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Quite a bit of people these days are talking about search engine optimization (SEO) for resumes. If you are new to the concept, you might be thinking, what in the world do search engines like Google and Yahoo have to do with my resume?
 
Such thinking is well founded because as things currently stand, the answer is “very little!” In this case when people say “search engine”, they are referring to the propritary search engines that sites like Monster and Career Builder have connected to their database of resumes. Both corporations as well as third party recruiters pay big bucks in order to be able to access databases like these in order to search for candidates.
 
In some cases the price they pay allows them a certain, limited number of searches per month. With lots of money involved, you had better believe that it's in an job-board's best inerest to provide their clients with relevant results.
 
One of the ways they do this is by borrowing a search engine concept that the big boy engines, like Google have been employing for some time. The concept is known in SEO circles as “keyword proximity”. In a nutshell the idea is that in any body of text, no matter the size, the same word of phrase should have a different impact on search results depending on it's distance from a fixed point in the text.
 
Now I know that that sounded like a bunch of technical gobldy-gook, so let me give you as strait forward an example as I can come up with. For an engine like Goggle the URL http://dog.com will have better keyword proximity for someone searching for the term “dog” then a the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog.
 
The reason is that the fixed point in this example is the beginning (left-most point) of the text, and in the first example, the word “dog”, in dog.com has greater proximity to the beginning of the text then it does in the other URL. It seems that sites like Monster use keyword proximity in their algorithm much like Google does.
 
You can apply this to your resume by figuing out which terms recruiters are searching for when trying to fill the type of job description you are interested in, and then putting those terms as close to the top of your resume as possible.
 
Of course you want do this creativly, in such a way that the resume is still readable and attracitve to human readers as well as machines. Engaging in “keyword stuffing” and repeating relavant phrases ad-naseum in your resume is not likely to win the hearts and minds of any humans who come across your resume.
 
I fist heard of the idea of “keyword proximity for resumes” from Mark Alves who is a professional in the field of Search Engine Optimization and Online Marketing. After applying these tweaks to my own resume, I found that I recived more calls from recruiters that had found my resume on various job boards. For more information from Mark, check out his blog on church marketing, ChurchMojo.com.