| edit: other people have said what would be my reflexive suggestion: a domain name that is actually your name would likely get a lot of search ranking juice. Besides having a meta title of your name, you need to have an h1 tag -- and not just the html; it should look like a major headline -- with your name, as opposed to what it is now ("Welcome"). Here's an easy fix: <h1>Welcome to Viktor Vojnovski's homepage</h1>
------------> but it seems logical that a personal website would be returned as the first result. Does it? If I'm an employer researching a job candidate, and the job candidate has bought their own vanity domain but left it empty of worthwhile content, would visiting that page be a better use of my time than that candidate's Twitter, LinkedIn, or public Facebook page? The fact that your page itself lists these social media URLs makes your homepage, theoretically, more useful in a broad kind of sense. But it's not obviously more useful than just directly seeing your tweets on first click. And on a quasi-technical note, think of the heuristic/algorithmic hoops Google's search engine would have to resolve in order to rank a page like yours over Twitter and LinkedIn: 1. LinkedIn page is ranked first because LinkedIn is an extremely popular site. 2. Random webpage that links to LinkedIn page should get quality points because it also purportedly links to the person's other social URLs, and a normal human being would find that useful. I know Google search logic and variety of signals is quite complicated and probably handles situations like these, but think of how easy it might be to game such a heuristic that gives pages quality points based on the quality of pages that they link to. That's almost exactly backwards of the original Google BackRub algorithm. Other than getting legit sites to link to you (putting the URL in your Twitter bio might help, though Twitter renders it with a nofollow tag), your easiest bet to get higher is to add content to your site. A blog with intermittent updates would be ideal, but are you really unable to write a public-facing biography for yourself? The ultimate question is: the purpose of Google and the Web are not to make things nice for any one user. Ideally, Google surfaces results that it thinks humans actually would be satisfied on clicking on. Let's imagine that someone, anyone out of the billions of Internet users on any given day, decides to search for your name. Can you put yourself in the place of that user and honestly believe you'd be satisfied with landing on your basically empty homepage? Web users don't benefit from all the meta optimizations that you've added, they are there for the content. |