ALAN KENNEDY, 54, had never used social networking sites until he was laid off from his job as an engineer last November. Then he did what many job seekers are now advised to do: he set up profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn.

In March, after several depressing months of searching, Mr. Kennedy received a “Jobvite,” an e-mail invitation to apply for a job. The invitation came from a former co-worker who had gone to work for Hubspot, a company based in Cambridge, Mass., that sells Web-based marketing software. Hubspot had open positions and was offering bonuses to its employees to help fill them.

Mr. Kennedy’s former co-worker, Brian Karbel, used a software tool to search the profile information of his Facebook friends and LinkedIn contacts. He flagged Mr. Kennedy as a possible match to a job listing. Mr. Kennedy, who lives in the Boston area, responded to the invitation, scheduled an interview and, within a week, was working as a support engineer there. “I landed a job I might never have even heard of otherwise,” he said.

Until recently, Facebook might have been more likely to be viewed as a barrier to getting a job. Cautionary tales circulate of job offers rescinded after an employer discovered unseemly content on an applicant’s Facebook page. Social network users have been advised to sanitize their personal pages when job hunting, lest potential employers spot an inappropriate photo or comment.

But now more personal pages, profiles and social networks are serving as fodder for companies looking to fill jobs. To mine its employees’ social networking contacts for potential hires, a business can pay for services from companies like Appirio or Jobvite, whose service Mr. Kennedy used. Both are based in the San Francisco area.

A hiring company that uses Appirio’s product asks its employees to add an application to their Facebook pages. The tool will notify the employees when new jobs open and which of their friends might be a good fit.

“Appirio’s matching engine comes up with a list of friends whose job titles, geographic location and other keywords match their company’s available positions, and the employee can send them a referral in Facebook,” said Ryan Nichols, Appirio’s vice president for product management. The matching engine has access to the same information that a Facebook friend does.

A friend who gets a referral can apply for the job if interested. If that person is hired, the company can use Appirio’s service to track which employee found the match and offer a referral bonus.

To address privacy concerns, the list of possible candidates is available only to the friend/employee and not to the hiring company or software provider. “People’s Facebook friends don’t want their personal information going to any companies they haven’t specifically authorized,” Mr. Nichols said, “so to protect their privacy, the candidate list isn’t sent back to the hiring company or reused in any way.”

Jobvite offers a similar service with a wider range. While the Appirio software can currently search Facebook contacts, the Jobvite tool can search Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter contacts. “And anyone who receives a Jobvite can search their own networks and pass it along again,” said Dan Finnigan, the chief executive of Jobvite.

“Employees have always referred friends for jobs,” he said, “Our technology just does the matching for them.”

Recipients who are hired can be tracked to the original sender for a referral bonus, even if the Jobvite has been passed from one mailbox to another up to six times.

Total Attorneys, in Chicago, started using Jobvite when the recruiting tool was introduced in March. Total Attorneys provides law firms with marketing services and with administrative tasks like preparing bankruptcy petitions.

Ed Scanlan, the chief executive of Total Attorneys, said: “Friends of our employees are more likely to have the same characteristics our employees do — hard-working, smart — so they’ve gone through a natural filter,” he said.

In a six-week period this spring, Total Attorneys hired 21 new employees. Eleven came from employee referrals, and of those, four came through Jobvite’s social networking search, he said.

GLADYS STONE, a corporate recruiter in San Francisco, says it’s smart for employers to tap into employees’ social networks. This accelerates the personal referral process and widens the field, as many social network users have hundreds of friends or contacts in their networks, she said.

And while some may be disconcerted that software from an unknown company is searching their profiles, Ms. Stone says that most know that information on the Web can be used in ways that people don’t expect, and that LinkedIn, in particular, is built to make professional information available.

Mr. Scanlan said that recruiting through his employees’ social networks was a natural progression from using Craigslist and job Web sites over the past few years. He hopes to make this grass-roots type of recruiting part of his company’s culture. “This is beyond the H.R. department,” he said. “All employees should be talent recruiters.”

And Mr. Nichols said that in an environment of high unemployment, friends want to help one another find jobs.

While Ms. Stone sees the value in the new tools, she also advises job seekers to take matters into their own hands.

“Use your social networking sites to reach out and tell everyone you know what kind of job you’re looking for,” she said. “You can’t always wait to receive an invitation.”

Blogs Attract More Search Engine Traffic

Blogs attract search engine traffic.  Blogs already have a search engine optimized site architecture. Most are set up with a clear navigation, where every page is set up to link back to the main page.  They are all well-linked right out of the box.   You don’t need to optimize your blog in most cases.

Blog Directories and Site Submission

Many of the top blog directories can be found on this Top 55 list.  But before you head over there and start submitting, you should know a little about how to optimize your blog. Then your new listings can help your blog get the best keyword placement in the the search engines.

Tip One: Blogs and SEO – Keywords

You can target a general high traffic keyword you have little chance of ranking well for and get barely any traffic. Or you can shoot for a keyword that gets a moderate level of targeted traffic resulting in more subscribers and sales. I like to call this a “lucrative keyword”. Whatever you call them, here’s the most important thing: They may not get you the most traffic, but they often bring the most profit.

More Web Site Traffic and More Sales? Not Always

You may be surprised to learn that there isn’t always a correlation between high traffic and high sales. Many of the most profitable sites in the world get moderate traffic because their lucrative keywords result in a much higher ratio of visitors to buyers.

Length of Search Query is a Factor

A recent article in Information Week stated that the highest conversion rates from search engine traffic comes from people who do four word queries. The great thing about your blog is that it can get so well-indexed that you have the potential to show up for any number of four word phrases that are relevant to your industry.

Target Your Blog for More Traffic and Sales

It isn’t just the four word phrases that get converting traffic – there are two and three word phrases that can bring you traffic and sales. Targeting your blog discussion to a two or three word phrase that has a high yield of traffic, and yet has little competition, is not a dream of past Internet days. Another recent study revealed that surprisingly high percentages of search engine queries debuted as late as 2004.As long as there are new developments, new products, services and trends, you’ll never have a shortage of these terms if you learn how to discover them.

Tip 2: Blogs and SEO – Keyword Placement

Your blog can be set up to repeat the keywords that you want to target just enough times to establish a theme. You can take full advantage of this in your post titles, your category names, the pages URL names, or even a combination of Technorati tags and the text of your permanent links that appear after each post.

Tip 3: Blogs and SEO – Timely Posting

Instead of pinging at 15 minute intervals when your site hasn’t been updated, or even pinging after every single post, you can actually get better results if you update or ping just once during one of three sweet spots in the day – typically early in the morning (or at least before noon).

Check your web site statistics. If you’re getting spidered every two weeks or even monthly, you can increase your number of spider visits by blogging on the anniversary of the period that the spider comes to your site. It takes a bit of monitoring, but you can often predict when the date of your last spider visit was. An even faster way is to ping at a time when the spider is reading a page that carries your update.

Tip 4: Blogs and SEO – Get Linked

Turn on your site feed(s) and use them to promote your blog. Robin Good’s guide can get you some great one way links.If you sparingly include the lucrative keyword you selected in tip two in your title and description, all those link backs will contain the keyword term you most want attention for, which is often noted by the spiders as they follow the link through to your site.

Once there, if you use these and other tips to skew your blog a little more to the search-engine-friendly side, the synergistic effect is better, more profitable traffic.

Tip 5: Blogs and SEO – Frequent Updates

The more you post, the more food for the spider, which can cause the spider to react by splitting up its job into several visits, whereupon you have even more content, and so on, until the spider just adds you to a more frequent schedule of returns.

For example, my main site gets spidered several times daily by Google, and yet I can go a week without an update with no change in spider visits. This means my pages get indexed more often and my new pages show up faster. Think of what that could do for the launch of your next product.

Bottom Line: Blogs and Search Engine Optimization

You’ll be happy to know that you don’t have to slave over long blog posts several times a day, all day long to get similar results from your blog. In fact, some blog software will let you set up your posts in advance, so that you can have posts show up daily even though you technically only blog once a month.

A few small changes to your blog can draw more search engine traffic without turning off your blog visitors. Done properly, this gives your audience more of what they were searching for in the first place.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul is a website promotion specialist and author of five books and ebooks for the online entrepreneur. Her last project was a contribution to Rok Hrastnik’s comprehensive guide to RSS: “Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS”. You can find more of her daily tips on RSS, Blogs, Google tools, and more, at her main blog,