Recruitment Websites “by design”

Flash and SEO – understanding the balance and implications.

We understand the importance of the Brand – all companies need to keep careful control of how they come across to their audience – and the importance of presenting a good image to your audience – whether clients or candidates – on your website is very high. You only get one chance in many ways.

Visually, your site needs to do the job well, and we must accept that one of the big tools in ‘grabbing’ people is animated, (usually Flash) graphics in some way. There’s no avoiding it… things that ‘move’ tend to work. (Within reason – we’ve all been to sites that are way, way too annoying before!).

The problem is, of course, that Flash is effectively a graphical interface – the words or messages in Flash are not indexed by Google or any search engines. They’re ‘empty’ words as far as SEO goes. So does that mean you should be avoiding Flash for your new recruitment website? Well… not really, but you do need to get the balance right. (more…)

Does your web developer ‘do’ or ‘get’ SEO ?

A good web developer for your recruitment website is a huge asset to any recruitment web design project – or indeed an in-house developer can be to a recruitment company if it’s large enough. But many developers do not seem to ‘get’ SEO – probably because they don’t see the need to.

I’d liken this to a brickie not ‘getting’ what an architect does – or even trying to understand the process of architecture. A brickie could pretty easily build a house without an architect – so why would they need one?

This fascinating story on SEOMoz shows a web developer’s foray into the world of SEO – it’s a great read.

How should recruiters deal with truly Free Job Boards?

With a massive pressure to reduce costs, it was a sort of inevitability that some big firms were going to club together and produce a truly free (well almost) super-job board. ‘United We Work’ was set up earlier this month in the US by the Fortune 500 companies.

“We believe that if we can break those [cost barriers] down, it may stimulate an employer to hire now instead of waiting six months,” said Jason Kerr, founder of QuietAgent, the technology developer behind the website.

The site, (at UnitedWeWork.org), won’t compete directly with online job board giants CareerBuilder and Monster – job seekers don’t search and apply for specific positions; rather they complete a standard résumé. It’s an interesting experiment in the US where unemployment is currently 10%.

With so many big firms putting their weight behind the new board, it’ll be interesting to see the level to which (if at all) traditional job boards are hit in the US.

Recruitment tips from Borat

Not the real Borat, but it just shows how a bit of sneaky viral marketing can suck the likes of me in… (more…)

Tweet your jobs… the easy way

I’ve seen so many articles recently about complex mothods of getting your jobs ‘fed’ onto Twitter.

It’s so simple and there are a few sites / providers out there with vested interests giving people all manner of complex advice about how to automatically display your jobs on Twitter.

It’s so simple to do and I feel the overpowering urge to tell you how before someone else tells you a more complex way.

1. Get the URL of your jobs RSS feed no RSS feed? Get a new recruitment website!
2. Create the Twitter account that you want to use (five minutes’ job!) to display the jobs
3. Login to that Twitter account
4. Go to pingvine.com or twitterfeed.com and submit the RSS feed (i.e., paste it in), and authenticate it.
5. Bingo… one more channel to get your jobs to the world – using the world’s fastest-growing search engine – Twitter.

Oh… and don’t forget the bit that people so often miss out on… PRMOTE YOUR CHANNELS – make sure people know they can digest your content in whatever way suits them.

Free versus Paid

Just stepping outside of the SEO loop and into the wider world of Search Engine Marketing (SEM), I thought it was time to post something about the use of Adwords in helping to market your recruitment website. (more…)

This is a democracy – use your vote

Just wanted to clear something up for a client who didn’t fully understand the use of ‘nofollow’ links when adding comments on blogs etc.

As we all know (surely!) a link to your site is generally a very good thing.  A link with good anchor text is generally even better.  This is because Google et al will understand what is at the end of that link to be summarized by the context of the anchor text.  (“Click here for Marketing Jobs” is good “Click here for Marketing Jobs” is not) (more…)

SEO Template for Job Descriptions and Job Details pages

A client’s just asked me for a template to use to write their job descriptions in order to maximise the benefits of SEO.

Not a ‘template’ as such, but some ‘new-starter’ guidelines for SEO copywriting and page architecture for recruitment websites (more…)

Optimising Conversion rates

The importance of conversion rate optimisation is derived from the benefits that it has to offer.  It’s normal – (if simplistic) – to assume that your SEO goals for a recruitment website are to gain

• more clients
• more candidates

‘Normal’ – because the old-fashioned and still important addage of getting traffic to your site can only be a good thing – and simplistic because getting people to the site in itself doesn’t do you any good at all.  No-brainer time: It’s what they do when they get there that counts. (more…)