A post yesterday on the Personal SEO Blog suggests tightly integrating social media with an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy for your personal brand.
What does all this mean? Your online reputation is measured through the kind of information people find in the results when they search your name in Google, Yahoo!, or other search engines. Make no mistake, people are googling you.
Recruiters and other hiring managers routinely google candidates. If they find unsavory information, that candidate just lost the chance to be considered by them. They will move on to the next candidate who has plenty of stellar google results.
It’s just good career management practice to regularly self-google (that is, conduct a search on “your name”) to monitor what everyone else is finding out about you.
If you find “dirt” about yourself, you’ll need to start building the good results you’ll need to make a great impression, while pushing down the bad results to the bottom of the list where they’re less likely to be noticed. You want to build up a mountain of squeaky clean results.
One excellent way to increase the good search results for yourself is to selectively join groups like LinkedIn, ZoomInfo, Facebook, etc. that are appropriate to your job search target audience. Carefully craft your online profiles to be on-brand and send the right message to people searching for candidates like you.
If you already have a great personally branded executive resume, you can literally copy and paste chunks of it into your profile. Search engines like these online profiles. Within just a day or two of posting your profiles, you will see them positioned at the top of your search results. This is what you want. The first things people will see about you will support your personal branding and send the exact message you want them to have.
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