Wednesday, January 08, 2014

Writing A Job Resume That Stands Out

Your job resume will be the first part of you that a prospective employer will ever see. With the economy and unemployment being what they are these days, you will find yourself competing against plenty of applicants when searching for a job. Due to this, you must understand the ways by which you can make your job resume stand out. Of course, on the surface, it might seem like the only thing you can really do is list your previous jobs and hope for the best. But in so doing, you will be limiting yourself greatly. Instead, you should write a resume that causes a prospective employer to feel like they have to call you; you can do this by learning to make your resume stand out.

When writing your resume, it is extremely important to consider its design. This might seem like an odd place to begin - after all, you are applying for a job, not applying to be a document designer - but you have to consider the prospective employer's perspective. The person reading your resume has likely been at their desk for hours, poring over a huge pile of resumes. Studies have shown that the initial look at a resume lasts about 15-20 seconds. You will not make tired eyes feel kind toward you if you fill the resume with small font and big, blockish paragraphs. Instead, you should aim to design your resume in such a way that it sports clear headings and lots of white space. When tired eyes come across such a resume, it will seem like an inviting escape; you might even get them to spend more than 15-20 seconds on their first glance!

The next thing to consider is the qualifications and accomplishments section, which will go a long way in setting you apart from other applicants. Never fabricate this section, but make sure you dig deep to uncover things that might not have popped into your mind right away. Think about everything that might lead a prospective employer to pick up the phone and give you a call, and include all of it in this section!

Finally, the section of your resume where you list your qualifications will be a big selling point. This is where you set yourself head and shoulders above your competition. This section should be thought of as an advertisement; you should use this section to convince the prospective employer of all the reasons why they should "buy" you.

Job hunting can become a whole lot easier, even in these uncertain times, when you know the steps necessary to make your resume stand out.

Exploring Three SEO Tips You Might Not Have Thought Of

When you are working on search engine optimization within the content of your website, paying attention to all the little things you can do that will help will be one thing that will be important; while most of your competition will be paying attention to the big things, adding these little things to your repertoire of SEO tricks will go a long way in setting your site apart - and bringing you extra traffic as a result.

One thing that you need to realize is your site will probably rank a lot more highly if search engines are "crawling" your site on a regular basis, and search engines are unlikely to crawl your site on a regular basis if you are never adding new content; if your site does not "have a reason" to add new content at least three times per week, consider adding a blog section to your site, and update this at least three days a week in order to increase your crawl frequency.

Another thing that will help your site is for you to share link juice with yourself; typically, when you think of link juice, you will think of the links you are giving to other sites, and the links they are giving to you, but you can also spread link juice throughout your own site - linking to certain posts or sections throughout your site.

And finally, remember that writing off-site articles, and submitting these articles to article databases, is a big key to SEO success: one of the benefits of this is that you will create an opportunity to gain new traffic through people clicking on the links in these articles, and another benefit is that you will increase your search engine ranking through the backlinks these articles create.

Regardless of whether you have a website as a means to promote your business or as a means to hopefully make money on its own, make sure you are always keeping your eyes open for the "little things" your competitors are missing - and take advantage of these as a way to gain an edge in the long run.