A personal website has two readers. One is a human who will spend forty seconds deciding whether you are worth their time. The other is a machine assembling a description of you that will be shown to thousands of people who never visit the site at all. Most personal sites are built entirely for the first reader, which is why so many beautiful ones contribute nothing to the owner's search identity.
01The pages you need, and nothing else
| Page | Job | Minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Home | State who you are in one screen | Name, one-line description, what you do, route to depth |
| About | The canonical description of you | 400+ words, third person, full history |
| Topic pages | One per thing you want to be known for | 500+ words each, genuinely useful |
| Proof | Writing, talks, press, books, work | Linked out to the real sources |
| Contact | A route that works | An address or form, and your city |
That is five page types. You do not need a blog on day one, you do not need a portfolio grid, and you certainly do not need a testimonial carousel. Add those when you have something to put in them.
02The about page, which is the whole thing
This is the page that gets quoted, pasted into conference programmes, scraped by aggregators and used by language models when somebody asks who you are. It should read like a well-researched profile of you, not like a personal statement.
- Write in the third person. Bhavik Sarkhedi is a personal branding consultant based in Ahmedabad, not I am a personal branding consultant.
- Open with the one-line description from your name standard, verbatim.
- Give the factual spine: role, organisation, city, field, how long, what you are known for.
- Include the verifiable things: books with titles, publications you have written for by name, talks with event names, qualifications.
- Name the organisations and people you are genuinely associated with, because associations are how entities get understood.
- Keep it current. A stale about page is worse than a short one, because it contradicts your newer records.
- End with where else you exist, linking to each profile.
03What must be text, not image
This is the most common and most expensive mistake on well-designed personal sites. A crawler reads text. If your name, role and description live inside a logo, a hero graphic or a typeset image, they are invisible to the systems deciding what to say about you.
- Your full name, as selectable text, in the title tag and the H1
- Your role and organisation as text somewhere above the fold
- Your city or region as text
- The about page body as text, not a designed image or a PDF
- Every image with a real alt attribute describing what it shows
- Navigation as real links, not a script-driven menu with no href
The test takes ten seconds. Open your homepage, select all, copy, paste into a plain text editor. Whatever appears is what a machine sees. If your name is not in there, nothing else on this page matters.
04One page per topic
A homepage cannot rank for five different things. If you want to be found for three distinct topics, you need three substantial pages, each one genuinely about its topic, each linked from the homepage and the about page.
These are also what earned media links to, what you point people at in a conversation, and what an assistant quotes when somebody asks what you know about a subject. A site with one page has one answer available. A site with five has five.
The homepage is the introduction. The topic pages are the reason anyone believes it.
05The structured data
Person schema in JSON-LD, on the homepage and the about page. It should state the same facts the visible text states, never different ones.
Fields that carry weight
- name, exactly as in your name standard
- jobTitle and worksFor
- description, matching your one-line standard
- url pointing at your own homepage
- image, a real photograph URL
- sameAs, listing every genuine profile
- address or areaServed if location matters to you
- knowsAbout, listing your actual topics
06The technical floor
- Every page returns a clean status directly, with no redirect chain in the way
- Each page's canonical points at its own final URL, exactly, including the trailing slash
- One H1 per page, containing that page's actual subject
- Title tags under about sixty characters and unique across pages
- Meta descriptions written per page, not generated from the first paragraph
- A sitemap listing only URLs that return a clean status
- The site loads and is readable on a phone, as its own layout rather than a shrunken desktop
- No content is hidden behind script that has to run before the text exists
That last one catches a lot of modern personal sites. If the page arrives empty and the text is inserted afterwards by script, some crawlers will see the empty version. Check by viewing the page source rather than the inspector, because the inspector shows you the assembled result and hides the problem.
07Things that actively hurt
Remove these
- A splash screen or animation that delays the text
- Your bio as a PDF instead of a page
- Contact details only as an image, to avoid scrapers
- A single-page site where every section shares one URL
- Autoplaying video above the content
- A name form on the site that differs from the one on your profiles
The single-page site is worth dwelling on. It looks elegant and it means you have exactly one URL, so you can rank for exactly one thing, and every link anyone gives you points at the same place. If you want to be known for more than one topic, you need more than one page.
08Before you call it done
- Copy the whole homepage as plain text and confirm your name, role and city are in it.
- Validate the structured data and confirm it matches the visible text.
- Check every page's canonical against its own live URL, character for character.
- Load it on a real phone, not a resized browser window.
- Search your name signed out a week after launch and see whether the site is ranking.
- Submit the sitemap in Search Console and confirm it is read without errors.
What to remember
- Your site has two readers. Design for the human and mark up for the machine, because the machine's version reaches more people.
- The about page is the whole thing: third person, four hundred words minimum, factual and current.
- Select all and copy your homepage into a text editor. Whatever is missing is invisible to search.
- One substantial page per topic you want to be known for. A single-page site can rank for one thing.
- Person schema with an accurate sameAs array is what turns scattered profiles into one entity.
Questions people actually ask
What should a personal branding website include?
A homepage that states who you are in text, a substantial third-person about page of at least four hundred words, one page per topic you want to be known for, a proof page linking to your writing, talks and press, and a working contact route. Five page types is enough to start.
Should my about page be first person or third person?
Third person. It is the paragraph that gets quoted in conference programmes, scraped by aggregators and used by AI assistants answering questions about you. A first-person about page cannot be lifted directly, so it gets rewritten by whoever needs it, and the rewrite is usually worse.
Does a one-page personal website work for personal branding?
Poorly. One page means one URL, so you can realistically rank for one topic, and every link anyone gives you points to the same place. If you want to be found for several things, you need a page for each, with real text on it.
What schema should a personal website use?
Person schema in JSON-LD on the homepage and about page, including name, jobTitle, worksFor, description, url, image, knowsAbout and a sameAs array listing every profile that is genuinely yours and live. The facts in the schema must match the visible text on the page.
Why is my personal website not ranking for my name?
Most often one of four things: your name is not in the title tag or H1 as text, the site has too little text for anything to be extracted, nothing links to it from your profiles, or a namesake with a stronger footprint holds the query. Check the first three yourself before assuming the fourth.