For those of you who may not know, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. There is a whole industry built around getting a website to the top of the search engine results.

The nuts and bolts of SEO is about increasing web traffic. That is a direct reason for you to engage in this endeavor. You want your resume to be seen and engaged more often. The top three SEO strategies are:

Quality -- Your website has to be user friendly, aesthetically pleasing and most of all, relevant.

-- Your website has to be user friendly, aesthetically pleasing and most of all, relevant. Research -- Are the keywords you use drawing in the audience you are looking for?

-- Are the keywords you use drawing in the audience you are looking for? Engagement -- Do people stay and browse or do they "bounce" from your site. A big metric for SEO is to reduce the “Bounce” rate.

There is more to SEO but I am going to pause there. Those are the three SEO strategies I want you to focus on for your resume.

Now, speaking of that resume, let’s apply those three SEO strategies.

Quality

I would venture to say that cold reading stacks of resumes is a very rare practice. All the resumes I review have been parsed and indexed by a database. That means a quality resume has a clean font (Arial, Times or Calibri), a reasonable size (1-2 pages) and that’s it. Images, borders and tables are just going to get in the way. Remember, most people who receive resumes are plugging them into the parser, not marveling at your prowess with Word.

Research

Your resume is now a collection of data points. Read and research the job descriptions and postings you are applying for then add those keywords to the skills section of your resume like this:

This resume is rich with keywords. If I were filling a job order for a Web Developer with experience in PHP, MySQL and CMS, It wouldn’t take long to establish that this resume warrants further reading.

I would also argue that just below your skills section should be your education.Clients often ask for degrees and certifications.This is definitely worth seeing in the first four inches of your resume.

Engagement

Now that I have found your resume, with the keywords and education I was searching for, you wouldn’t want me to “bounce” off it and move on, right? In SEO speak; the bounce rate is how long someone stays engaged in your website. So, in terms of SEO for your resume, give the reader a reason to stay.You do this by proving that you have used all the skills you have listed on the top of your resume. The employment section should contain:

Employer Name and Phone Dates of Employment (a least month and year) Job Title and a one-liner description Bullet points of accomplishments highlighting your skills using your keywords.

You are now SEO’ed! Whether you submit to an employer direct or submit to one of the big sites, your resume should be seen more often.

Thanks for reading.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Guillermo Yañez

Guillermo is the Lead IT Account Executive at eXcel Staffing, an employment & staffing agency located in Albuquerque, NM who assists employers with finding top talent.