Category: SEO

Categories
Google Internet Job Site Jobs Monster Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP Twitter

Google Penguin 2 and the Jobs in Ireland

Did you hear Google released a major update to Penguin 2 on Friday? Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s Webspam team) recently confirmed on his blog that Penguin 2.0 is now live.

So let’s see how did the Google Penguin 2 update affect our Irish online recruitment industry. Here is the search result page for the word “Jobs” made in Google.ie.

Make sure if you do this search yourself that you are not logged in into Google yourself, have removed the Google cookie, etc – so that you do not see the Google’s “Personalised” search result for you.

Here is the new google.ie ranking for the search word “jobs”:

  1. Jobs.ie
  2. IrishJobs.ie
  3. FindAJob.ie
  4. Indeed.ie
  5. RecruitIreland.com
  6. Monster.ie
  7. Fas.ie
  8. Ie.JobRapido.com
  9. JobsToday.ie
  10. Twitter.com/jobs

So what can we conclude from the list of the sites that a are on the first page for the phrase jobs? By comparing what we have used to see there before the Google Penguin 2 update we can see what sites have been affected. Let’s start with the sites not affected by the update:

The SAON Group web sites leading with the purchased Jobs.ie site on top and their original IrishJobs.ie is steadily on top.

Nothing changed there for years. In fact may years. The last change there actually when Jobs.ie overtook IrishJobs.ie. If my memory serves me correctly that was towards the end of 2005. Very shortly after that IrishJobs.ie bought Jobs.ie.

So since 2005 the first two search results for the search for “jobs” have not changed in Ireland. So is Google doing much really with all these Panda, Penguin & Penguin 2 “updates”? Well in the last 7 years the results on top are not changing at all. Or does IrishJobs.ie & Jobs.ie have so good SEO specialists to keep them on top for all these years? It must be one of those.

The next three slots are Findajob.ie (aka LoadzaJobs.ie), Indeed.ie and Monster.ie. So what’s new here? Nothing much really in relation to the Google Penguin 2 update. Long term there isn’t much that has changed in here in the last 10 years really. What has changed is that Loadza has changed its domain name several times. They cannot seem to get it right really. EmployIreland.com that was 4th there is replaced by Indeed.ie about a year or more ago when they came to our market. Monster is the 5th recruitment web site there for the last 10 years.
So in essence the top 5 results for the word “jobs” haven’t changed at all in the last Google Penguin 2 update.

Where the changes that did occur are on the bottom part of the search page. That is the space that in the last 10 years have been occupied mostly by the Irish start-up job boards or similar sites. FAS was always there somewhere. They did rebrand to SOLAS, but forgot to do it online. Hence FAS.ie is still there. Good old civil servants…

So what the Google Penguin 2 update did affect is the last 4 remaining slots the search results page fro the word “jobs”. You can say Google hasn’t changed much really. What we are going to look at is if the Google Penguin 2 update was good actually. Or is it a step back in the quality of the search results?

The bottom of the page of the search results for jobs has been occupied by start-up job boards. It always was a dynamic space. In the last 10 year, about 100 web sites appeared and disappeared from there. I can remember the first Irish Jobs Aggregator IrishJobs.ie featuring there, and a long list of the site showing Irish jobs listings. There was one recruitment agency that made up there – in 2010 when the CPL.ie new web site was released. In this new update, CPL.ie dropped to 128 places, while their other site CPLJobs.com landed on a much better 53rd slot. Is there a hint that CPL.ie got hit by the Google Penguin 2 update? Most likely from the way it is ranking now.

It is still quite strange that no other recruitment agency got listed on the first page for the word “jobs” there ever, isn’t it?

So what did Google Penguin 2 update replaced the Irish start-ups with?

Ie.Jobrapido.com – one job aggregator. Well, it is the only .com web site here. It actually does have jobs aggregated from sites like freelancer.com and similar. Some Irish recruitment agencies as well. The overall quality of the jobs advertised (content) if poor. A large number of jobs are taken down from the sites they are originally published on anyway, and the whole set of jobs is a really poor representation of the list of active jobs in Ireland. In essence a really poor experience for a job seeker.

JobsToday.ie – a UK newspaper publisher. Note that any link you click on that site it brings you to their UK web site (.co.uk). This results-driven by the backlinks from their newspaper releases is so wrong that it actually reminds of the Yahoo style paid search result placements from the end of the last century. It is pointless and out of place. It is no good to a Google visitor. There are simply a handful of jobs listed there on some UK newspaper web site.

Twitter.com/jobs – The page with the HTML Title: Jobs at “Twitter –San Francisco”. San Francisco??? A search result to someone looking for a job in Ireland in Google.ie? Google? Don’t you have a Google Maps division? Or do you want us all to emigrate? What’s the story there? What kind of a (crap) search result is that? Or did the Google Penguin 2 algorithm value a social media sites results “a bit” too much so the results from the social media are going to creep into any search we make?

So to conclude what have the Google Penguin 2 update brought us? It removed Irish start-ups and replaced them with what can be the best described irrelevant search results. In their own vocabulary, they call it SPAM. Luckily for us, this only affects the bottom part of the page. The “under the fold” stuff. The top part of the page wasn’t affected by the latest update.

How did your site ranking feature in the Google Penguin 2 update last week? If you are stuck give the SEO Consultant a shout!

Categories
Career CV Database Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment Recruitment Agency SEO Social Networks Social Recruitment

Recruitment Advertising Workshop

Great Recruitment Advertising Workshop event organised by Stephen Harrington Recruitment Manager: Sales | Marketing | Multi-Lingual @ Allen Recruitment. Here is the original announcement:

When and Where:
Aviva Stadium, Lansdowne Road, Dublin 4 – Vavasour Suite, registration at main reception.
Wednesday 24th April, from 8.45 to 11.30am
Enter via entrance A on Lansdowne Road
Car park is situated on Lansdowne Road

Who is attending?
Confirmed attendees include Jonathan Campbell (Social Talent), James Mailley (Monster), Jennifer Bray Kennedy (TMP), Ivan Stojanovic (Jobsboard.ie), Lynne Rooney (LinkedIn) and many more from many or Irelands best known companies.

The Format
We will run two sessions, in each one there will be four discussions happening at the same time. There will be no presentations, each discussion will be started by the discussion leader but after that, the conversation will go where ever the participants want it to. You can join in at any time by providing details of your own experiences or asking questions. If you find that one discussion is not so relevant to you, you can simply get up and join another one mid-way through!

The agenda:

8.45-9.10 Registration, Tea/Coffee and Pastries

9.10-9.20 Welcome by Brian Cunningham, MD Allen Recruitment

Session 1

Job Boards
When to use job boards, which ones should you use, quality applicant’s v quantity, filtering applicants?
Career Websites
Effectively advertising on your own careers site, employer branding, SEO, getting candidates on to your site
Alternatives to advertising
Searching for candidates directly (Boolean, xray etc), referrals, networking, job board databases
Start your own discussion
This is a break out area where anyone is free to start another topic that is relevant to them!

Tea/Coffee

Session 2


Job Boards
Getting the most from these, how people find jobs on job boards, getting your jobs to the top of the lists
Advertising Master class
How to measure success, getting your adverts noticed, the psychology behind advertising, what we can take from advertising in other industries and apply to recruitment.
Referral’s and Networking
Referrals, Networking, social networks & Talent Pooling
Start your own discussion
This is a break out area where anyone is free to start another topic that is relevant to them!

Well done again and thanks for the Allen Recruitment “cube”!

Categories
Internet Job Site LinkedIN Recruitment SEO Social Networks Social Recruitment

New LinkedIn Profile is good (for Recruiters)!

The LinkedIn haven’t really updated the Profile section for far too long time. It becomes a bit archaic in fact, so a new profile is really welcome. It is far easier to read and more importantly scan, as we consume the web sites. It also tells you far more about the person than the any older LinkedIn Profile version did.

One feature that really helps the recruiter to assess the potential candidate from his LinkedIn profile is the ability to quickly assess the candidate’s connections. You have a choice to display the connections by:

  • Company
  • School
  • Location
  • Industry

By looking at the graphical representation of your LinkedIn connections grouped by and industry the recruiter can quickly get what type of people the candidate is connected to on the social network.

It tells a lot about the person when you can see what schools are the people his connections are from. What companies do the candidate’s contacts work for is priceless. Location and industry profiles of the candidates LinkedIn contacts just add to the complete picture of a candidate.

All this data combined gives you very quickly a profile of the candidate’s connections. This data can help a recruiter profile a candidate much better than by just looking at a very static data, a document like a CV or the (old) LinkedIn profile.

Where LinkedIn could improve the display is in including what the number represents as opposed to displaying just the number of the connections in each group. It is annoying to have to put a mouse over each circle to find out what company or country the contacts are from. A tag cloud would be far more usefully display. A company name printed and on mouse over the exact number of the connections in that company? Would you agree?

Categories
LinkedIN Search Engine SEO Social Networks Twitter

Top Referrers to www.JobsBlog.ie

Top Referrers to www.JobsBlog.ie:

  1. linkedin.com – 276 Visits
  2. t.co – 82 Visits
  3. google.com – 22 Visits
  4. google.ie – 18 Visits
  5. facebook.com – 15 Visits
Categories
Blogs Internet Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP Social Networks Social Recruitment Twitter

Recruitment SEO: How many web sites link to yours?

In the Links are the currency on the web we looked at the total number of links no the web that the Link Count tool from SEOmoz would show for our 20 recruitment agency web sites. But not all the links are equal. The more I think about it, it would be fair to say that no two links are the same. One (smart) way thinking about the links is to count just the web sites that link to your web site. So if there are 2 or 2 million links from some domain to your web site it would still count as one.

If we look at our 29 recruitment agency web sites list and www.JobsBlog.ie between them where is what we get:

URL

Sites Linking
http://www.cpl.ie

568
http://www.hays.ie

294
http://www.morganmckinley.ie

265
http://www.brightwater.ie

127
http://www.jobsblog.ie

126
http://www.hrm.ie

125
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie

100
http://www.eolas.ie

100
http://www.careerwise.ie

86
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie

77
http://www.peoplegroup.ie

70
http://www.frsrecruitment.com

68
http://www.Vantage.ie

65
http://www.icds.ie

55
http://www.Sigmar.ie

51
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie

46
http://www.rftgroup.ie

44
http://www.Stelfox.ie

34
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie

32
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie

26
http://www.Recruiters.ie

19
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie

14
http://www.harmonics.ie

14
http://www.hudson.ie

13
http://www.gempool.ie

9
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie

7
http://www.Brompton.ie

5
http://www.placeme.ie

5
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie

5
http://www.solasconsulting.ie

4

The results show that only 5 Irish Recruitment agencies have more web sites linking to them than this blog. If you want your jobs to be seen by as many possible job seekers and as many possible clients (employers) it would be natural to want to bring visitors from as many sites to your site. Therefore having as many web sites linking to your site would help you get more candidates and clients. As simple as that. The above table show how good are you at that particular task. If your site is not on the list, you can get this figure for your site and compare yourself with the competition.

Even more important than this direct traffic of visitors that you get from other sites is the fact that from the perspective of the search engines like Google, your site the more “important” the more web sites link to your site. So the more links you have to your site – the more likely is that Google will display any content on your site above the similar content on any other web site. This is extremely important for the ranking of your jobs. When a similar job is advertised on many job boards and recruitment agency web sites, the site that will get listed on top is very often the one that has the most links from other web sites.

How to get more links to your web site?

Submitting your site to an online directory? – that is the most common answer I get when I do the Recruitment SEO Training. Unfortunately, the answer is always – no. Why not? The practise was abused and Google decides to in most cases ignore it, and in some cases even penalize it.

Just do not buy links. Please. – That is what Google would say, and in my experience, this is the best advice possible in most cases.

Spamming social media with your links. – Will make sure you get ignored, not followed by anyone but bots. Again the time and money the drain.

SO WHAT THEN?

Think about what links do you click at on the web.

You might click on a link in the article you are reading on some site. If you are reading a review on some blog, about the new tool the LinkedIn has launched, and there is a link to that tool within the article – you might click it. Ask yourself how did that article ended up on a publication you are reading? Can you submit your content there? With a link to something new and cool on your web site? If you are thinking of PR submissions at this stage, I can tell you, you are on the wrong track. Think of guest blog posts. Think of the places where different people publish content. You are probably getting where I am going with this… yes the combined name of all such sites is Social Media.

Categories
Blogs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP

Recruitment SEO: Googoe Index Saturaton

Imagine the following scenario:

First in Google for your keyword!
Your web site has one page, and the site is with that page linked first for your main keyword. One would say this is the search engine optimisation done very well. The site is first for its keyword. What else can one ask for?

First in Google for all your keywords!
When will realise there are multiple keywords your site need to be first for in Google searches. One page will not make it easier. You will create one page for each keyword. It usually starts with the page for ‘Clients’ and ‘Job Seekers’. You will optimise each of those pages to get on top of Google searches for your search keyword of the search phrase. Most recruitment agencies would naturally want to be ranked on top for the phrase “Recruitment Agency” – to attract Clients. Then there are similar keywords targeted to Job Seekers like “Jobs in IT”, or whatever your agency specialises in. If you get first for those search keywords – have you done your SEO good? Of course, you are first in Google for all your main keywords.

Highly ranked in Google for every single one of your jobs, pages and blog posts (and having tons of them!)
In this scenario, you are not really first for search phrases like the usual hot one “Recruitment Agency”. Instead, all your jobs are on top or close to the top for ANY relevant keyword to that job. You cannot really define what keywords you are highly ranked for since it depends on what jobs you have advertised on your site at that time.

If you don’t have jobs in a particular industry, or for some reason, they don’t rank as well as your competition, you write blogs about those industries. In essence, what you are doing is you are creating more content and publishing it on more pages on your web site. Those new pages then start ranking for the keywords you are writing about. What you are doing is you are saturation Google index and the Google search results pages with your entries. This enables you to capture traffic for any search phrase you are interested in. Your web site becomes an inbound marketing platform that is quite simple to use. Need some Java developers? Just write about the Java development on your site. Get that content in Google index, and anyone searching for Java Development will see your site listed in the Google search results. If you write interesting articles and they are nicely presented in the search results – anyone looking for a Java development will come to your site!

This is what I call Google Saturation. It is a process of submitting the content on your web site to Google, for various search phrases you are interested in. Notice the difference between the top two scenarios. We don’t have the ”Main Keyword(s)” we want to rank for on top of the search engines.

The table below shows the Google Saturation of 29 recruitment agency web sites and www.JobsBlog.ie as a marker. The number next to each web site shows the total number of pages Google has from each web site.

Note that this table is the first on in this Recruitment SEO series that show really drastic differences between the 29 randomly chosen recruitment agency web sites.

URL Google Index
http://www.cpl.ie  496000
http://www.morganmckinley.ie  291000
http://www.hays.ie  184000
http://www.eolas.ie  10700
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie  7580
http://www.icds.ie  6980
http://www.brightwater.ie  5680
http://www.peoplegroup.ie  5490
http://www.rftgroup.ie  4810
http://www.Vantage.ie  4660
http://www.jobsblog.ie  4430
http://www.frsrecruitment.com  2390
http://www.hrm.ie  783
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie  610
http://www.careerwise.ie  602
http://www.Stelfox.ie  601
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie  533
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie  528
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie  471
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie  446
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie  302
http://www.gempool.ie  190
http://www.Recruiters.ie  189
http://www.placeme.ie  145
http://www.hudson.ie  138
http://www.harmonics.ie  100
http://www.Brompton.ie  62
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie  37
http://www.solasconsulting.ie  5
http://www.Sigmar.ie  n/f

By looking at your web site visitors logs in a program like Google Analytics you will notice that even linked first for your most important keyword it still delivers traffic that is a very small percentage of your total visitor’s traffic from Google for all the other keywords combined. If you have a high Google Saturation – meaning hundreds of thousands of pages featured in the Google search results, the traffic for your main 10 most important keywords brings less than 1% of your total traffic! And as such, the ranking for one individual keyword becomes irrelevant to the overall traffic of the whole site. If you want to make a success in capturing the largest possible amount of free traffic, this is definitely the route to go. Think big! THINK BIG!

Google Saturation is one of the key factors of SEO. It is also the most often ignored one.

Categories
Internet Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment SEO: Links are the currency on the web!

Search engine optimisation is in essence a huge amount of statistical analysis and a lot of trials and errors. There is not book about it, since by the time it gets printed it is completely outdated. There are two SEO Rules:

Content is King
Links are the currency on the web

Nothing else matters as much to your web site ranking as the content you have on your site and the links from other web sites to your site. If you get those two things right – you will get the free traffic from the search engines. Relevant traffic – people searching for what your web site text copy is about.

We looked at the Google PR, MozRank and Alexa rank of the 29 recruitment agencies. Today we will look at the links towards those 29 web sites. The numbers next to each recruitment agency web site show the total number of links found on the web pointing to each domain. The more links to it – the more search engines ‘Like’ the domain, and hence show it’s web pages higher in the search engine results.

This site JobsBlog.ie is within them again as a tracker for performance.

URL

SEOmoz Link Count
www.hays.ie 117643
www.cpl.ie 59629
www.morganmckinley.ie 34688
www.eolas.ie 8333
www.brightwater.ie 6766
www.jobsblog.ie 6552
www.peoplegroup.ie 4235
www.hudson.ie 3357
www.careerwise.ie 2689
www.3qrecruitment.ie 1707
www.Sigmar.ie 1630
www.hrm.ie 1453
www.EdenRecruitment.ie 766
www.rftgroup.ie 580
www.collinsmcnicholas.ie 578
www.icds.ie 539
www.frsrecruitment.com 491
www.qedrecruitment.ie 358
www.accountancysolutions.ie 318
www.Recruiters.ie 305
www.gempool.ie 189
www.Stelfox.ie 187
www.recruitmentplus.ie 177
www.Vantage.ie 149
www.harmonics.ie 141
www.solasconsulting.ie 110
www.MatrixRecruitment.ie 92
www.placeme.ie 25
www.enterprisepeople.ie 23
www.Brompton.ie 12

Any surprises above?

Categories
Internet Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment SEO: Alexa traffic ranking

After ranking the Irish recruitment agency web sites based on the Google PageRank and less known SEOmoz rank here is the one most marketers are familiar with: Alexa. What Alexa does exactly and how does it do it was a topic of a debate from the day Alexa have started publishing the traffic ranking scores. Some people like it, and some don’t. As with most of the ranking algorithms, it is usually the people featured on top that agree with Alexa’s results, and the ones ranked towards the bottom would have a different opinion. But that is the nature of every semi obscure ranking system. And in the world of SEO, nothing is really that straight forward!

What does Alexa web site ranking number mean?

What does Alexa say about their ranking number? They say that the Alexa number associated with each web site is its ranking in the overall global web traffic. So a site with the Alexa’s No. 1 is the web site with the most visitors, and as the ranking number grows the lower you are on the list of the sites based on the number of visitors. So the smaller the Alexa ranking score, the more traffic your web site has (according to Alexa).

So here is the same list of the 29 Irish recruitment agencies and the www.JobsBlog.ie within them so you can use it as a benchmark. There are some results that are just “screaming out” in this Alexa web site traffic ranking list. I’ll let you be the judge of it yourself:

URL

Alexa Rank
http://www.cpl.ie

291100
http://www.morganmckinley.ie

336866
http://www.hays.ie

803824
http://www.brightwater.ie

874987
http://www.peoplegroup.ie

1274311
http://www.Vantage.ie

1441180
http://www.eolas.ie

1769945
http://www.jobsblog.ie

1817137
http://www.icds.ie

1854172
http://www.frsrecruitment.com

1997184
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie

2428334
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie

2595232
http://www.hrm.ie

2811817
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie

3457055
http://www.careerwise.ie

4564311
http://www.Stelfox.ie

4828821
http://www.Recruiters.ie

4831059
http://www.rftgroup.ie

5312061
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie

6804532
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie

8119435
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie

8669731
http://www.gempool.ie

8720144
http://www.solasconsulting.ie

9507536
http://www.hudson.ie

12469855
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie

12578768
http://www.placeme.ie

17197072
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie

18446204
http://www.harmonics.ie

18661080
http://www.Sigmar.ie n/f
http://www.Brompton.ie n/f

Why are there two web sites that have no data in Alexa? I have absolutely no clue.

Now, if you compare the Alexa ranking above and the two lists we have looked at before: The Google PageRank and SEOmoz MozRank, there are some obvious similarities. It is especially obvious towards the tops of the lists. The same recruitment agency web sites feature the top spots, and there are no “Big Surprises” there. If your site is high in one listing, it is high in the other two as well.

Categories
Internet Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency SEO

Recruitment SEO: 29 Irish recruitment web sites SEO Ranking by mozRank

102 people have visited the Recruitment SEO: Google PR yesterday, where I listed the 29 recruitment agency web sites based on their Google PageRank. It even stirred some comments and discussions in social media. Mostly on LinkedIn as it is expected since the recruitment social network LinkedIn is a “natural habitat” for an average recruiter.

Google PR has its quirkiness. It is fantastic and horrible at the same time. It needs to be looked at relative to each web site as opposed to the absolute ranking number. That makes it almost useless to the people outside of the search engine optimisation industry. This is why so many people dismiss Google PageRank. It is not the easiest to “get” actually.

Today we will look at the same group of the 29 recruitment agency web sites and this blog www.JobsBlog.ie and compare them a different by third party ranking mechanism. We will look at the ranking by the SEOmoz: MozRank. Here is what the SEOmoz site says about the MozRank:

What is MozRank?

MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.

How is MozRank Scored?

We calculate this score on a logarithmic scale between 1 and 10. Thus, it’s much easier to improve from a MozRank of 3 to 4 than it is to improve from 8 to 9. An “average” MozRank of what most people think of a normal page on the Internet is around 3.

How can MozRank be improved?

A web page’s mozRank can be improved by getting lots of links from semi-popular pages or a few links from very popular pages.

Note that MozRank is all about links. The number of links to your web site and their link quality. It is very safe to assume that a higher MozRank results in the larger amount of the referral traffic – from the web sites linking to your site.

Recruitment   Agency mozRank
http://www.morganmckinley.ie 6.22
http://www.cpl.ie 6.17
http://www.hays.ie 6.11
http://www.Vantage.ie 5.84
http://www.eolas.ie 5.62
http://www.brightwater.ie 5.49
http://www.hudson.ie 5.42
http://www.gempool.ie 5.04
http://www.jobsblog.ie 5.01
http://www.peoplegroup.ie 4.95
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie 4.93
http://www.hrm.ie 4.92
http://www.frsrecruitment.com 4.84
http://www.placeme.ie 4.74
http://www.harmonics.ie 4.56
http://www.Sigmar.ie 4.34
http://www.rftgroup.ie 4.33
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie 4.29
http://www.careerwise.ie 4.15
http://www.icds.ie 4.09
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie 4.08
http://www.Brompton.ie 3.9
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie 3.75
http://www.Recruiters.ie 3.69
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie 3.68
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie 3.63
http://www.Stelfox.ie 3.55
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie 3.43
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie 2.71
http://www.solasconsulting.ie 2.67

Notice the difference and the similarity of the SEOmoz MozRank ranking of the 29 recruitment agencies above and the Google PageRank ranking from the blog post yesterday. How to judge if your MozRank is good compared to the other recruitment agencies? This blog http://www.jobsblog.ie/ has a MozRank of 5.01. The general rule you can adopt is – if your company web site is below a personal blog, you might want to do something about it.

Any surprises in the recruitment agency web sites ranking by SEOmoz MozRank above? Do you find it more or less relevant than the Google PR ranking?

Categories
Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency SEO

Recruitment SEO: Google PR

Working on the search engine optimization of the recruitment agency web site, the first thing one should look at is the competition. What other agencies are competing for the same keywords. One could widen the analysis further, and look at what other sites like job boards, recruitment social media sites, employer career pages or blogs are competing for the same keywords. The first task is checking your direct competitors. The quickest way to check ‘Who is Who’ in your industry is to check the Google PageRank (Google PR). There are million other things you should measure, but Google has done its best to measure it all for you, and give you a very simple score. Google PR number. From 0 to 10 (where 10 is the best).

Here is a list of randomly picked largest recruitment agencies in Ireland and their web site Google PR score.

Web Site

Google PR
http://www.cpl.ie

6
http://www.hudson.ie

6
http://www.brightwater.ie

5
http://www.hays.ie

5
http://www.Sigmar.ie

5
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie

5
http://www.eolas.ie

5
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie

5
http://www.morganmckinley.ie

4
http://www.hrm.ie

4
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie

4
http://www.frsrecruitment.com

4
http://www.rftgroup.ie

4
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie

4
http://www.icds.ie

4
http://www.Vantage.ie

4
http://www.Brompton.ie

4
http://www.careerwise.ie

4
http://www.jobsblog.ie

4
http://www.Stelfox.ie

3
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie

3
http://www.gempool.ie

3
http://www.Recruiters.ie

3
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie

3
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie

3
http://www.placeme.ie

3
http://www.peoplegroup.ie

3
http://www.harmonics.ie

3
http://www.solasconsulting.ie

2
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie

2

Note I have also put this blog here in the mix. It is a benchmark really more than anything else. The rule of thumb could be here if you are above JobsBlog.ie you are OK. If you are below you should look into it since your SEO is obviously not really done right, hence no job applicants on your company web site.

Categories
Blogs LinkedIN Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO Social Networks Social Recruitment

LinkedIn: Follow a company button

If you are still wondering why have you placed the Facebook ‘Like’ button on your home page this will be interesting for you!

If at some stage you got bored checking how many Facebook ‘Likes’ your page got and you have offered an iPhone draw when you reach 10 000 ‘Likes’ this is even more relevant for you.

Remember that job site dressed in the social network that has sent you those nice young people to show their fabulous Recruiter Package? The one that cost more than your total advertising budget? Well, they would like you to place their button on your Home Page. And guess what they do not want to you pay for advertising them on your home page. They want to help you get more followers on their platform. Why? So that they can sell those to you. In a lovely Linkedin Recruiter Package.

LinkedIn Follow Button

Quite a strange sales model from LinkedIn, isn’t it?

Google did something similar some 6 months ago asking all web site owners to put a ‘Google+’ Button. Blogs accepted it because of the simplicity of installation of it. Does it drive any substantial traffic or bring any other benefit? Well no.

Do you think web sites will not get the LinkedIn Follow button?

If you decide to place a LinkedIn Follow button on your page, here are the three nice formats you can choose from:

Will LinkedIn Follow button slow your web site? Yes.
Does the speed of the site affect the site ranking in Google? Yes.
Will you site drop in Google index because you have placed a LinkedIn Follow button. Yes, a bit.

I have to admit the ‘Like’ from Facebook was more original than any of the copycats. They could have really come up with something better in all this time!

Categories
Blogs Internet Job Site Jobs SEO Social Recruitment

Why Recruiters don’t like blogging?

Statistically, less than 10% of recruiters write a blog. Less than 5% wrote more than 100 blog posts. That is one in twenty! There is a number of interesting theories why recruiters are rarely bloggers. My own opinion is that by nature of the recruitment as a business it is really about communication and social interaction. I mean recruiters are natural networkers. This is a core skill a recruiter is effectively selling in conjunction with the sales skills. Guess what, bloggers are more often than not, not so good networkers. To write a blog post you need to sit and think and write. Not really a social activity, is it? To write 100 blog posts, quite a lot of this sitting and thinking and typing is involved. And quite often a blogger needs to write a lot to perfect his technique, understand his skills and his audience before the blog gets any decent traction. And then, and only then it all changes, from the solitude to online social networking on steroids! A good niche blogger is more known and has a far greater influence than the editor of the industry magazine. It is to do with the payroll, with the freedom, with the social aspect of the blog as a publication.

The best recruitment bloggers I have seen have turned their career path completely. They blog. They teach. They train. They do not recruit any more. My best guess is that they have been in the wrong job in the first place.

I have spent my past 5 years preaching blogging to recruiters. I can tell you one thing: It was a tough 5 years! From the largest recruitment agencies to the start-ups I always had the same issue. They will be very excited about starting blogging after the training. But most of the recruiters will just get to that stage, being excited about it. But never post a single blog post. Well, one can only bring the horse to the water.

A few clients in the last 5 years have made some extraordinary successes. The one just got published yesterday: A blog post is worth €20,000 by the great Peter Cosgrove. Reading it, just makes me feel good since my last 5 years didn’t go to waste. It’s really fulfilling to see your clients doing things you thought them, and doing them right.

Categories
Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment Recruitment Agency SEO

CPL.ie: Top Recruitment Agency Web Site in Ireland

When your competition and independent industry experts point to your web site as the best there is very little more, that is more satisfying. Yes I know you are going to say what about the revenue and profits? OK, yes that too, but the first next best thing then is a clear industry recognition of a true winner. A real market leader, the one all the competition aspire to be. Here is Jonathan Campbell the most known recruitment trainer in Ireland today showcasing the elements of the CPL.ie web site in his training session, and also publishing statistics showing CPL.ie on top of the list of Irish recruitment agency web sites.

For two years I have worked on the CPL.ie web site. It was far from a leading spot when I took over the ownership of it. The worst thing was Google didn’t really ‘like’ it very much. As time went by, optimizing the site little by little, I watched Google Analytics every morning, and witnessed the traffic growing. In the first 12 months we got it 4 times higher. Yes, 400% traffic increase in a year on CPL.ie.

Funny enough we still couldn’t say – we (CPL.ie) are number one web recruitment agency site in Ireland. You simply do not know what traffic others are achieving. Every now and then I would get a recruitment manager of a certain industry saying –this and that agency are always above us in the searches! What do we do about it?! I could do nothing to prove them wrong. I only had our visitors data, and could show it growing, and growing quick.

In the second year of working on CPL.ie web site, and staring in the traffic figures every day, I realised we have actually done something. We have done something BIG. I simply couldn’t believe ANY recruitment agency could be having such traffic and especially number of applications made on the web site. We go to the stage where the CPL.ie would deliver more CV’s than paid jobs sites. Even within CPL there have still been those that believed that we are still below some other agencies. Some also believed we are just scratching the surface, and our traffic could be 100 times more based on ‘their estimates’. I love democracy and the freedom of speech but,…

Most importantly, the same growth we have achieved with the CPL.ie web site was exactly in the years that job seekers drastically changed their online behaviours, and simply stopped looking for jobs online as they have been before. All job sites have shown a decrease in web site traffic number in that same period when CPL.ie grown so much.

Last month I looked at requests for proposal from different recruitment agencies to develop their web sites. What was remarkable was the number of times CPL.ie was referenced in those documents. Yes, it made me feel proud about what we did with CPL.ie web site. Especially since now I can proudly say aloud: CPL.ie is the top recruitment agency web site in Ireland!

Categories
Career Internet Job Site Jobs LinkedIN Recruitment Search Engine SEO Social Networks Social Recruitment

LinkedIn Skills – SEO of your Profile!

Categories
SEO Social Networks

SEO Jobs

How to handle the SEO jobs?

Irish companies are still not 100% sure if to have the SEO outsourced to the specialist SEO Company, or to hire SEO staff directly, and have them work onsite. The constant barrage from the SPAM email offers from mostly Far East SEO companies and their low pricing and the high contract rates of the local Irish SEO companies and professionals mate things even worse! To outsource to an unknown company on the other side of the world, or to hire a local provider – who will in most cases charge you twice more?

The reason it is so hard to hire a SEO staff or engage a SEO company is that there is relatively little understanding on what SEO really is. It is not uncommon to hear the completely opposite opinions and definitions on what the SEO is. Some people bring in the pay per click (PPC) in it, some talk about on site and off site SEO, some talk about link building (now, how do you build a link?). The social media, made things even more complex lately.

So how do you hire someone not knowing nothing neither on what the task on hand is, nor the results that are to be achieved? You are quite likely to fail. If you stick to it, you are quite likely to fail a few times as well.

The same is true if you hire internally or a external SEO vendor.

Do it yourself SEO jobs are the natural result of this situation. You either try to do it yourself if you are a small company, or you ask the existing staff you have to learn and do the SEO tasks for you. That is even more often a recipe for the disaster. You are asking of your staff to do a SEO job that they have not been trained for and have no experience in it. Jet somehow you expect them to succeed?

Hiring for SEO jobs is tough!

The best peace of the advice is to get a the best SEO professional you can get – to help you and do the job interviews for you. Regardless if you are hiring an external SEO company, or a onsite SEO vendor, or the person to do SEO inhouse on your payroll. You are far likely to get the right one to do your SEO jobs than trying to asses the candidates yourself (presuming you are not a SEO specialist yourself!).