Making a developer portfolio easier to find (without gaming Google)
What I changed on itsrobin.in for SEO and AI discoverability, and what I'd tell someone shipping their first portfolio.
You're not going to rank #1 for "developer." Type it in and you'll drown.
Personal sites win on branded and specific queries: your name, your handle, your city, your niche. I'm not trying to own the word React. I want someone looking for Robin Kurian, itsrobin.dev, a software engineer in Kochi, or a developer consultant who actually shows work to find this site and think "yeah, that's him."
If you're putting up a portfolio and wondering where SEO even starts, the internet will try to sell you a course. You mostly need boring consistency. One canonical URL, redirected properly. The same name and handle on the site, GitHub, LinkedIn, Instagram. A real title and description on each page, not five tabs that all say "Welcome to my site." A sitemap, sensible robots.txt, RSS if you blog, staging on noindex so Google doesn't chew on preview deploys. Write like yourself. Link between your pages. Put the URL in bios and READMEs. That's the baseline before anyone starts talking about backlinks.
I'd also verify the site in Google Search Console on day one and submit your sitemap. Then actually open it once in a while. You'll see what got crawled, what got skipped, and eventually which queries mention your name. Early on the numbers are thin. Normal. Watch branded terms first. Search Console won't magically rank you. It just tells you whether Google can read your site, which saves a lot of blind tweaking.
What I changed
Same name everywhere. Robin Kurian on the site. Robin K where that's how people know me. itsrobin.dev on GitHub, Instagram, LinkedIn. Search engines connect dots the same way people do.
Structured data on the home page. Person and ProfilePage JSON-LD: job title, Kochi Kerala India, links out to profiles. Not magic. Just less ambiguity when Google, Perplexity, or ChatGPT tries to summarize who runs this site.
More than one indexable page. About, consultation, projects, apps, blogs. Each with its own title and description.
The boring technical stuff. Sitemap, RSS, fast hosting on Workers. Staging stays noindex.
/llms.txt. A short plain summary for assistants that read it. Same facts as the human site, less clicking. I wrote it partly for crawlers, partly because forcing yourself into one tight paragraph makes the about copy better too.
Blue-link SEO isn't the whole picture anymore. AI Overviews and generative search pull from pages they trust and stitch an answer before anyone clicks. You can't control that paragraph. You can make it harder to get wrong by keeping facts consistent across the site, JSON-LD, llms.txt, and your social bios. If your name is common, say which you are. A specific post about something you built beats ten generic listicles written for robots.
What I didn't do
Buy backlinks or spam directories.
Spin up duplicate domains.
Stuff keywords into every sentence.
Publish generic AI slop daily for "content volume."
Four honest posts about things I've actually built beat fifty of those.
Expectations
You won't instantly rank first for your first name unless you're already famous. You can become the obvious result for Robin Kurian developer, itsrobin.dev, and local searches if you're consistent on-site and off-site for a while.
This post is part of that. Useful to a human, specific to my setup, linked to the rest of the site.