Recently at a coffee shop there were two gentlemen talking about the war in Iraq. One was a homosexual from Canada on vacation in the United States, the other was a former military Colonel, who had a son and a brother both on active duty in Iraq. Need less to say the gentleman who looked to young to have made Colonel was pro-America, pro-Democracy and pro-Bush. The gentleman from Canada was quite liberal in his thinking and very anti-war. The both agreed that wars were a terrible tragedy of the human race and it was a shame anyone had to go to war.
The Canadian assumed that the former Colonel was upset about the equipment, bullet proof vests and armor on the Humvees and said; “You feel your brother and son who are serving over there are not getting enough protection, don’t you?” The Colonel nearly let the Canadian have it, verbally that is and said;
“With all due respect here are my thoughts on your perception of “Feelings.” And please do not take this wrong, but lets understand what we are talking about here. I did not say that my brother or my son was not getting enough protection as a defensive play, do not put words in my mouth. My brother and my son can and will protect them selves and blow a hole in his enemy. I want offensive weapons so we can kill the enemy, as in splatter their brains against block walls or smash them into oblivion via steamrollers, crushing every bone in the bodies and let the flies deal with it; The faster the better. I do not “Feel” anything. I only care about winning and finding everyone one of those little maggots insurgent international terrorist murderers and killing them, that is all.”
The Canadian was taking a back. He said; “Well yes, I understand that you want to win the war, who wouldn’t? But don’t you feel George Bush lied to the World about Saddam and that your son and brother are risking their lives for no reason?”
The American Former General said; “Look you SOB, I want those scum killed efficiently, permanently, effectively and immediately. This feelings crap is for faggots and socialist liberal weak-minded mommas boys. I only care about winning, ONLY. Complete and total victory and complete annihilation of the enemy and you can call me Bob von Clauswitz, Sir. “Feel” where on Earth did you get that from? Feeling is for women, this is a war, not a game. What? Are you psych major too? Do you want to discuss psychological warfare instead? Let me know on that, got plenty of information there. Now get out of my way you Girlie Man!”
With that the Canadian man snickered some comment in a femine voice and left. The Colonel turned around and got what was close to a standing ovation from the entire coffee shop. I stood there in amazement and before I left I shook Bob’s hand and said thank you for your service to our nation and for the service of your son and your brother. Good day. Think on this in 2006.
“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/
You’ve probably heard it since you were in college, writing your first resume:
“A resume should be only one page.”
Nope. Wrong. Dead wrong.
Having said that, the one-page rule IS a good rule of thumb for most resumes. But once you’ve been working for a couple years or more, one page simply isn’t enough to market yourself effectively. That’s what your resume is supposed to be about.
If you’re straight out of college and don’t have lots of experience yet, stick to a page. If you’re an experienced executive, one page is a joke. It’s time for a new rule:
“Make your resume long enough to cover everything, but short enough to be interesting.”
This is a general rule for writing (it’s called The Miniskirt Principle, actually), but it’s particularly important for resumes. And here’s a rule of thumb to go along with it:
“Limit yourself to two pages…unless you can’t.”
For most people, even executives, I recommend you do your best to fit the goods on two pages. You might not be able to. Trying to, though, forces you to be as concise as you possibly can without sacrificing marketing effectiveness.
That resume austerity plan is based on simple resume economics. When it comes to resumes, each word costs something, and your budget is low. The people who look at your resume probably have to look at LOTS of them. If yours is too long, it costs too much time. So keep it as short as you can.
There’s one exception. If limiting yourself to two pages will hurt your chances of getting an interview, add another page. But I’d be EXTREMELY wary of going beyond three pages.
Maybe there are some 70-year-old super-candidates that require more space than that, but very few. If you can’t present a compelling picture of the targeted highlights of your career in three pages, you’ve moved beyond the targeted highlights.
The one-page rule is bunk, but I recommend following the two-page rule strictly.
Copyright (c) by Roy Miller
Roy Miller created http://www.Job-Search-Guidepost.com.
Would you like a “secret weapon” to crush your job search competition? Subscribe to Roy’s free newsletter and get a free report that shows YOU can win the job of your dreams in record time. Visit here to subscribe and claim your free copy: http://www.Job-Search-Guidepost.com.
Would you like never to need a resume again? Visit Roy’s new site http://www.resale-money-machine.com to find out how.
Roy will link to you if you publish this article! Publish with no changes (keep the bio box at the bottom) at your site or in your newsletter. Then email Roy here to let him know where you’re publishing: Editors@Job-Search-Guidepost.com. You’ll get a link at http://www.Job-Search-Guidepost.com, and maybe an ad in Roy’s weekly newsletter.
Are Some Links Better And, for that matter, should you focus on sheer quantity of links to your site, or the quality of those links? For our first piece of evidence, let’s ask Google.
In a post to their blog in September, we find the following: “By using a practice called googlebombing, however, determined pranksters can occasionally produce odd results. In this case, a number of webmasters use the phrases [failure] and [miserable failure] to describe and link to President Bush’s website, thus pushing it to the top of searches for those phrases. We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.”
While that doesn’t mean you should engage in the practice of Google Bombing, by any means, it does give you a clue to how effective it can be to use the description of the site that is being linked to, where appropriate.
It isn’t a secret that a sheer volume of links can help you get better rankings. If you could get 25,000 links legitimately referencing your site, sure, that would be a great thing.
When you look at the work involved in the reciprocal link process, even with the powerful tools available on the market today, the objective would be to reduce the amount of time generating links back to your site as much as possible. This makes it seem that it’s more important (and more realistic for entrepreneurs and small businesses) to get quality links, if these links are going to carry greater weight than their reciprocal counterparts.
While that goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom about getting better search results, the truth is that search engine optimization is a bit like adjusting the graphic equalizer on your stereo. There are several ways you can adjust your settings to get the desired effect.
In light of that, let’s revisit quality link building. What is it?
In general, each link pointing to your site is sort of a “vote” for your sites contest. But all votes aren’t equal. If you sell airline tickets on your site, pages that are about travel will get a more powerful vote than a site about butterflies.
And if two pages that have unrelated content link to you, the tie breaker will be the anchor text, or the words in the hyperlink that is linked to you. Nirvana would be an anchor text link on a search-engine favored page that is related to the linked page..
Therefore, a quality link would be the kind of link that carries the most weight in favor of your site. Since their “vote” counts more, you don’t need to get as many quality links to get the same effect as pure volume of raw links.
Quality link building, then, is the process by which we discover links that can help us build more valuable document relationships and favor getting these over links that create weak correlations.
A better link would be one that links to me using the phrase free traffic, on an unrelated page. The fact that they use a phrase that is descriptive of my site to link to me, put that link in a better context, so that even when it’s from an unrelated page, it’s even better.
Slightly lovely would be a raw link to my site that was on a page that is related.
The best I’d hope for would be a link that uses the phrase free traffic from a page that has something to do with any topic related to traffic generation.
There are even better scenarios than that, but they are only in play when you’re in control of the link pointing back to you. In the meantime, from watching what Google itself has said about Google Bombing, you can learn that not all links to your site give you the same voting weight.
The question then becomes, why do all that extra work if you can get the same benefit with 25% of the effort?
Why indeed.
This article is an excerpt from a discussion of linking. You can view or participate in this discussion at http://www.freetraffictip.com/linking for more, with reference links to resources around the web.
