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Standing out at a Job Faire can make a difference in your job search. Career Fairs are starting to pick up, and Dice is running some nice ones, called Targeted Job Fairs. At a San Jose Area Career Fair in early 2010, 10 companies as showing up, and a major job search company has 82 career faires scheduled for 2010 across the US.

How do you compete at a Job Faire? The competition can be significant, but you can help yourself jump out from the crowd with advance preparation. At AA-Careers, we have a straight-forward six-step process to get ready. Plan to go? Here’s how to prepare:

First, investigate the companies that are going and pick your objectives. Use the World Wide Web to check out the companies that are there before you even decide to go. Go to their sites and see if they have their job openings listed. Pick a sane number to target, and get ready to spend an hour or more researching each one. It’s hard to do more than 10 in a day, and four or five is a much more reasonable target. For each hiring company, you want to know: key product lines, recent news, and executive names. Try to see if you know anyone at the target companies. You should end up with a page or two of research for each company/job.

Second, if there are job openings on the web, read them to see what the hiring department is looking for. Create a mapping of your accomplishments and skills to the requirements of the job. Make the nomenclature match. If the hiring company calls customers "clients", your resume should do the same thing. The accomplishments should be written in the style of the hiring organization.

Third, create a ‘mini sales pitch’ for each likely company/job combination. Write down a sixty second ‘thumbnail’ that you can repeat verbally depicting why you are a great prospect for that job. You’ll use this in your resume and when you meet the company at the job kiosk.

Fourth, modify your resume for each position. The objective on your resume should exactly match the job you’re targeting. The executive summary should be a written form of your “mini sales pitch” for the job. Then choose the accomplishments and skills that most clearly match the job description. Especially at a Job Faire, the purpose of your resume is a sales tool for you – to get you on-site job interviews. It should be very easy to see that you’re a match based on your resume.

Fifth, rehearse your ‘mini-sales-pitch’. Collect your research and the resume for each spot - bring a couple of copies for each – and put each in a intelligibly labeled folder. Keep them in a light briefcase or folio.

Finally, dress and prepare as if you’re doing on-site interviews. Dress well and be properly groomed. Avoid strong cologne or perfume…use any eau de cologne or scent sparingly, if at all.

Remember to smile, and good hunting!

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Traffic, is one of the magic words on the internet! The number or volume of visitors to your online business website is what ultimately dictates the success or failure of your home based business or online venture.

You can have the best looking website on the internet, offering the most incredible product to your potential customers, but if no one comes to visit then all your design efforts will have been in vain.

Now none of us want that do we? I know I certainly don’t because I want people to see what I have done and to buy what I have to offer! What about you? I am sure you would like nothing more that to have a constant flow of people to your online business website. Here are some proven ways in increasing the volume of users who will visit your site.

Use Overture.

Overture is a subsidiary of Yahoo that offers a powerful keyword suggestion tool that helps you come to find the right keywords. If you are using the right keywords on your website then they will bring in more visitors for your site.

With Overture you type in the words that are related to your online business products or services, and see how many searches were made for those particular entries. The more searches there are, the more you should consider using those keywords in your site.

Submit your site to the many search engines on the web.

We all use search engines when we are looking for information on the internet. Can you imagine what life on the internet would be like without the Search Engines? Doesn’t bear thinking about does it? So you need to harness the power of the search engines to ensure that when people use search engines to determine their destination they have the option of coming to your website!

Know the value of keywords.

Search engine spiders are sent to fetch the keywords embedded in your site, so it would serve you well if your pages are populated with the right keywords you’ve acquired from Overture. So without turning your online business website into page after page simply made up of your keywords you need to ensure that your online business keywords are prevalent throughout your website. The Search Engine Optimisation phrase to cover this is “Keyword Density” and that is such a big subject that it will be covered in a separate article very soon!

Provide quality content.

As I have already suggested simply populating your site with keywords would be useless if done carelessly. Your visitors will be looking for information, and if you don’t give them what they are looking for then they will just leave as quickly as they came. Remember, you want quality visitors, those who have the highest possibility of purchasing what you have to offer. You have to provide good, informative content for them so that they’ll stay. Try to publish articles or special reports on your site, where your keywords are strategically positioned in the body of your content at a density level of at least 2% (2 mentions of the keywords per 100 words of the body).

Promote in online communities.

Get the word out to the wider world by joining forums, mailing lists, discussion boards and similar online places where your target audience is likely to gather. Many people start threads asking for help. Help them by providing answers to their questions and you will start to build your reputation within your field of expertise. More often than not, in online forums you are allowed to have a signature where you can put a link to your online business website and this will certainly bring in some visitors as well.

Create a reason to return

You need to aim at encouraging return visitors to your online business website. You can build your own mailing list to keep in touch with them and offer some promotions or special offers from time to time. Alternatively you could incorporate a forum into your website to provide for a venue for your visitors to come together and discuss certain topics. This would simulate the semblance of a community they could call their own, and they would keep visiting your site to join in the discussions.

Constantly refresh and update your content.

Not only will this win the favour of search engines, but it will also increase the possibility of attracting visitors you once lost.

During the early stages of your online business website’s existence, traffic may come slowly. However, do not be discouraged into giving up. With the techniques shared in this article, you can increase the flow of visitors in due time, resulting in a high level of activity for your online business venture. With a prosperous website comes a prosperous business!

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High ranking on Google and other such search engines is largely based on the number of sites that links to your page. Due to this factor, the SE conscious web master is eternally engaged in a quest for links. In this article I shall reveal some of the does and don’ts, and perhaps even a few tips and tricks to help you along your quest.

Links exchanges can be extremely productive, but here are a few things to consider. Set up a separate page where you will put your reciprocal links, however, do not name this page links.html or links.htm, call it associates.html. This will make other webmasters more attracted to having a link on your page, also it seems a lot more professional to have ‘associates’ rather than; ‘random people I decided to exchange links with to gain/maintain a high SE ranking’.

Furthermore, when first starting out on your quest for links, always be the one to make the first move, by placing a link to someone’s page in anticipation of them reciprocating. You can always remove it if they don’t, and it is likely to encourage them to add a link to your site. Do not be afraid to approach the ‘Big Boys’, do a search in Google for your keyword, and contact the people that rank highest. This makes perfect sense, but many people simply do not bother contacting the webmasters at the top - thinking they would never agree to exchange links with them. But remember; they too have to maintain their high position and getting new links is the easiest way to do this. Moreover, exchanging links with high ranking sites is far more productive, Google is after all based on weighted voting.

To make the most of the links to you, submit the pages that link to your site to the search engines, this will ensure that their ‘votes’ are counted, and if you let people know that you are submitting their pages for free, just because they linked to you, then people are far more likely to link to you in the future. The easiest way to get loads of links from a high ranking site to your own is through forums. Becoming very active on popular forums is a great way to increase search engine ranking.

Another good tip is to submit the pages of the forum that have your link on, to the search engines. Now people are going to be sitting there reading this and thinking, ‘there is no need to do that, Google crawls every link on a page and they will eventually get to the link to your site’. However, EVENTUALLY, is the key word (if you pardon the pun), submitting directly to the search engines will make the process quicker. Also, there is evidence to suggest that pages submitted directly to the search engines and linked to in other pages gain higher ranking.

Furthermore, Google does not penalise for over submission, so where’s the harm? Always ensure that you exchange links with sites relevant to yours, but not too relevant, the last thing you want to do is promote your competition. For example, if you run a web design company, exchange links with web design resource sites, SEOs, graphic designers, but not other web design companies - unless you have formed a good relationship with that company and work collaboratively on projects or work in different markets.

Good luck on your quest for links!

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