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2.  LinkedIn

LinkedIn () seems to be on all of my job lists and for good reason.  LinkedIn is a combination of a resume, cover letter, reference document and a moving database of your contacts. The resume portion is quite standard, with fields asking for your education and work experience.  The cover letter piece is the summary you get to have at the beginning, where you can position yourself for a particular job, based on your qualifications, awards and an explanation of what type of job you’re looking for. 

As you accelerate in your career, your network can easily observe your change in jobs or positions.  You can also update your status bar, just like in Facebook () or on Twitter (), with the type of job you’re looking for.  Your LinkedIn “resume” will be perceived as noteworthy when you fill it out completely, acquire endorsements for your work, join groups related to your interests, and add applications (such as your blog).

3.  VisualCV

VisualCV is a website that provides users with a virtual resume, as well as a database of job openings and networking opportunities.  Whether you’re a job seeker, entrepreneur, consultant, student or manager, VisualCV lets you display all of your credentials in an easy to read format, with multimedia integration.  For example, you can upload or embed a video resume or a podcast of you being interviewed. 

The latest capabilities that they offer allow job seekers to integrate their resume with social media sites, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, to share their qualifications with friends and colleagues.  When you update your resume, it can be shared through websites such as Digg () and StumbleUpon ().  Your resume, or VisualCV, can combine other elements, such as images, charts, awards and recommendations, in addition to traditional resume fields such as “work experience.”

4.  Emurse

Emurse allows you to create, share and store your resume for free online.  Their resume builder is job seeker friendly, allowing you to create and maintain a professional resume which can be downloaded in any format, such as PDF.  Just like LinkedIn, your resume can have a unique URL linked to your name and the ability to view employers who have seen your resume in the past. 

You also get statistics and graphs to aid in resume distribution. In addition, Emurse lets you keep track of your contacts, invite contacts and always access their latest information, similar to LinkedIn.  Just like Google () does with AdSense, you get job postings in your local area that are relevant to your resume.  There is also a job search area and organizer, similar to Monster.com’s, where you can keep track of the resumes you submit over time.

5.  Xing

Xing () is a social network with over 7 million business professionals globally, and is read in 16 languages.  Aside from being able to create a profile, the networking part of this site is what shines.  There are over 22,000 groups and networking events from London to Beijing advertised. 

Xing offers many of the same services as LinkedIn, and like LinkedIn, can serve as your online resume and cover letter. The standard service lets you create a professional profile page, search for people by name and industry, and join groups and events.  When you login, you’ll see jobs that might interest you, new members, visitors to your profile and much more.

6.  ResumeBucket

ResumeBucket is a service that enables you to post a resume quickly online.  The site provides you with a unique URL for your resume and enables you to promote your resume on your website or blog with embeddable ResumeBucket badges. In addition, resumes are shareable via popular social bookmarking and social networking sites.

If you’re currently employed and would like to keep your resume private, you can. ResumeBucket also provides you with sample resumes and cover letters as best practices to help you when you build your own.  And if you need assistance, they have a resume writing service where their professional writers can help you along the way.

ResumeSocial

ResumeSocial is a social resume community, where you can post your resume online and get feedback, just like Razume.  Registered users can build a resume through feedback and comments from other users who have similar job experience.  You can also be a resume expert and become a valuable member of the community by providing others with resume assistance. 

There is also an area for sharing cover letters and follow-up letters, which are very important as well.  When someone finds your resume on this site, they can print it, quote it, favorite it and email it to other people.  There is also a job search area, a blog and a career area, which gives you advice for putting resumes together.

8.  Gigtide

Gigtide () is a website that lets you create, publish, manage and track your resumes, contacts and cover letters online.  You can store unlimited resumes, contacts and cover letters and there are professional resume templates to help you.  You also have the option of creating a social media resume, which includes images, video, direct links and sharing functionality. Another interesting feature is a direct employer contact form, where employers can contact you directly through your resume.

9.  Howtowritearesume

Howtowritearesume gives you an easy way to build a professional resume, without being an expert.  You get their phrase builder technology, which helps you build compelling headlines, qualifications, achievement statement and more.  Then there is “one-click formatting,” which automatically reformats your resume and makes it easy to choose the best layout.  Your resume is stored online and is accessible by potential employers.  The templates are all predefined, so filling in the blanks is really easy.  You can change the font and margins and preview the changes instantly before printing or saving it.

10. Ziggs

Ziggs is designed to help you market yourself and manage your personal brand on the web. The service lets you create a profile and manage your online identity, and alerts you each time a recruiter views your profile and resume. You can discuss topics, ask people for advice or referrals, and search for jobs.

Source ordered content is especially useful for SEO because:



• it allows to give prominence to keyword-optimized sections of your site (e.g. content above the navigation);
• it allows to show spiders unique page elements first - before sitewide elements (e.g. article before sitewide navigation);
• it allows to place search crawlable elements above blocks that are ignored by search bots (e.g. content above flash or javascript elements).

The benefits of this technique include:



• no “undesired” elements (e.g. navigation, paging, etc) being shown as a snippet in the search results;
• important and informative content loads first (lower bounce rate from slow page loads);
• better rankings (priority is given to that content that resides directly after the <body> element).

Once again thanks for your post. It is really very informative.

I am not sure about the disadvantages.

Even I have a site in which the navigation bar has many links(its a drop down menu) because of this the content gets pushed down to the bottom of the html page. Even i was thinking the same solution for it. Except home page in other pages placing the navigation menu after the content (using CSS) really am not sure if it is possible or not, lets see.

Keyword prominence can be basically achieved by:



• making sure the most important element goes after (or is close to) the opening <body> tag in the page source code;
• including your keyword in the SEO-sensitive elements of the page: title, anchor text, bold text, alt text, etc.

Let’s see how we can make one element/keyword of the page prominent over others:





1. Emphasize the most important keywords of the page with the help of basic semantic structure: make sure to take full advantage of H1, H2, H3 tags to make your page structure perfectly clear to a search bot.
2. Use SOC (source ordered content) technique especially in cases when your (customer’s) designer’s desires come into conflict with on-page SEO. The technique is simple and widely used: place your keyword-rich content closer to the top of the page in the source code and use CSS to order all page elements the way it pleases the web designer’s eye.
3. (A copywriting technique used in journalism) Try inverted pyramid writing - that is, use the first paragraph to give a short summary of the content below and to include your keywords there (that’s also an effective blogging technique when you let those summaries appear on the home page and the full content on the single post page - thus avoiding duplicate content issue).

Here is the checklist of proper heading usage (please add your points or argue mine):

Each of my pages have at least one heading;

I have only one H1 heading per page;

H1 heading is the first heading on the page;

I use the page main keyword in H1 heading of the page;

I use headings to structure content and CSS for visual effects;

I don’t skip heading levels (e.g. H1 to H3);

All other headings (except H1) are subheadings; they are (ideally) thematically connected with the previous-level heading;

I use headings consistently throughout the site;

Headings are short and concise (and thus easily scanned);

Headings extracted from the page represent the summary of the text (i.e. I can guess what the page is about without reading its full content);

I use SEO or web accessibility tools to evaluate the structure of my pages.

The staleness of a document may be based on:



• document creation date,
• anchor growth, traffic,
• content change,
• forward/back link growth, etc.

Google patent explains how they can spot the stale content using 4 factors:



• Query-based factor;
• Link-based criteria;
• Traffic - based criteria;
• User-behavior-based criteria.

1. Query-based factor basically refers to analyzing which pages in SERPs are selected by users.

Besides, the search engine tracks which queries one and the same document ranks for: “discordant set of queries” might mean the page is spammy.

2. Link-based factor analyzes the page backlinks monitoring the dates that new links appear (i.e. “indexed by Google or the date the linking page was created”) to a document and that existing links disappear. By looking into the the rate at which links appear or disappear over time and how many links appear or disappear during a given time period, the search engine is able to conclude whether there is trend toward appearance of new links versus disappearance of existing links to the document or vice versa:



• downward trend = > stale document (more links disappear than appear);
• decrease in links = > stale content (either sudden or significant link disappearance).

• Check how many URLs from your site have been indexed: search [site:yourdomain.com] and “dig deeper” into the search results:



[site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory1] + [site:yourdomain.com/subdirectory2] + etc (the “deeper” you digg, the more/ the more accurate results you get)

• Identify most powerful pages of your site:



[ www site:yourdomain.com]

[ tld site:yourdomain.tld]

[inurl:domain site:yourdomain.com]

[domain site:yourdomain.com]




(kudos to SEOmoz for the tip)

• Identify most powerful pages of your site (keyword-dependent): search [site:yourdomain.com inanchor:keyword];
• (based on the previous one) Find sites with most potential (to further promote them):



[site:yourdomain.com inanchor:”key * word”]

[site:yourdomain.com intitle:”key * phrase”]

• Find most relevant pages of your site (to further promote them for the specified term): search [site:yourdomain.com keyword] or [site:yourdomain.com key * phrase]