SEO techniques to improve recruitment results
However, in most cases, recruitment agencies don't know how to get their website to list on google for chosen key phrases, and there are plenty of companies out their offering to do it for you for a large fee, but do you really know what you're getting for your money?
The reality is, they don't even know what they can give you for your money, because although there are some consistent techniques that work, SEO just isn't that predictable as to how much time and effort will get a given result. My conclusion was that I either needed to learn enough to do it myself or at least enough to judge the abilities of those trying to sell it to me. Here's some ideas of the things you should be looking to learn.
What are the most important key phrases for you. This very much depends on the outcome you would like. You may be simply looking to appear for one or two phrases for profile in your market, or you maybe looking to attract new clients or if you are an ambitious agency you may be looking to use your website as an active source for new candidates. Each of these options would require different key phrases to focus on and will require different levels of resources and costs. Be wary of companies looking to charge for 'keyword research' unless they ask a lot of questions about what you want first.
Make sure the content on your site reflects the key phrases that you have decided are important. The majority of SEO work will involve building links into your website from anchor text (that's the phrase you click on to link) which is your phrase. If, however, google arrives at your site only to find no evidence of content reflecting your key phrase it won't be impressed. The ideal scenario is that for your top key phrases you have a page on your recruitment website dedicated to the subject of your key phrase.
Mug up on Link building techniques. This really is the key to getting your recruitment website at the top of the search engines. There are lots of techniques out there that can be researched on the web. There's huge debate as to which are effective, which are not, which may work now but not later and so on. But the starting point is to learn to build links, and after this you can start to tune things to learn how to build higher and higher quality links. Perhaps the easiest starting point is building links from directories.
Be very wary of companies promising instant and huge success. In particular steer clear of anything automated. Google is constantly on the look out for artificial techniques to develop SEO techniques. Once it recognises an artificial technique, it changes the algorithm to discount anything you have built this way. Software laid links are easy to spot (lots going down too quickly in the same place) and so on. You may even get short term results (long enough to pay someone) only to find you loose positions at a later stage.
Mug up on article marketing. If you are an expert in your recruitment field, this is an excellent organic link growth techniques that's likely to stand the test of time. Why, because it's a natural and organic technique, not a fake one. Write an article of more than 450 words on your key phrase topic. Then submit it to article websites for publication. This immediately allows you a back link to your site, from a page on your chosen topic, and is therefore a good link. In addition, if the article is good, people may copy it for their own recruitment website. The idea is is they can copy it for free, but must carry your link with them. A good article could pick up 50 downloads, each generating another link, possibly from a related website.
There's nothing overly complicated about learning enough SEO to get your recruitment website noticed, but you need to start somewhere. These tips should give you enough of pointer to get you started, beyond this, the answers are all there on the internet if you look for them.
About the Author: John Bult runs a portfolio of internet recruitment job sites in the UK
More articles by john@ukcareers.co.uk
Print Article | Download PDF | 9 views | Jun 11 2008
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