As designers, a portfolio is a highly important facet of our existence. It is a way by which potential clients can not only find and contact us, but it also allows us to show off our work.

Unfortunately, a well-designed portfolio is practically useless if it does not place well in search engines. Optimizing for one of the most important users that visit your portfolio, search engine robots, is absolutely essential these days.

There are several simple ways to optimize your portfolio site for search engines, although the most important piece of advice for those embarking on a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) journey is to always remember to design for the users first, not the search engines. Many people get caught up in making their sites search engine friendly and forget about the most important user group, the site’s actual visitors.

If your portfolio contains well-written, useful content, and is user-friendly, other sites will naturally link to the site to promote the quality found therein and your site will grow in link popularity, high rankings in search engines will naturally follow this.

In addition to providing quality content to your users, there are several steps you can take to cater to search engines:

• Choose a Descriptive Relevant Page Title
• Make Effective Use of Headers
• Proper Meta Tag Use
• Create W3C Valid Websites

Choose a Descriptive, Relevant Page Title

The page title is one of the most important aspects of any webpage. It should provided a short, yet detailed, summary of the page’s content. Including keywords and careful wording to increase the relevancy of the title to the page’s actual content can boost that page’s ranking exponentially. After all, when a user searches for something, the page title is what Google displays first when linking to the site.

Make Effective Use of Headers

Headers are like the titles of your page content, and are weighted more heavily than other parts of a site’s content. Using headers semantically and ensuring they accurately reflecting the site’s content are great ways to improve rank.

Proper Meta Tag Use

Meta tags have historically been misunderstood and misused. These days, it is best to utilize Meta “Content Type” and “Meta Description” at a bare minimum. Both are important and can provide significant rank increases if used properly. Due to spammers, many search engines have stopped using the keyword meta tag to determine rankings; however, you may still use this tag and garner benefit from search engines that utilize it.

Create W3C Valid Websites

While creating websites that validate to the W3C spec may not instantly garner a ranking bonus, as most search engines these days to not factor in valid code in their algorithms, validity should still be an important part of any SEO undertaking. Down the road, search engines will doubtless factor this in; plus, there are many other non-SEO benefits to creating valid websites available today, for example, adding “Alt” tags on images is not only a part of creating a valid site, it allows search engines to better index your content and can boost your ranking.

Just remember, always steer clear from illegal, Black-Hat SEO techniques. While you may not be caught right away, any temporary benefits garnered from these uncouth methods will be undone if the site is caught and banned from search engines. Search Engines Optimization is not nearly as complicated or difficult as some people make it out do be, just use common sense and follow guildlines like the onese presented here by PSD Nation and you will see a difference in your placement on SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages).

Have a favorite SEO technique? Let us know about it in the comments below…

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