Viva Las Vegas Wedding

I'm officially Married! Adam and I said "I do" last night (Saturday May 24th) at 7:30 PM.

The Professional Reputation Management Test

What's more important than your professional reputation? In my opinion, your reputation is everything.

Protecting my brand is a priority which is why I invest a lot of time and energy in controlling and managing it.

I am curious to see how important brand management is to some of my fellow recruiting friends.

The Brand Management Test

Admittedly, I am stealing this idea from a fellow search marketer and friend Ward Tongen. I lost this challenge a few weeks back to my colleagues Paul John, Clint Danks and Sarah Bernier but only because my Google Alert fell into a spam folder that I rarely check. (SIGH)

So here goes, the test subjects are:

• Paul DeBettignies of MN HeadHunter
• Steven Rothberg President & Founder, College Recruiter.com
• Don Ramer / CEO & Founder, Arbita
• Gregg Dourgarian, CEO of TempWorks Software
• Rick Deare of Deare Recruiting Solutions
• Toby Dayton, President & COO of Jobdig.com
• Doug Berg, co-founder of Jobs2Web and HotGigs
• Josh Kahn of the sourcing Riff
  

As recruiting, staffing and HR professionals who are very web savvy I figure there are a few ways they could find this post.

• A vanity search (after this post gets indexed)
• Backlink analysis of their web properties
• Referral analysis of their web analytics
• RSS feed to HRSearchMarketing.com
  

Ok let’s see how long it takes them to find this post.

Paul, Steven, Don, Gregg, Rick, Toby, Doug and Josh – when you find this post leave a comment. First one to leave a comment wins!

Why Do or Don’t you Blog?

Blogs represent an emerging and rapidly growing communication vehicle. According to the state of the blogosphere report there are over 70 million blogs aka “weblogs” in existence today.

Blogging as part of your overall recruiting strategy is a powerful, inexpensive way to generate brand awareness as well as humanize your company.


Where Are All the Minnesota Recruitment Bloggers?

With all the local recruiting events I’ve been helping to organize I’ve been fortunate to have met hundreds of recruiting and HR professionals but sadly, I only know a handful of
Twin cities recruiting bloggers.

This is where my question comes in – Why do or Don’t you Blog?

I’ll start…

Why Nicole Blogs

First and foremost, like all new bloggers I was afraid to death to start, my first post took me a good day to actually “publish”. But, that was a year ago and now I am absolutely addicted.

I mainly use my blog as a way to share what I’ve learned with others. It is also a place for me to answer questions I get asked regularly. My hope is that the information I provide helps people to understand a bit more about search marketing, while establishing myself as the “expert”– move over Cheezhead (only kidding – we can share)

Your next...........

Social Tools and Technologies w/ Jason Alba

Last nights Jason Alba presentation at JobDigs was fantastic. Thanks again Toby Dayton and crew for hosting us!

You can tell Jason is passionate about educating others on what he’s learned throughout the years.

We were Jason’s 4th stop of the day and yet he managed to keep a very high energy level.

I stated in a past blog post that I was going to blog this event “live” but unfortunately, I got caught up in my other “wingman” duties and couldn’t make that happen. For those who are interested, I did manage to take some pictures of the event.

Thankfully though, there are other bloggers like Gregg Dourgarian who were online blogging about their experience just a few short hours after the event – Go Gregg!

Jason’s Presentation

Jason gave a 90 minute presentation entitled "social tools and technologies for recruiters" in which he explained the value in tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Blogs and Twitter for recruiting professionals. Here's a bit of video, nothing fancy.

SEO – More then Just Hype

There have been many blog posts written recently describing SEO as “Hype” So, what’s the real deal, Is SEO valuable or just overly promoted Hype?
____

Overly promoted – I suppose sometimes, but in my opinion that’s because there is a fundamental lack of understanding in terms of what SEO can and cannot do. Often I feel that SEO is considered “the entire strategy” rather then an aspect of the strategy.

SEO is not the end all be all, but it is a very effective tactic to an organizations overall search marketing strategy.

Search Engine Optimization in its simplest form is the concept of making changes to a website’s content and often code in order to increase the site’s visibility in the search engines.

SEO Alone Is Not Enough

SEO alone is not necessarily enough to secure a high ranking within the search engines, often (depending on industry and goals) there are many other tactics involved including:

• Link Building
• Article Marketing / Content Syndication
• Press Release Optimization
• Blogger Relations / Blog Optimization
• Professional & Social Networking
• Social Media Optimization
• Social News Submission
• Online Reputation Management
• Video Optimization
• Online Reviews
• Photo Sharing
  

Our Site Ranks Well, Now What?

At the end of the day successful SEO implementation can only bring traffic to your website. If a website lacks basic usability principles and visitors don’t convert, where is the value?

Example – If your organization is looking for experienced .Net Developers and qualified individuals find your website via the search engines, but are then forced to jump through hoops to apply for the position and decide not to – is that the fault of bad SEO? Not in my mind, poor user experience is to blame here. SEO and website usability are both needed for high impact results.

Unfortunately, most organizations don't want to hear about their need for a usability makeover, they don't want to discuss website architecture or visitor behavior, they want rankings and want them now. Finding a balance between SEO and a usability can be a challenge, but it is necessary in order for your website to be most effective online.

In Closing…

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a valuable technology that brings your product/service/jobs visibility to the people looking for them online. SEO should be considered a long term investment, a tactic and not a one time event or the entire strategy. SEO is much more then Hype and definitely here to stay.

Minneapolis Welcomes Jason Alba

Let's give a big Minnesota welcome to Jason Alba (al - buh) author of the book I'm on LinkedIn - Now What??? and CEO of JibberJobber.

Jason will be speaking with Minnesota Recruiters at the JobDig corporate headquarters in Eden prairie on Monday April 28th

from 5-6:30.

Presentation Info:

Topic - Social Tools and Technologies for Recruiters

LinkedIn is obviously a powerful tool for recruiters. What about

other social tools, such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs?

How can recruiters develop and execute a social networking

strategy that will help them find new (and passive) candidates,

engage with them and develop a relationship, enriching

their candidate pool?

Jason will share what he’s learned as a job seeker and career management

advocate, taking you on a tour of successful recruiter strategies with these

four technologies.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

As I write this only 9 tickets remain. This is a FREE event (snacks included)

Register Here

I plan on blogging the event live as well as getting my copy of his booked signed to add to my collection.

Big thanks to Toby Dayton and crew at JobDig for hosting this event.

Going Global? - Global SEO Strategies

Managing an international website is not as straightforward as running a website focused on one local market. When it comes to taking search engine visibility globally, the question I get asked most often is “Why can’t I just translate it?”

Unfortunately it’s not that easy. SEO presents very unique challenges for organizations seeking global search engine visibility. Given the needs of search engine users, extending brand presence around the globe requires much more then simple translation.

Language & Content Considerations

At the end of the day search engines care about their user's and from a search engine users perspective, it is important that their search be relevant to their location and language.

Forget about translating from one language to another, you need to translate from one culture to another (localization). Think about the differences between the English spoken in the UK and in the USA for example:

Localization is the process of adapting your website, to a specific locale; to its language, standards and cultural normalities and dialects (Bejingese to Shanghaiese for instance)

Ian McAnerin, International SEO Guru provides the following foreign language examples:

French – In French, search engine optimization is "Référencement", not the literal translation of "optimisation de Search Engine", which would make you look foolish. Additionally, no one is searching for “optimisation de Search Engine” anyway.

Chinese - In Chinese, what an English speaker would call "cold water" to drink, would be called "open water".

Website Address

It is interesting to see the different approaches organizations take when it comes to a website address targeted internationally.

For example, Apple and Microsoft utilize subfolders to distinguish between the various language versions of their site. On the other hand, Mercedes-Benz, Nokia, and Google use country domain extensions. Companies such as Yahoo and MSN choose to use a combination strategy utilizing both country domain extensions and unique sub-domains.

Which Strategy is better?

The famous answer in search marketing is “It Depends”. Each approach has unique benefits. You will need to examine factors such technical constraints and content management limitations before making the decison as to which approach is best for you.

Additional Elements to Consider:

• The behaviors of your audience



• What search engines are key in a given country (Badiu in China, Naver – South Korea)
  


• How each country specific search engine operates by default

Example:

Below you will see I did a search on Google UK for “Board Games”, by default the results that appeared had the .UK domain extensions, unless I re-ran the search checking the "search the Web" radio box. How many people do you think change the default setting? Therefore, if you don't have a local domain extension, you could be at a disadvantage.

In Closing

Taking your online search marketing strategy global is no easy task, it involves many different people, across multiple countries. Before you decide to go global, it is important that someone within your organization take the lead. Create rules of engagement, guidelines and best practices that become institutionalized - keeping all involved stakeholders on the same page.

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