Bumping my personal website up on google

P337

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Historically Ive made pretty poor design websites, only recently did I take a course on PHP and have re-discovered the joy of websites.

Anyway, I have a personal website (petercormick.com) its hosted under x10 free hosting, Ive had a few SEO discoveries.

I run one basic page, that just links to my social media stuff.

I have a sub-domain (testing.petercormick.com),

And an Admin page, where I much around with my own custom built logs.

All of these pages had the same header construct. untill I noticed that my Title wasnt being used in googles search results, instead my H2 tag is being displayed when I search for my full name.

Since discovering this, I have attempted to individualize my title and keyword data, because initially it was just generated in PHP, every page the same.

As google now searches H1->H6 tags for relevant content, Im considering removing them from my site, so that I can regain "Peter Cormick" as the header in search results in google (instead of "My names Peter") But I dont know if this will devalue my page or not.

This is just a personal website, And I have limited SEO knowledge, can someone inform me how I should go about optimising my site to relate to my name

Am I doing anything that I probably shouldn't be?
 

essellar

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Google uses the headers because the headers are how you tell people what's important. The <title> tag is rarely relevant at all; as often as not it's going to be displaying a site-wide value rather than anything specific to a single page. Obviously, Google (and everybody else who's actually put some thought and effort into it) is going to disregard a "WELCOME" headline, since of the billion-ish websites in existence at the moment, 990 million of them will have a "WELCOME" splash on the landing page. (Bad habit. Save that for sign-up pages, webinars, tutorials and such; it doesn't need to be on a landing page and just takes up valuable H1 space.)

More important is to learn and use ARIA roles and the approriate data schema, and to get hold of an outliner (there are "HTML5 Outliner" extensions/addons for most browsers) to see what your site is telling the world is important. For instance, if you want the most relevant term to be "Peter Cormick", that should probably be your H1. And keep in mind that there are two kinds of relevance: local and global. A <header> will be globally relevant unless it lives in an <article> or a <section>, and it's local relevance can be minimized to the point of irrelevance if you use the "banner" role.

We may put a lot of time and effort into the appearance of a website/page, but it never hurts to remember that the HTML is data. The meta stuff is supplementary -- the EXIF data to our picture, if you will. People are looking for the picture, not the shutter speed, so that's what search engines try to index.
 

P337

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Thanks for the detailed response essellar

So you are suggesting that I make my H1 say "Peter Cormick" or whatever I want my title on google to be.
And shuffle all my H tags down 1 priority (<h2>welcome</h2> <h3> My Name's Peter </h3>)

Would google penalise me if I made this "Display: None;" in CSS?

Because thats the only way I can forsee me incoperating my name in H1 on this page. :(
 
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