I posted this earlier today on the Reverse Delta blog but thought it worth posting here… though I guess I’m preaching to the converted here if you’re reading a blog about Recruitment SEO!

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.

As this article describes very well, there is a balance to be struck. On one extreme, you could go all out with Flash for that mega cool graphical interface, then try your best to optimise, or (at the other end of the spectrum) go for a more traditional text website but throw in the odd smidgen of Flash to lift things.  The latter is a significantly better route for SEO if you can make your brand work around the concept of organic SEO.  There is a lot that can be done by small bits of dynamic, ‘moving’ content without going for a wholly flash-based solution.  If you do go down the flash route, prepare yourself for some pretty poor organic search traffic.

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.

“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.

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.

SEO is generally considered more ‘worthy’ by us SEO types. It’s doing something ‘healthy’ to the text elements of your website to help serve your users. But it’s good to remind ourselves from time to time that in some cases, paying more directly for those clicks through to your site is of equal or more value for money.

A recent study for NMA showed that 55% of companies surveyed intend to increase natural search budgets and just under half (45%) will up paid search investment this year as they look for measurable ROI in difficult economic times. The annual UK Search Engine Marketing Benchmark Report, which surveyed 800 client companies, agencies and search consultants, found large numbers were continuing to increase spend on organic search. 48% of them reported better returns on natural search (optimisation) campaigns and 43% claim greater ROI on paid search (pay-per-click).

Life of your investment

SEO is a better long-term investment.  Put simply, when the SEO person has gone away, finished what they’re doing – for a while or for good, then the work that they should have done on the site will still bring rewards int he longer term.  That’s the beauty of optimising for the organic rankings.

Is should come as no surprise tro you that if you pay for every click that comes through to your website, you can turn that on or off at the push of a button (or a few clicks on an account page).  This is good if PPC is not working for you, or if your circumstances change; if your recruitment business moves into or out of a certain sector.   But the benefits tend to stop the moment you press the ‘off’ button.

Immediate Returns

Inversely, when you need immediate returns; visitors to your site right now, then PPC is the obvious way to go.  For a brand new website there is no way (for most budgets) that anyone could get you right up there in Google for anything other than the most niche search terms.  Organic just takes time.  It’s about growth, which is one reason that it’s called organic!

The Long Tail… again

I keep going on about the long tail but I can’t over-egg this one.  If your site has lots of good textual content then you are more likely to capture ‘less frequent’ and more specific search terms.  Those terms are from searchers who generally know what they are looking for, and hence have a higher conversion rate.  Example: Someone searching for ‘Marketing Jobs’ is a candidate just browsing.  Someone typing “Marketing Account Manager Jobs in South London” into Google knows damn well what they’re looking for and is far more likely to take action when they get to your site.

There is not really a way of capturing Long Tail search through PPC alone – the two notions don’t work together.  For good Long Tail traffic you need good weighty relevant textual content.

There’s no substitute for good architecture

A short word about why SEO more is worthy in my opinion.  SEO gets you into good habits.  You become aware of a website that is easily spidered (crawled and ‘read’ by the search engines) and that it contains the (textual) content matching people’s expectations.  Whilst PPC can bring you traffic in for any keyword you want (if you’ve got the budget), it need not match those visitor expectations when they click through to it.  I could pay £20,000 per month to get traffic to this site for the phrase ‘iphone’ and expect a good click-through rate.  But the traffic would leave the site immediately once it got here.  A well SEO’d site should never really do that.  Content should match expectation.

Summary

So… just to put it into basic sound bites…

ORGANIC SEO

Pros

Long term investment

Capture “Long Tail” traffic

Forms good habits

Content matches visitor expectations

Cons

These things take time

Slow Return on Investment

Slower to adapt to change

PAY PER CLICK

Pros

Instant – so good for new sites

Adaptable

Easily cancelled / suspended

Top of the page

Need not match your content

Cons

Visitor expectations may not match content

Benefits end when the budget ends

Brings no long term benefit

Popular words can be VERY pricey.

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)

So… lesson 1… it makes sense, if possible, when you’re leaving a comment on a blog, try to get a keyword into the ‘Name’ field… as this is the anchor text of the link to your site (see above). “But wait, Dave…” I hear… “Don’t all blogs use the “nofollow” attribute, meaning that any link I leave on a blog will be useless?”

Let me clear that one up.  “No, no, no, no, no… you’ve got it all wrong”. The table below will explain why, but to summarise it in simple terms: a link to your website is followed on blogs (by most search engines) as long as the page linking to (generally this would be your homepage) had previously been indexed by that search engine. In short, nofollows ARE followed. A link to your site is a vote. Use yours well.

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

Links to the job:

Make sure the job title is the anchor text of the link (not ‘click here‘ or ‘more info‘)

Jobs pages

Just make sure there is one page per job!

In-page factors

Your Keyword Rich areas should be:

• Meta Title Tag
• Meta Description
• Job Title

… then other important keywords – especially job / sector or geographical ones should feature prominantly on the page.

Job description copywriting

1. Try to make the job title a term people would search for in Google / Yahoo etc
2. Avoid ‘non-search’ terminology like “Opportunity” or “Seeking a “, … “My Client is “ etc.  You can use these terms, but they’re wasting valuable space up in the Title and the early part of a job description
3. Familiarise yourself with the different levels of headings (or <h> tags as developers call them).  Headings and sub-headings on a page should flow properly, so if you want to break your job description down, don’t use bold headings, use h3 or h4 (Heading 3 or Heading 4) tags – like ‘Job Description copywriting’ is, above.
4. Avoid, at all costs, pasting anything into a web site’s text editor using Microsoft Word or another similar program.  These are designed for print and can put all sorts of unnecessary code into your text that could – in some cases – mean that Google can’t properly index the content.
5. Repeat those search keywords  coming wherever possible and relevant (think of candidates searching and what they might type into Google – then keep thinking it – what candidates call their job may differ to what recruiters call it)
6. Use lists if needs be to increase keyword density.
7. Think about synonyms — e.g. “team leader” as well as “project manager” or “sales manager” as well as “business development manager”

For developers:

• Make the Title Tags work dynamically in the following format
  • Meta Title: Job: [Job Title] – [Location] – [Category-or-sector]
    
  • Make the Meta Description dynamically take the Job Title then first characters of the Job Description up to a max of 160 characters
• Place the Job Title in <h1> tags
• Place the Location and Category in <h2> tags
• Ensure that the job editor allows site admins to add <h3> headings within a job description and train them to use them.

• 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.

How about these overarching example  goals:

• Gaining better, friendlier clients
• Gaining repeat candidate visits
• Getting more revenue / visitor
• Getting more applications / click
• etc etc…

There are numerous benefits of optimizing the conversion rate of your website, and it only adds to what you are already achieving through your website. For instance: Out of every 100 visits only 5 goal conversions occur. This effectively means that the website conversion rate is 5%. On the other hand it also means that 95 visitors do not perform the desired action.  Making minor changes to your website could very well increase the website’s conversion rate to 10%. Your site’s efficiency just doubled and at the same time your cost per acquisition is reduced by half.

Mentioned below are few of the benefits of conversion rate optimization:

• Increasing conversion rate will give your recruitment business more candidate applications / registrations (the most obvious one!).
• You can earn more profits than your competitors even if they get more visitors than your website. This is because you would be converting more visitors into business £s than they do.
• The increase in profit, as a direct result of conversion rate optimization, will help you make your online recruitment business more robust. The profit can be used to expand your online offerings and consolidate your online presence.
• The process of conversion rate optimization will help you to address the shortcoming(s) of your website. This will make the website more users friendly and thus enhance the overall website experience.

In short… your marketing might work brilliantly… does your site work as well?