Today’s unemployment rate of 8.8% and gains of 216,000 non-farm jobs in March, which covered many sectors including manufacturing (+17,000 jobs), health care (+37,000 jobs), the service sector (+78,000 jobs), leisure and hospitality (+37,000) and mining (+14,000), were welcomed news! Unfortunately, it will still take over 5 years or until later this decade to make up for the 7.9 million jobs killed off by the recession! Fortunately, hope resides in the form of both jobs and strategies to land jobs from SEO (Search Engine Optimization)!
I so strongly believe in SEO as a vehicle to provide job seekers a differential advantage in job-hunting that, over the last six months, I have built up one of the largest SEO groups in the Chicago area with over 500 members. This is because search engines are the new Yellow Pages and SEO techniques can be selectively adopted by job seekers to: a) rank higher with search engines and b) stand out among employers. For example, developing a blog or contributing to social media sites on specific expertise will be noticed by Google, Yahoo and Bing and in turn discovered by employers searching for your type of talent. I invite you all as my special guests to our next meeting on Saturday, April 23rd where we will be discussing six free new SEO tools that job seekers can easily adapt to job-hunting. Please go to http://www.meetup.com/chicago-seo/ for more details.