Tag: Search Engine Optimization

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
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 Career CV Jobs Recruitment

Less jobs and far less candidates in 2009

The recruitment in Ireland is changing, and changing a lot in this recession. We all know there are far less jobs advertised. All the metrics point to it like the Irish Employment Monitor by Premier. The Unemployment is growing as companies are reducing their staff levels or closing and leaving Ireland due to its un-competitiveness. The problem is that the skillset of the people being made redundant, in most cases does not fit the jobs advertised. The jobs advertised therefore cannot be filled by the unemployed people.

Passive Candidate is Cautious

Who will fill the jobs then? What about people that have jobs already? Are they interested in the career move? Well most of them again, in this market, would still prefer to stay with the existing employer. At least they will collect a redundancy package if they get fired. Leaving a job for a better one with the new employer is not on the cards of most people in the current market.

Tough Recruitment

This shortage of jobs combined with the current un-predictive economy actually created a shortage of the qualified candidates. Employers are hoping of hiring the top skilled staff for less then what they had to pay for a year ago. In most industries, that is just not happening to them. To make the things worse there is a whole lot of CV’s to browse trough for every job advertised, and it takes time…

Recruitment is tough today

Then again there are jobs that can be filled today that could not be filled 12 months ago at all. There are also cool new skills emerging, and new jobs demanding those skills. Who was hiring Search Engine Optimization Consultants, and Pay Per Click Specialists 12 months ago? Not to mention Bloggers, Social Networking Professionals, Online Branding Managers and whatever you will need in the coming months?

Required skills are changing. Jobs are changing. The same workforce should fill those places and do those jobs. That is one of the core problems in the recruitment for the current jobs advertised in Ireland.

Categories
Blogs

SEO for job advertisment?

Is Search Engine Optimization important for advertising your jobs on the job boards? Should you optimize every single job post? Isn’t optimization of job post on a job board actually only ‘Keyword Stuffing’, since you do not control any other page element?

Short answer:

Yes SEO is extremely important when publishing a job on a job board. Yes, you can only play with text, s0 make sure you do it well!

Why SEO-in a individual job post?

It will attract searches composed of number of words (‘Long Tail Search’) that describe the desired position. In general a job seeker that searches for ‘Jobs’ is on average of less ‘Quality Applicant’ than someone searching for ‘IT Project Manager Dublin South’.

By optimising the job specification for the search engines – the quality of the applicants raise dramatically. I have done tests with a number of my clients in publishing the two versions of the same role. One the way they would ‘Normally’ write it and the other highly optimised for the most used search words combined in search phrases constructed from:

  • Job location
  • Job title or role name
  • Job Location
  • Skills required or technologies used
  • Qualifications required or desired

The result is that the majority of candidates interviewed came from a version of the job advertised that was optimised for the search engines. The majority of the applications would tend to come from a day to 3 – 4 days after the publishing of the role. The overall quality of the applications would tend to go down as times goes by after that.

Categories
Career Google Internet Jobs Recruitment

How to write a job advertisement – for Google?

Since the Irish recruiters have finally understood that the search engine optimization strategy is the key to the success of their business I get asked a same question more and more, and more often:

How do I write a job advertisement so that it attracts more and better quality candidates?

While the page you are publishing a job advertisement has the critical determining factor when it comes to search engine rankings, the targeted keyword phrase should still appear in the add itself. Also having your keyword combinations appear throughout the job specification generally helps search engines further identify the relevancy of the page for your search keywords.

Here are a few general tips for keyword integration in your jobs advertisements:
1. Job Titles
The most important place your keywords should appear is in the title tag of the page. The nice thing about job boards is that your job post or page title will be automatically transformed into both title tags and either an H1 or H2 heading tag as well. Remember, your headline should wrap your keywords in a pithy promise that perfectly communicates what the job is about.

2. Short Job Description
I’ve always found it useful to repeat the targeted keywords in the short job description, as long as it can be done in a way that is appealing to the candidate and reinforces relevancy. Since many job boards use this initial copy as the displayed description of the job, you want to make sure you are accurately inviting the candidate to click through as well.

3. Subheadings in Job Description
Another important place that keywords can appear is in subheads that aid the reader in navigating down the page. A resource that matches up well with the targeted keyword phrase will find natural opportunities to restate keywords in subheads, as an introduction to the next topical section of the page. Subheads are on jobs sites typically created using the H3 tag.

4. Related Words and Synonyms
Good job description copy should naturally result in words that are related to, as well as synonyms for, the keyword phrases you are after. Rather than mindlessly repeating the same words ad nauseam, assume that search algorithms are advanced enough to look for proper contextually-related words that support your targeted keywords. Think skills!

5. Specificity
One of the hallmarks of great job description is specific, descriptive words in lieu of bland general terminology. Specificity aids the reader by clearly demonstrating relevancy, allows for more dynamic copy, and provides opportunities to increase the general on-page keyword frequency. Make sure to employ your specific keywords when feasible within the context of the job description, rather than rely on generic wording.

6. How to Apply?
Let us not forget that we want the Candidate to apply for the job. Otherwise, what’s the point of advertising? Once again, your job advertisement should conclude with a call to action that prompts the reader to travel down the path you desire. It might be to use a facility to apply for a job on a jobs site, or to contact you directly. Your primary keywords should naturally fit in with the next step you want the reader to take.

Conclusion
The key to good job advertisement is crafting the content that seamlessly integrates keywords in a way that doesn’t offend the reader. In fact, good keyword-rich job advertisement should never even consciously alert the reader that keyword repetition is being employed for any reason other than his or her own benefit.

The other factors that determine whether your job advertisement will appear in the search results in the search engines, or your competitors is the number and relevancy of the links to the page where the job is advertised. You should certainly submit your jobs to the social media sites, especially if advertising jobs on your own web site as opposed to a jobs board shared with your competition.

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment Search Engine SEO

Job Boards and SEO in Ireland

Year 2008 started funny for the Job Boards in Ireland. Job boards started understanding that the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the core of their business.

The reason the big job boards understood the y need to invest in SEO is because the year 2007 was the year where a largest number of the niche small job boards appeared in a single year. More than 20 new job boards requested to be included in the multiple job posting software eRecruit.ie in the year 2007 only! Those small niche web sites are in most cases industry specific, and usually have some link with some existing organisation or publication, or are just set up by someone who does know the industry. Knowing the industry helps in organising and running the small niche job board, so more often than not the niche job sites have some success as well. That hurts the job big boards, and it hurts them badly! So the national job boards decided to fight back in 2008, and to do so they are looking for the SEO people.

Irish Jobs - SEO JobIrish Jobs looking for the SEO Specialist:
http://www.irishjobs.ie/JobDesc.asp?ID=5125108&MID=3233

Due to continued expansion and focus delivering maximum jobseeker traffic to our websites worldwide a vacancy has arisen for an SEO specialist.
Job responsibilities:-
Knowledge and experience of SEO, Web 2.0 concepts, traffic and SEO analysis tools (Google Analytics, Google Webmasters Tools, keyword and structure research spiders)… Web 2.0?!

Jobs.ie Jobs - SEO JobJobs.ie (owned by Irish Jobs) are looking for that same SEO Specialist:
http://www.jobs.ie/ApplyForJob.aspx?Id=652847

This is actaully the same job in the same sompany as advertised by Irish Jobs. BTW Jobs.ie was purchased by Irish Jobs a year and a half ago.

Loadza Jobs - SEO JobLoadza Jobs made the adverts sound better by naming the job Online Search manager (SEO/SEM)
http://www.loadzajobs.ie/view-job-details.jobs?jobId=1077057

The Job Description finishes with the very funny sentence:

“Please do not apply if you have not got a good solid knowledge of the internet.”

That clearly shows they know what they are looking for!

Recruit Ireland…. nothing? About 20 different agencies have a job that appears in the search result for the word SEO, but no SEO jobs from the job site itself. Do they not need a SEO staff like the rest of the ob boards? Do they not trust the web site to deliver the candidate and have advertised in their papers?

Monster have a new site with a bit strange front page, and again they are not looking for a SEO specialist in Ireland. In all fairness, their SEO needs are probably managed from the head office in the US.

Ok, Ok,… EmployIreland.ie – no we are not looking for the SEO Specialist, we do have our SEO Consultant (that is available for projects!).