communication. community. cognition.
Posts tagged SEO
Destined to Obscurity
Nov 16th
Vanity… all is vanity.
I think Solomon had it right.
Yet in an age of Information Flood, part of our task is to help relevant and useful information be found.
In the process, we’re just going to have to sacrifice quality.
Destined for Obscurity More >
The Search for the Secret Sauce
Aug 31st
Most internet users don’t remember a time before there was a Google. (Those who do likely were grimacing over my failure to capitalize Internet.) For those who made surfing a dry activity since 2000, there has always been an Algorithm in the background, providing order to the vast online Universe.
What Google did was promote the idea that an unseen formula could improve your search results. Human-inspired and seeded indexes could not scale to cover the exponentially-growing feed of data – and we needed a Secret Sauce to sort it all out.
The Search for the Secret Sauce More >
SEO for HR
Nov 18th
I was talking with a friend who is in the middle of a job hunt, and he was reflecting on the wide variation in advice he’s been given. Several professionals and “headhunt consultants” reworked his resume multiple times, leaving him with a document that an ideal 1-3 pages, while being completely professional and casual, and all topics are covered in narrative style complete with ‘hierarchical’ bullet points.
In other words, he got a whole lot of opinion, and very little useful direction. Even old adages such as “It’s not what you know but who you know” are getting debunked now.
My friend has decades of experience in television, and knows of a couple openings at Fox News Channel, where he happens to “know people.” Despite the advice of his job gurus, the people at the network said “Don’t bother with a paper resume. Nobody reads them.”
This is true. Most big companies don’t bother with paper anymore, but not for the reason you think. They can sort and slice and dice the entries, and bring up only the ones that have certain key words. “Managerial” might be an important word, and “budget” would be another. It’s a smart way to get to the best candidates, but it brings a whole new set of questions to the mix.
The Machine Readable Resume
First of all, once SEO becomes mainstream in the resume business, then you’re going to see even more spammy buzzwords injected into narratives just to get notice. (It’s a great way to “leverage” the system, by showing how you can “optimize” “dynamic” situations, and “shepherd” the “results” that lead to “actionable” “success.”) This will be a wash, because we’ll just replace one set of contradictory consultants with another set. The replacements, with experience in SEO, will at least have data on their side. Allegedly.
The larger issue for me is that we end up devaluing a skill there’s precious little of to begin with: writing.
Even companies where communication is the livelihood will tell you there aren’t enough good communicators. You can’t calculate the loss of productivity that occurs when people dress things up in formal-sounding language, for no good reason. Or the clear and concise reports that mysteriously balloon from a single page to five pages, just to make it look more important.
Sure, there are safeguards built into the hiring process. The unqualified and the intolerable don’t survive very well in the interview, but good candidates get shut out more often than you would think. I have another friend who is in a hiring capacity, and she has a constant struggle with HR and recruitment. When she has job openings, she tells her ideal candidates about it expecting them to make the cut, yet HR will forward a batch of screened resumes that don’t include no-brainer obvious candidates. She is able to use this information, over time, to calibrate what she asks for, but this becomes more energy wasted on cat-and-mouse games.
The paper resume is dead, and my observations to the contrary it’s not coming back for one simple reason:
When you apply online, they can force you to fill out the Salary Requirement field. Those left blank get kicked back to the applicant. You might have the perfect qualifications, education, experience and moxie – but if you’re a few dollars over the budgeted ceiling, you’ll never get the interview, no matter what you’re worth.
Failures in Self Promotion
Nov 5th
Update:
There is no need for further linking, nor humiliation. Matthew has stepped up, and has eloquently apologized for acting upon bad advice.
The links have been removed, and the page redacted to be more representative of Mr. Duggan’s position and stance. (That’s not to say there aren’t weasels out there continuing to advocate for spammy tactics, but armed with new knowledge I am confident that Mr. Duggan will be a much better example of best practices going forward.)
We all enjoy feedback and comments. Well, at least the ones that are genuine.
When they are not genuine, be prepared. Especially when you try to game me.
This means you, Matthew Duggan.
I got the following comments from Matthew:
Very interesting. It’s good to hear the thoughts of an experienced media expert on a new media like Twitter.
The ‘community’ aspect is a very good idea and tools like TwitterFall are good for regional searches.
Posted on my Twitter Policy page.
Incredible! Those statistics are quite amazing.
Congratulations on the way you use Twitter Ike and on your induction into the Twitter Elite!
Now, Matthew Duggan (matthew@buildyourfollowers.com) happens to run a site called BuildYourFollowers.com, and signs his comments with the very search-engine friendly name of “Twitter for Business.” Which means that he wants as many web pages as possible to associate the phrase “Twitter for Business” with his site.
Let’s just see what kind of site this Fake Twitter Guru runs, shall we?
‘9 Free Videos, 6 Free e-Book Chapters and an Exclusive Members Area Reveal How To Automate Twitter and Transform It Into A Marketing Machine For Your Business…. Even If You’ve Never Used Twitter Before’
Fake Twitter Guru, indeed. But wait… there’s MORE!
You’re about to learn little known tools and techniques to transform Twitter into a free and automatic way of generating targeted leads to your website and grow your business. All with little effort and no knowledge.
And I’m giving away part of the course plus another $97.00 in value just so I can show you that this works!
Yes I’m literally going to bribe you just to get you to give me your name and e-mail.
Why would I do that?
Well I know that the only way for me to show you who I am and to demonstrate the value I can add to your online business life is by the 2 of us getting acquainted, and in the online world the medium we use to stay in touch with each other is the e-mail address (here’s mine – matthew@buildyourfollowers.com)
BUT
There is A LOT of garbage out there, and because of this I know that I’m genuinely competing for your time.
So
I’ve decided to do the only smart thing that makes solid business sense. By offering you a 7-part course for free that’s filled with top quality training, I’m hoping that 2 things will happen:
1. You’ll get to know, like and trust me.
2. Later on when I’ve demonstrated my value to you by helping you get started you’ll possibly invest in my full e-book and video course on Twitter.
That’s the truth.
Others will tell you all sorts of BS but that’s what’s really happening.
In the free course, I’ll show you how to:
- Promote Your Business Automatically
- Maximise Your Twitter Profile like a Social Media Pro
- Show you a strategy that got me 1500 targeted followers in 2 and a half months
- PLUS: My free strategy for using little known methods to Maximise Your Business
This way you have zero risk and the onus is on me to impress you… which is, as it should be.
So shall we get started?
SEO is a two-way street
I know what you are saying. “Ike, this guy is a loser, and you’re just giving him free publicity and the link-love that will help him game the search engines.”
I would have just left this one alone and deleted the obviously spammy comments, but there were two things I could not leave alone:
- He didn’t even bother to read the posts he was linking to. For instance, the “Global Dominance” piece was written last year to mock another Matthew, who trumpeted his own dominance of Twitter. I showed how easy it was to game the system to become the Number One Twitter User on Planet Earth. Apparently, Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan was too quick to post his spammy comment on my site to realize his overly-fawning comment was a joke (and a damned fine one, at that.)
- Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan – in the process of posting spammy comments on my site – actually links people to this:
You think that
YOU hate Spam?
(Try running an
internet business!)
I personally detest Spam and PROMISE that you will NEVER get an unwanted email as a result of signing up here.
Please help me make Matthew Duggan #1 in Google!
I am a firm believer in Search Engine Optimization techniques, but I am not a fan of being a shameless spammer like Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan. So let’s show Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan how SEO is done right.
If everyone uses the words Fake Twitter Guru as the anchor text linking to his site, then we can make him Number One with a bullet!
Please share the good news about Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan with as many sites as you can, and be sure to share this entry with your friends! Get them to help too! (There are a number of icons below to make it easy. Bookmark it! Digg it! Tweet it!)
Let people like Fake Twitter Guru Matthew Duggan know that their Neanderthal nascent understanding of marketing is sleazy unwelcome and won’t be tolerated in a polite society. The business you save from getting suckered by his shenanigans might be your own.
