One of the many people who responded to my query about resumes and cover letters was Jeff Benrey, CEO of Trovix. While Benrey's advice is tailored more toward job seekers who like to use the Internet for most - if not all - of their job searching, certain aspects of it are useful to all.

Here's Benrey's advice:

Optimizing Your Resume for Online Job Search

1. Don't focus on keywords. Instead, draw recruiters to your experience. If you feel like you need *meta tags, put them at the bottom of the page.


2. Make sure your job titles are current. You may not find many listings for a secretary; however an executive assistant may pull up more results.


3. Create multiple resumes. If you have several resumes, each focusing on different strengths, a search will find more jobs for you to choose from.


4. Avoid special tables, fonts and graphics. Simple formats will help yield greater results.


5. Add keywords in the context of your skills and experience. Being a recent graduate, you may not have ten years of experience, but you may have been in charge of marketing for the environmental club. Be sure to reflect this on your resume to demonstrate the skills you gained from the opportunity.


6. Keep the format of your resume consistent. If you list your most recent job by Company, Title, Date, then be sure to list your previous employment experiences in the same order as well. A clean and orderly resume is very important so that search engines can easily interpret your information.


7. Label sections properly. The fancier you get, the more inconsistent you become.


8. Include your contact information in plain view. It is very easy for this information to become buried in the header or footer.

*Okay, I admit I'm far from Internet-savvy and had absolutely no clue what meta tags are. I found out, though. Courtesy of Jeff Benrey, meta tags are HTML codes that can be added to online posted resumes and may help with search results placement with some search engines. These meta tags are an "invisible" collection of keywords that you can add to your resume's HTML file at either the header or footer of the page. Caution: When including key word meta tags, be sure that you have the skills and experience to back it up. The problem with meta tags arises when the keywords that you use lead one to believe that you have more experience than you actually do. This dishonesty will certainly be revealed in the interviewing process.