Re-starting My Career in a New City

It's not really starting all over again: the work I did over the last decade or more in New York should give me as much credibility as would work I'd have done in Toronto (in theory, anyway). But no one knows I'm here. So if anyone's going to hire me, I first have to get the attention of the city's creative directors. And that isn't so easy.

But, I’ve worked up this shameless scheme to sell myself (that is, after all, what I'm supposed to do for living, anyway). Here's the plan:

Creative directors seem to spend a good deal of time thinking about themselves and their place in their industry. That means searching for their own names on Google the way most of us search for articles about celebrity gaffs. So how difficult would it be to arrange for a page I've designed to come up in the first few results when they look for their names on the Web?

Well, more difficult than I'd originally thought. There are two keys to the process. The first is to make sure that the pages I create are very focused on the term for which they'll be searching: their proper names. Search engines use complex algorithms to determine the important content on a Web page and to rank it with regard to any other pages out there offering similar content. Pages with a small amount of content in which a specific search term appears more than once should appear very focused on that term: the specific term comprises a high percentage of the total content on the page.

The second is to make it seem that the page is important to other content creators on the Web. Search engines look at the number of pages on other sites that link back to a page; they use that as a measure of the first page's popularity and importance. By creating pages elsewhere on the Web with links back to my employer-focused pages, I should be able to raise their apparent popularity.

Of course, it's much more complex than that, in part because those algorithms that run the search engines are designed to foil attempts to cheat the system. Otherwise, the search results they offer wouldn't make users happy and those users would defect to some other engine. For example, all those nasty sites from which we all receive spam on a regular basis would be offering insidious links to their content -- illicit pharmaceuticals and cheesy porn -- when people were actually searching for "casserole recipes" or "car polish tips."

So the following links take anyone who follows them back to my creative-director-specific messages. They're just a drop in the bucket of page links out there in the ether, but I'm hoping that there aren't too many pages devoted specifically to the people I'm trying to reach:

Jack Neary at TBWA\Canada

Helen Pak at Saatchi, Toronto

Duncan Bruce at Publicis, Canada

Brian Sheppard at Saatchi, Toronto

Carlos Garavito at Elvis

David Chiavegato at Grip, Limited

David Crichton at Grip, Limited

Scott Dube at Grip, Limited

Jon Finkelstein at Grip, Limited

Bob Goulart at Grip, Limited

Dave Hamilton at Grip, Limited

Rich Pryce-Jones at Grip, Limited

Randy Stein at Grip, Limited

And just to increase the number of links to these pages -- and thereby increase their importance in the eyes of a search engine's algorithm -- I'll point to other pages which link to them:

the other Mr. Knappy-Head

from the desk of Mr. Knappy-Head