Web presence strategies for academic/professional job search?

November 13, 2013 6:14 PM

I am at the start of a long runway leading to a job change in mid/upper higher education management. I don't have online skeletons, I just want my presence to be coherent and to point to me -- I google people when I hire, and I know how it can go awry. I am looking for best practices in self-SEO, details inside.

I am 20 years into a career and looking to make a move, so I want to have a coherent professional presence that commands my name when searched for. I hope that the large online/creative professional community here on MF can help me out. Professionally I use Christopher, but many people know me as Chris -- I want to be present in both sets of searches. Here are my assets.

1. Most of my work materials/CV data is available on a work-hosted professional page that I keep up to date.
2. I own mylastname.org and use it for email, but for now the domain forwards to my work page and I host the domain email on google.
3. I am on LinkedIn
4. I have a presence on both ResearchGate as well as my institution's bepress repository.
5. I have an account on BrandYourself

So for now my main page at work owns the number one result for my name, but the secondary professional items show up further down after random pages to a little league phenom, Chicago's best undiscovered rapper, and an eponymous home cleaning service located in the town next to mine (so it shows up when you use my name and geographic location).

What I am thinking is this:

A. Move my domain to about.me or weebly and set up a small professional bio site.
B. Set up a brandyourself profile and link out to all my sites, use SEO tips there.
C. Make sure that both versions of my name appear on each site, and try to use both in named links.
D. Crosslink everything.

Since I am looking to make a move to a different city and will be making many contacts through networking, I expect that my google presence will be the first impression in a lot of circumstances. Any pro tips from the community would be much appreciated.

posted by cgk to Work & Money (4 answers total)

Flavors.me aggrgates all your social media really nicely and serves as a nice business card.
posted by jrobin276 at 6:33 PM on November 13, 2013

Your plan is fine, but it has become a lot harder to game Google these days. I think you are over thinking it. Move your work materials / CV to a space you control so they don't go bye-bye when you change jobs. You are already #1 for your name, what more do you expect?
posted by COD at 7:32 PM on November 13, 2013

Here's another perspective for you. I'm an academic, and as you probably know academic culture tends to be conservative and suspicious of some types of self promotion. When I look up a job candidate, I want to easily find basic information like contact info and CV. A basic website with this is fine. To put a suspicious academic spin on it, what you describe considering with an extensive online presence would seem off and too much to me, it looks like trying too hard. I would wonder, what's wrong that you need all these websites? Personally I would stay far away from any service with "brand" in the name, that's code for flashy self promotion to academics.
posted by medusa at 5:08 AM on November 14, 2013

Response by poster: Thanks for the responses everyone. To close this question out, I was very mindful of the "cheese" factor that medusa raised. I didn't want something that looked like I was trying too hard, but I did want the materials that have organically built up over time to rise to the top. Since this is an admin position the people I will be dealing with are a mix of individuals in my field who are familiar with me, and people who will be learning about me for the first time. So yes, looking like I am trying too hard was something to avoid.

With minimal creation of new stuff (only one new URL), I worked on some SEO strategies (god, I hate writing that) and while I used to have the #1 result, I now have the #1 result as well at 6 of the top 11 responses. More importantly, the backstage twitter posts from my rapping alter-ego have been pushed out of sight.

So yes, there was a degree of overthinking, but with a couple of hours of tweaking I think that the results were worth it. Thanks everyone!
posted by cgk at 9:36 AM on December 7, 2013