Publish Photos for Your Job Search

By Joshua Waldman from Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies

When you post photos of yourself, you’re increasing your likelihood of ranking in Google, which increases gives you an edge with hiring managers. Google’s search results page has become more and more multimedia oriented over the years. A results page used to be a simple list of links to websites, but now you can choose from images, videos, maps, and social networks.

In order for Google to correctly index and serve an image, the image needs to have a proper description. Creating a description for an image depends on the image-sharing tool you use. Here are two great photo-sharing sites you can post images of yourself to:

Flickr: Flickr is a photo-sharing site frequently indexed by Google. The site allows you to create a free account and then upload images. When you upload images of yourself, use your full name in the title of the image and in the description area.
Picasa Web Albums: Picasa Web Albums is owned by Google, so you can assume that images uploaded to the photo-sharing program get indexed pretty regularly. Although Picasa Web Albums isn’t a social networking site like Flickr, it’s still an easy way to get images ranked on Google’s first page of search results for your name.

Picasa Web Albums creates the title for your image based on the file name, so be sure to rename your image with your full name before uploading it. For example, before uploading an image, rename it like this: full.name.presentation.jpg. This step can help your Google ranking.

Picasa Web Albums was built for headshots. When you upload a headshot, the program allows you to name the face. You simply click the individual photo and name your face. Doing so adds a meta tag to the image. Google uses this tag to identify and index it.

If you’re an advanced user of either of these programs, you can choose the Creative Commons (CC) license. CC tells Google that you give other people permission to use and reuse your image in any way as long as you’re attributed as the source.