For whatever reason, my hometown of Cleveland, Ohio is a hotbed of search engine optimization and marketing talent. As a result, a group of us decided to create ClevelandSEO, an organization committed to promoting the tremendous level of SEO talent in Northeast Ohio.

One of our members, Sage Lewis, recently did an interview on the organization after our first luncheon. Enjoy.



Video by Cheezhead.

Even Google's feeling the heat from the war for talent.

In an article from Wall Street Journal today entitle, "Google Adjusts Hiring Process as Needs Grow," Google is reportedly making the hiring process less stringent and time-consuming.

"Everything works if you're trying to hire 500 people a year or 1,000," says [head of HR Laszlo] Bock, 33 years old. But "we're hiring much larger numbers than that, and so it forces us to go back and say...what do we need to change in the way we interface with our candidates?"

In addition to great talent becoming harder to come by, Google also realizes that time-to-hire needs to decrease in order for supply to keep up with demand. Google hires 16 people everyday and has moved up from 1,628 employees at the end of 2003 to 5,680 at the end of 2005.

One initiative Google has already undertaken is reducing the number of interviews. Mr. Bock says each candidate offered a job by Google went through 5.1 in-person interviews on average in June, down from 6.2 at the beginning of the year. (A veteran tech recruiter says five to eight interviews is probably about average for Silicon Valley.) Google is also considering requiring staff members who interview candidates to submit their assessments within a week of the interview; right now, there's no strict deadline.

Amazingly, even in light of the fast pace and incredible growth of Google, the founders still find time to review every candidate. The article states, "Even today, at least one of the co-founders reviews every job offer recommended by an internal hiring committee on a weekly basis, sometimes pushing back with questions about an individual's qualifications."

I'm beginning to believe the Google founders are actually robots. Robots that don't sleep, of course.

Not only are exact-match domains a good way to ranking well for those phrases on Google, they're also a pretty good way to bypass Google's sandbox.

A site I recently set-up called Blogs with Jobs already ranks pretty well for the term, even among some pretty trusted sites.

Indeed.com has a fun little tool that allows users to see the number of jobs posted with specific keyphrases or search terms. According to the tool, the need for search engine optimization and marketing pros continue to rise at a healthy pace when looking at the number of job postings month over month.



The talks that I have with search marketing firms and experts reveal a similar theme: The demand for SEOs outweighs the supply. I fully expect this trend to continue, with the trend of contracting and homegrown SEO/SEM growing at a healthy pace.

Who needs Google's sandbox when you have an exact-match domain name?

The success of my own firm, HRSEO, has sparked a handful of copycats. Most notably, a firm with the domain HRSEO.co.uk has sprouted.

Now, this site has zero going for it, except its domain name, but when doing a search on Google for HRSEO, this site is a Top 30 result in 20,000-plus search results.

Aaron touches on the phenomenon as well on his blog.

For this reason, sites like Recruiting.com are so formidable a term when ranking for a keyphrase as competitive as "recruiting," even though much older sites like Electronic Recruiting Exchange, ESPN or the Army rank amongst it.

No doubt the backlinks going to a site like Recruiting.com with the keyphrase "recruiting" in it are a huge benefit. Another example, a site like ClevelandJobs.com can rank so well for "Cleveland jobs" in big part because of its quality backlinks from Yahoo! and DMOZ.

However, if a site is largely compiled of affiliate links and AdSense code, your chances of top rankings go down considerably. For example, a search for "Michael Jordan jerseys" fails to serve the Web site www.michaeljordanjerseys.com in the top results.

That said, if you can get an exact-match domain for a particular keyphrase you want to target, it's a good investment. For example, this site owns www.searchengineoptimizationjobs.com, but has yet to take advantage of it, a la the strategy outlined above ... yet.

Google pushing its Gadget offering. Cool stuff, but can't add Pac-Man to this blog because of the script?

Boo! Oh well, I doubt it would even fit correctly on the screen anyway.

StartupReview has a great report on Rotten Tomatoes and how the site has leveraged SEO to drive significant traffic.

SEO traffic comprises up to 70% of our incoming traffic. We have a dedicated and loyal community of movie fans on Rotten Tomatoes (in fact, our forums and Vine community system is second-to-none when it comes to movies, I would like to think), but even a dedicated, active community is only a fraction of the browsing, drive-by traffic that the search engines will provide to you.

Seventy-percent! Keep in mind this is a site that has been around since 1998 and has a very loyal following. To say that in light of its userbase, the site drives 70 percent of its traffic via search is significant.

The question is, Are jobs like movies?

In many ways I think they are, just like any product these days. People tune out the messages until it's time to "buy."

"Oh, I just heard about this new movie and want to see what it's all about" and "I just found out I'm being laid off, where do I find current opportunities" all lead to the same place: Search.

A big difference is people are more interested in films on a regular basis than they are employment. Only the most aggressive and desperate job seekers are on job sites regularly.

All job sites will tell you that search is a primary way they drive traffic. Is it 70 percent? Probably. It should be, or else get a new marketing team.