The Forgotten Secret Weapons to Optimization!!
What are these “Secret weapon” you wonder! A Dictionary and Thesaurus. That is right probably two of the oldest books around are the secret weapon. Now first let’s not think of Dictionaries and Thesaurus’s as only the old books on our book shelves. I am talking about any dictionary; the standard, online, technical, etc.. Any book or website that defines things, is by definition a dictionary. The same goes for a Thesaurus.
Now how can these two types of resources help us, as staffing professionals. Well in the age of the search engine, the age were you need to think of any way you can possibly write something and have it mean the same thing. The age of “Search Engine Optimization”, both as a standard search engine, a job board or a database, the ability to come up with all the different ways a person might search for something or the words they might put on their resume or in a document can help us find hidden gems.
Example let’s look up resume in a thesaurus:
You get-Curriculem Viate, Vita, CV, Synopsis, Abstract, Precis, Work History, Biography, summary, Bio etc..
So now lets do a quick search in google
inurl:resume yields over 5,710,000 results.
inurl:workhistory yields over 4,510 and yes some of those results are what we would call resumes.
inurl:”work history” yields 15,100 results and again some are what we would call resumes.
So you can see how just looking up the word resume in a thesaurus, gave us other ideas on how to search. Also remember I used just a standard thesaurus. There are all types and all will give you other words that mean the same thing.
Let’s look at another example; you need a tester, well if you look up testing in a technical thesaurus you will see allot of interesting words used to mean testing, such as “reverse engineering”. If you search on testing you will get a certain number of hits, you search on “reverse engineering” you will get a certain number of hits, but you will get a large percentage that will not be the same. Of course the same principle works with search strings, job descriptions, resume writing, blogging etc..
Basically all we are doing by using these age old tools, in all their varied forms is doing a type of optimization. Whether it is job description, search string or resume writing the idea is to use as many possible words, and phrases that mean the same thing as what we want, in the event someone out there, and they will, uses them also.