Ways To Boost Your Job Search With SEO

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You’ve heard of SEO or search engine optimization — but it’s a strategy only webmasters and marketers use…right?

Actually, as a job seeker, you can take these tricks marketers use to bring their products to the top of the rankings and apply them to help market yourself as a qualified candidate.

The first step, of course, is to get a website or blog…or both! If you don’t already have one, now is the time to start. There are plenty of free, user-friendly hosts to choose from like Wix, WordPress, and more.

Even if you’re not a tech-savvy webmaster, you can still implement a few SEO tricks to boost your job search:

Use keywords

Think like a recruiter. Create a list of words a recruiter might search to find a candidate with your skills. For example, if you are skilled in graphic design, “graphic designer” or “creative director” could be keywords you include throughout your blog or website. However, don’t overdo it. If a keyword is repeated more than 10 times, web crawlers could become suspicious and bring dock your page rank. Try to aim for four to six occurrences.

Carefully craft your titles and meta descriptions

Here’s where using keywords counts most. Pick out a couple of keywords you plan to use a few times throughout that web page and include them in both the title and meta description.

Remember keywords aren’t everything

Searches to help you determine keywords are no longer as relevant since Google began encrypting keywords for protection against NSA spying activity. But you can still find out which content is driving traffic to your webpage through analytics tools (more on this below.

Create compelling content

Become an expert on a few niche things within the industry in which you want to work. Conduct research and write about it. If you have other skills, like video editing or design, make infographics or videos to include on your website to either support your content or market your personal brand.

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Share your content regularly 

Consistent sharing of all of your content across all of your social media platforms will get the attention of web crawlers, increasing your pagerank. You can also share your content on your job search profile, encouraging recruiters to follow you. In addition, be sure to share links to your webpages to increase clicks.

Install an SEO plugin

If your website enables it, install an SEO plugin that will allow you to add meta data and relevant keywords to your content. There are different SEO plugins for different site platforms, but you should be able to find the right one for you with a simple search. If you’re using a WordPress site, check out these great SEO plugins. For Wix, check out this free report tool.

Make your posts shareable

Include social buttons on all of your content pages to enable easy sharing on social media. Posts with visable share buttons generate seven times more mentions.

Include links

Include both inbound links (hyperlinks to other pages or content on your website) and outbound links (links to credible, relevant sources) in your post. Try to get other pages to link to your content. Check out this article for link building strategies.

Guest write for other outlets

This is a great strategy that will increase your exposure, build your personal brand, expand your portfolio, and provide more outbound links to your website. If the articles you write for other outlets allow you to, include a couple of hyperlinks to relevant content on your website.

Use images in your posts

Posts with images generate more attention. A Twitter study by Buffer found that tweets with images received 150 percent more retweets, 89 percent more favorites, and 18 percent more clicks.

Track your metrics

You’ll need to track your website’s progress as you optimize and share your content to see which content is most popular, and continue to produce popular content. Google Webmaster Tools is perfect for this as it provides you with data about search queries, keywords, and incoming links that direct traffic to your site.

The ways you can use SEO tactics to boost your job search are virtually endless. Just as marketers use SEO to help their products stand out among the web traffic, you can use it to stand out as an industry thought leader while on the job search.

What are some other SEO tricks you’ve used to help boost your job search?