Professional Global SEO – SEM | janet bartoli

SEO BLOG – Hints for a new job in a new year

January 1, 2009

Happy 2009!

After a very difficult past year for a lot of folks, losing a job can be very discouraging and down right depressing. It could also give you the opportunity to step up your career a bit. If your not currently a professional SEO, this might be a good time to think about making a career move. If you are currently a professional SEO or SEM, and perhaps if you lost your job there are a few things that I have shared with some of my colleagues that I thought might be best shared here as well.

Whether your beginning an interest in SEO or are currently a seasoned professional, one thing you might ask yourself is (and I really hope your way ahead of me here) when I Google my name, what comes up? Besides your last triathlon stats from the local parks and recreation is there anything there on the first page of Google that shows your prospective employer that your an expert in your field? Hint: there should really be.

Start by creating your own blog, much like many others before me have done.  This does multiple positive things all at once. If your a geek of any kind, build your blog on your own, don’t go the wordpress.myname.com route, which simply means having Wordpress or Blogger or any other Blog host your blog, you should really be hosting your own,  this isn’t great for SEO and it’s just not as professional looking especially if your trying to showcase your work the best it can be. Yes I know it’s very quick to just have it hosted with the blog provider, but seriously so is building your own.

I began by going to YouTube, then I  searched for “how to build your own wordpress blog” (FYI: wordpress is one of the best SEO blog platforms and I like it), there are others of course, try a few and see which you like best.

There are tons of videos, skim through a few until you find one that just gives you step by step instruction on downloading and installing wordpress. I also searched for best hosting provider. GoDaddy, is not my favorite and they now think who they are and charge more money than is necessary. After finding many reviews on HostMonster, all very positive,  I went to HostMonster.com, and I can honestly say that after working as a web developer on so many other sites, using so many other hosting platforms, this company gets 5 stars from me!

Excellent Cpanel, clean interface, excellent support group and they don’t kill you with massive annual hosting fees. Also, once you tour around you will find so many other really great advanced features SQL DB, all types of plugins, so much included in this package.

One of the things you will or should do if your redirecting pages or domains etc, is to employ a 301 redirect. Using .htaccess to accomplish the 301 redirect is highly suggested due to it being fairly convenient to manage, rather than setting redirects on each individual page, you can simply add the redirect code to the .htaccess file.  Now, it’s a good idea to know how to create this redirect within your .htaccess file, however, if your using HostMonster, they include a 301 redirect area within the Domains section, I suppose its a WYSIWYG idea, but it works and it’s a 301 permanent server side redirect which is key! Don’t forget to include Google Analytics, another thing to add to your resume, learn the new features and learn how to decipher analytics, this is a very important aspect to any professional SEO’s skill set.

You will find that it is actually fun building a new site, adding in your own touch and then get writing. This is one of the most important parts of our blog, what to write about and how often to write. I really don’t write as often as I should, however, I think it’s important that you give your visitors something to come back to, writing for the sake of writing isn’t going to advance your returning visitors rate.

After you setup the blog, and if you chose Wordpress you should then begin to install those SEO friendly plugins such as Gray Wolf’s Wordpress SEO Plugins make any necessary redirects, especially if your blog name is one that get’s misspelled more often than not. Definately setup your Google account and get analytics installed. Tracking your visitors, bounce rate, time on site, all important factors for improving your blog over time.

So now you have a new blog, your found in Google and Yahoo, your learning what works and what doesn’t and you are sharing your experiences with all your visitors.  Most importantly, when it’s time to find a new job, your prospective employer will find you and see that you are the expert your resume says you are. Believe it or not, people are still impressed by someone who has gone to the trouble to build their own blog, and the older it gets, and more posts you have written, the better!

In fact when I was called for a phone interview last year, on the other end of the phone, was the employer reading my blog. It speaks for itself when your resume might look like so many others on his or her desk.

Good Luck and Have a healthy and prosperous 2009!

Filed under: SEO - SEM GENERAL