Global Premises

Standing out at a Career Faire can make a difference in your job search. Job Faires are starting to pick up, and Dice is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a Bay Area Job Fair in early 2010, 10 companies as showing up, and a major job search company has 82 job faires scheduled for 2010 across the United States.

How do you rise above the crowd at a Career Faire? The contention can be substantial, but you can help yourself surpass from the bunch with advance homework. At AA-Careers, we have a simplified 6-step process to prepare. Plan to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, research the companies that are going and pick your objectives. Use the web to research the companies that are there before you even decide to go. Go to their internet sites and see if they have their job openings posted. Pick a rational number to go after, and get ready to spend an hour researching each one. It’s hard to do more than 9 in a day, and three or four is a much more reasonable target. For each company, you want to know: recent news, key product lines, and contacts you know. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You should end up with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job postings on the web, read them to see what the company is looking for. Create a mapping of your accomplishments and skills to the requirements of the job. Make the nomenclature match. If the hiring company calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The achievements should be written in the style of the hiring company.

Third, create a ‘short sales pitch’ for each likely company/position combination. Write down a ninety second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat verbally showing why you are a special prospect for that job. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the team from the company at the job stall.

Fourth, modify your resume for each opportunity. The objective on your resume should exactly match the position you’re aiming for. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the accomplishments and skills that most clearly match the job description. Especially at a Job Fair, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be quick to see that you’re a fit based on your resume.

Fifth, practice your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each opportunity - bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a intelligibly marked folder. Keep them in a light briefcase or folio.

Finally, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress well and be properly groomed. Avoid strong cologne or perfume…use any eau de cologne or perfume sparingly, if at all.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

No, it’s not a general question for all and sundry. Obviously,
there are many who would want to link to a Home Business or
Affiliate program related website and for good reason. They
would be helping their Page Rank, if that’s important any more
however, more to the point, they would be improving their
chances of a better ranking in the SERPs (Search Engine Results
Pages). But yes, you guessed it, THERE IS A PROVISO. A very
important one, that so many people engaged in reciprocal linking
programs just don’t seem to be able to get their heads around… I
must confess, I have written about this same subject, just on
twelve months ago, I think it was. My experience during the time
since would suggest that I may as well have been writing fairy
stories, for all the good it did. I get, and this is no
exaggeration, at least a dozen requests EVERY day from people
wishing to link with my (currently seven) Home Business or
Affiliate related sites, who have websites that have absolutely
NOTHING in common in any way with either topic, or in the case
of Affiliate content websites I have, nothing to do with the
subject matter or product/s concerned. The majority of these
requests, for some reason, seem to come from
‘poker/casino/gambling’ websites and those concerning
‘travel/holidays’. Why is it that the people requesting these
links don’t understand that they are, in fact, irreparably
damaging their websites and possibly harming their chances of a
decent showing in the SERPs? (Not that all those with these
types of websites practice this type of ‘free for all’ linking).
Why can’t they understand that Google the devisors of the PR and
the Search Engine with whom most are concentrating on scoring a
good ranking, quite clearly explain that “…links from RELEVANT
websites are the only kind of link that is likely to improve
your SE rankings”. They also go on to say that “using any kind
of mass linking program or ‘free for all’ method of linking is
more likely to damage your rankings”. While it’s true that your
PR will probably increase with the amount of ‘raw’ links to your
website, those links that are from websites of non-relevant
topics will NOT serve to improve your ranking in the SERPs.
Where the PR is calculated simply from the number of links, the
algorithm used to come up with the SERPs definitely includes
more complex data including an analysis of the content of the
websites from which incoming links come, not just the text of
the link. The only advantage I know of, that PR alone will give
you is a better chance of obtaining reciprocal links from other
websites. Certainly, a far better way to obtain links is to
publish good quality articles about the topic of your website,
which of course will be picked up, by and large, by websites
looking for good content of the same subject matter. This will
also serve to give you ‘one way’ incoming links, which although
Google don’t appear to mention in their pages, are widely
understood to be of more value than ‘reciprocal links’. Apart
from the reasons I’ve mentioned above, there is also the amount
of work involved in trying to do the right thing by answering
these pointless requests for links. I must say, it’s very
annoying given the time involved, which could be better spent by
all parties doing more constructive things. I have often
lamented the irreparable damage that mass linking programs have
done to many websites. After all, there is virtually no chance
of getting the links that are in place from non-relevant
websites removed. It would be a mammoth task. The types of link
building program that collect links from anyone willing to
complete the form on your website and place your link on theirs,
have turned a number of websites into mini directories, which
certainly won’t help their rankings in the SERPs. My advice to
anyone, either new or an old hand is to join one of the
reciprocal linking co-operatives like Linkmarket.net, in which
you are able to approve links from sites of YOUR choosing and
request links from sites with the same content and subject
matter. After all, links of the same content as your website are
the most likely to interest your visitors and THAT is the
primary basis of linking, to offer worthwhile information and
assistance to your patrons. Incidentally, that’s what Google and
the other SEs are primarily concerned with, sites that are of
value to THEIR patrons and they will only offer you as a choice
if they feel you have the same goal in mind. I’ve been told that
when I do anything designed to improve my rankings, to ask
myself a simple question, “would I do this if there were no
Search Engines?” If the answer is no, then it probably won’t
benefit my visitors and will be a waste of time as far as my SE
rankings are concerned.

Try an Experiment

If you have a web site, try this experiment when you have some spare time. Pick a nonsense phrase, like “bed happy meatball” or anything equally silly. Make sure it’s something very unlikely to appear on a web page anywhere, and make sure it’s a phrase (not a single word). Also, make sure it does not appear on your own site.

Next, get a few friends or co-workers with web sites of their own to post a link to your site using that exact phrase (without the quotation marks) as the anchor text. What’s anchor text, you ask? It’s simply the word or words that form the clickable part of a link.

Now, wait a while. Make a note to yourself to check your web site’s ranking in the results for a search of your chosen nonsense phrase at a major search engine in a month or two. Unless you picked a phrase that actually appears on other sites, you’ll find that your site is #1! Moreover, that’s in spite of the fact that the chosen phrase does not appear anywhere on your actual web site. Think about that.

An infamous, large-scale example of this same test involved the phrase “miserable failure.” Some enterprising bloggers got together a few years ago and decided to link lots of sites to the official biography page for President George W. Bush at the whitehouse.gov site. The goal, of course, was to make that page show up in the #1 position whenever unsuspecting (or in this case, many suspecting) searchers typed in that phrase. It worked. (Side note: at last check, Michael Moore - famous film maker and Bush detractor, was in the #2 position at Google for this same search). Again, keep in mind that the phrase “miserable failure” does not appear anywhere on either man’s web site.

Is There a Point?

OK, so why bother with this seemingly asinine experiment (that’s actually been dubbed ‘Googlebombing’)? Ahh, Grasshopper, for the lesson it imparts. Which is? Well, it points to the power of anchor text in determining search engine ranking. And it has definite relevance to your activities as a webmaster.

Many of your fellow site owners - including a lot of them who run sites in direct competition with yours - have never heard of anchor text. Some of you reading this may be unfamiliar with it. But, as should be clear now, anchor text plays a major role in search engine ranking positions.

In basic terms, it works like this…

Search engines rely on links to help them ascertain both the theme of a given web site and its popularity. Knowing that, consider two scenarios. In the first, your site has built up a lot of links pointing to it, and each one has your domain name as the clickable part of the link (anchor text). Let’s say your domain name is your company’s name, JoeSmithBakery.com - and you sell baking supplies. OK, great - now your site will show up in the #1 position at the search engines whenever anyone searches for your domain name! Hmm. Think that one through. If they know your domain name, why would they need a search engine to find it?

In the second scenario, you have lots of links pointing to your bakery site, but instead of the domain name as the anchor text, you wisely chose a phrase that lots of people search for, like ‘baking supplies.’

Easy question: which would you prefer - being #1 at Google when people search for your domain name or being #1 when people search for bakery supplies? This is why the anchor text you choose for the links you build is so important.

A Plan of Action

Now, here’s a simple plan of action to improve your site’s link situation and search engine ranking going forward from this day…

Step 1 - Research Keywords

A great service is provided by the folks at wordtracker.com. They catalog search activity at the major engines, and then make available those numbers to the general public. You simply type in a word or phrase related to your site’s theme, and wordtracker shows you the number of times that entry is being searched at the major search engines. Cool, huh? The service will also give you a list of related terms, so you can look for other important search words to target.

Step 2 - Pick a Few and Get Some Links

Compile a list of several search terms that are most closely related to your site’s theme and that get searched for often. It’s up to you, of course, but you should pick those phrases that get a few hundred to several thousand searches. These will be the terms you use in the anchor text of the inbound links you build from now on. Doing so will really increase your site’s search engine traffic - once all your new links begin to boost your rankings.

Nothing Else Changes

Now, just carry on with your usual link building activities: reciprocal links, one-way links from directories and article distributions, etc. The only change is to make sure you choose a phrase from your list to use as the clickable part of the link you ask for (the anchor text). If you rotate your choices, your site will move up in the rankings for each phrase. The only downside is that you’ll be getting fewer links per phrase, so it may take longer for any single phrase to rank high.

Keep in mind that the phrases you pick will be popular, unlike those in the examples that began this article. To score high rankings, you’ll need to be diligent and get lots of links. Never stop! Over time, this strategy will really help your site’s traffic, but it does take time. As the famous poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, famously wrote: “All good things come to those who wait.”

© John Schwartz http://www.web-article-w riter.com (all rights reserved)