(Entry was posted by Shaun Alle on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 03/22/2018).

I could really benefit from a few brain storming ideas, tips and guidance.

Hi All, A little new to SEO, and could really benefit from a few brain storming ideas, tips and guidance. I have a small personal one page website that is basically my CV, I have fully optimised the site to get results of 100/100 on PageSpeed Insights and 100% / 100% on GTmetrix`s and getting UK based load times under 300ms where my target niche is along with it having good markup with schema. NOTE: Not opted to try AMP yet. I am ranking well for my name + city currently in second position without a single back link or any off-page tactics so far. However I would like to try and rank for just my name and I likely need to build a strong back link profile to obtain this. I have stayed away from back linking thus far as there is too many shady methods and I can never tell if they are good/bad in the eyes of Google web master rules and simply waiting and hoping someone links to me is incredibly frustrating wait, so if you have any tips, tricks or ideas what can help my back link profile grow I would be grateful. Thanks in advance.

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

Travis Bailey: Long story short, Shaun Allen isn`t a money keyword. Money keywords being something like Service/Product City. But you can`t go whole spammy. I don`t worry about personal knowledge graph stuff too much, but that`s what you`ll want to target. That involves a lot of various social profiles, which you can make canon via Schema markup on your site. It apparently helps to have a Wikipedia page. You get that one by doing something `newsworthy`. An acquaintance/friend of mine is an artist based out of London, UK. He pretty much just does things, but he`s amassed a mess of social profiles and mentions over the last 20 years. It helps that he brands himself with the Salvatore part. Otherwise, there`s a lot of Ray(mond) Harmon entries.
John Bosworth: 100% on gt or pagespeed is useless. 300ms though is exactly what your looking forðŸ‘. In answer to your question, ranking for your name is a vanity project and is easily doable but pointless. If your mark zuckerberg or bill gates youâ€™ll get traffic. Shaun Allen - who are you? Someoneâ€™s got to know who you are to search for you. One pagers are hard to rank for many keywords so Iâ€™d pick a better keyword related to your business / brand and rank for that. What do you do by the way?
Dave Elliott: Unless you have a fairly unique name like "Alan Bleiweiss" or are pretty famous in your field... like "Alan Bleiweiss". Then it is unlikely you will rank well tbh. Especially as there is likely to be a huge amount of personalisation on this kind of serp(for example if a footballer player exists with that name i`ll get that top!), and you will undoubtedly be competing with LinkedIn, Facebook, Wikipedia and other hugely authoritative sites
Shaun Allen: Thanks for the feed back so far, In simple, I understand my name will not draw much traffic in however it seemed like a good starting point/ practice point to start testing different methods.
Dave Elliott: The other obvious question is why would you want to? Your site is a CV get it to the right recruiters on Linkedin and sign up to the main job boards and that is really all you need to do..... the fact that you have such positive page speed scores prooves you know what you are doing, but as someone else said web ranking is a bit a of a vanity project
Nihal Ahmed: Do you have a Google my business attached to your name?
Jennifer Mathews: Use your social media channels for that. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest profiles can all be optimized for your name and you can set that page as your website. I do this for my name, "Jenn Mathews" and for "SEOGoddess". It works!