I bought the sharebravery.com domain name a few days ago and switched my personal website from the second-level domain name of GitHub Pages to a custom domain name. I also upgraded my personal website from a technical blog to a content website, and took care of SEO matters.
Record the whole process and give it a reference for people who are also building a personal content site.
Why buy a domain name
Sharebravery.github.io of GitHub Pages works, but there are several problems:
Weak brand sense. .github.io looks like a temporary site for technical people at first glance. It is not SEO-friendly like a serious content site. Search engines evaluate the weight of custom domain names more independently, and second-level domain names are always listed under github.io for migration costs. If you change the deployment method (such as Vercel, Cloudflare Pages) in the future, the domain name will remain unchanged, and all external links and inclusions will not be lost.
Buying a domain name from Cloudflare, .com costs about 80 yuan a year, and the renewal price is the same. There is no routine of doubling the low-price renewal in the first year.
cloudflare
Domain name and URL specifications
After purchasing a domain name, the first thing to do is to unify the URL specifications.
https://sharebravery.com and
https://www.sharebravery.com must point to the same place. Search engines will treat them as two sites and spread the weight.
Method: Configure CNAME in Cloudflare DNS, www jumps to the root domain name, and ensure there is only one canonical URL.
The same goes for non-home pages. /web3/, /tech/, these paths must have the same rule with or without slashes. VuePress will handle this by default.
sitemap: Give search engines a map
The new site has no external links, so search engines don’t know where your page is. sitemap.xml actively tells it: "I have these pages, come and grab them."
The VuePress Hope theme comes with built-in sitemap generation. Just configure the hostname and no additional operations are required.
Where to submit:
Google Search Console – Add domain name, verify ownership, submit sitemap URL. Submitting it once is enough, and Bing Webmaster Tools will be automatically crawled later – also submit sitemap, Bing's inclusion speed is slower than Google, but it covers search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Baidu Webmaster Platform – if there are domestic readers. However, the collection speed is slow, and registration is required to achieve stable collection (I haven’t done this yet. It’s hard to find the various content entrances. It seems like a lot of troublesome pre-steps. It’s not like the previous two intuitive steps, just click in and operate directly and complain about Baidu…)
Google Search Console
Inclusion takes time
After submitting the sitemap, search for site:sharebravery.com and you may find nothing. This is normal.
The search engine process is: crawling -> indexing -> ranking, and each step takes time.
Approximate collection period:
There will be almost no search traffic in the first 2-4 weeks, so don’t worry. There is only one thing to do during this time: continue writing content.
Traffic monitoring: just enough
There is no point in installing a bunch of analysis tools on a new website. The amount of data is too small and it is useless to read it.
Only two are needed in the early stage:
Google Search Console – View inclusion status, search terms, clicks. This is the core tool for SEO and must have Cloudflare Web Analytics – look at the traffic and sources. Cloudflare comes with it, free, no additional deployment required, privacy friendly
GA4 (Google Analytics) can be added after there is stable traffic. Baidu statistics is the same.
Tools are auxiliary, and focus on the content in the early stage.
Content strategy is more important than SEO skills
After fiddling with SEO configuration, looking back, there is only one thing that really determines search rankings: content quality.
Several principles:
Serial writing. It is difficult for search engines to understand the structure of scattered articles. Like the Polymarket quantitative trading series, 12 articles are linked to each other. Search engines will treat the entire series as an in-depth topic title with search intent. "Polymarket Quantitative Trading Practice: API Authentication and Proxy Wallet" is much better than "API Authentication". The former covers the keyword combinations that users may search for. Don't follow hot garbage. Write something that you have real experience with. Search engines are increasingly able to judge the depth of content, and the ranking of AI hydrology will only get worse. Social media: radar, not the home field.
X, Xiaohongshu, etc. are suitable for sharing opinions and attracting traffic, but the complete content is only posted on blogs. (Of course, if
The reason is simple: the blog URL is yours, and the content of X belongs to the platform. Search engines index your domain name, not your tweets.
Other platforms (Zhihu, Nuggets) can publish images as mirrors, if a link to the original text is provided. On the one hand, it is the copyright statement, and on the other hand, search engines will determine the original source through the link relationship. However, it may be annoying for readers to read too much, and there is a choice between whether to put it or not.
SO
There is no black magic in personal website SEO:
Buy a domain name, unify the URL, standardize and submit the sitemap to Search Console, set up lightweight monitoring, and then write the content.
The technical configuration is completed in half a day, and the rest is left to time and content.
