In part 3 of my recruitment SEO guide I talked about a great way to handle your vacancy pages from the point of view of good SEO, traffic generation and conversion.
This post develops the concept, by adding a discussion on how best to handle dynamic meta code templates for each one of your jobs. Could you imagine writing 10,000+ meta titles? I think not! The secret is in a little developer time and some research into your specific industry (perhaps via your deepest, longest tail data in your analytics account?!). I’ve written a similar post before, thing is, it missed a vital concept: candidate search behaviour can vary depending on what industry sector jobs they’re searching for!
My last post looked at optimising a key area of your recruitment website content – your vacancies.
Vacancy optimisation is designed to capture traffic for long tail search like “landscape gardener job in Rickmansworth”, and that long tail can mean a 30% uplift on your site traffic. But there’s another search behaviour in recruitment. Brand search.
It sounds obvious when you say it out loud. Job seekers are looking to work at specific companies. Would you like to work at Google? Maybe Mencap? Perhaps Microsoft? There are already recruitment agencies cashing in on this search. Let’s try some searches:
In the last post I discussed some of the basic elements of a search engine optimised homepage on a recruitment website. For part three of my recruitment seo guide, we’re going to talk about vacancy pages.
Vacancy pages. How many jobs has your recruitment agency had in its database since the company started, each vacancy lovingly typed into a database by one of your recruitment consultants, hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?
How do search engines find all of these jobs? have you built your website with the ability for search engines to crawl, index and rank your jobs pages?
In my last post I discussed planning the structure of your site and assigning keywords to each main content area of the site. Thinking in “keyword buckets” should have helped you out there too. This is part two of my recruitment seo guide.
This post discusses a basic guide to creating an optimised homepage on a recruitment website. I’ll give some specific examples along the way too.
Step 1 – What business are you?
Over the next few weeks I’m going to be creating a guide to recruitment SEO: the series is aimed at beginner to intermediate SEO’s or in house marketers working to design a search engine friendly website able to attract new candidates or potential clients.
Getting a clearly organised and well optimised sitemap structure on your recruitment website plays a vital role in user experience and search engine optimisation. This is a step by step basic guide to creating your website structure with that in mind. If you’re thinking about creating a new site, read this post.
Check out this week’s whiteboard friday on SEOmoz. A series of very interesting “black hat” disclosures, particulary the cookie handling issue for affiliate marketers and a “point your DNS at someone’s web server to steal their links” tip. Genius, if that’s the kind of thing that floats your boat.
Anyways, in response to the “point your DNS at someones website and steal their links” idea, I suggest that SEO consultants need to talk to their webserver admins a lot more. Think “SEO hosting” and you’re almost there. The original issue was highlighted as merely a security flaw that needed more attention, but I’m not suprised it’s been translated into a black hat link building technique. It’s exactly this kind of issue that gets overlooked because the people who manage the web server administration likely don’t think like SEO’s.
Check out Matt Cutt’s last roundup on SMX advanced last week, giving a really nice run down of his perspective on the conference.
He also mentions how black hat has reared its ugly head once more. Not the first blogger to mention that!
Finally check out this hilarious post back from Colin!
Optimising a website CMS is reasonably easy as long as you can edit meta code, manage url rewrites, deal with canonicalisation issues and create reasonably clean, semantic HTML. A few years ago that meant developer time and a lot of work. I managed it in an hour.
Nearly everything you need to optimise your Wordpress blog is a standard option in version 2.5 or higher, or available as a plugin. I built this WP blog in no time (the site, not the content!!) – here’s how:
A really useful technical search engine optimisation reference book. I bought it for my development team back at 4MAT – ended up pinching it when I left it was so good!
For ASP.NET developers or project managers / SEO’s with technical experience this SEO reference book provides a solid guide to established SEO development techniques..Particulary, the guide to url rewriting (with particular attention to ISAPI rewrite) was extremely helpful. Many little gems (such as the easy way to handle lower case redirects) came out of this book.
Oh dear. I did a search for seogadget in Google.co.uk, and these results appeared!
Whoever owns the .com version of my domain might have been doing something slightly shady? Seogadget.com is also featured on this Wikipedia entry!
I hope I don’t get penalised just for owning the .co.uk domian! 
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