Tell Google You're a recruiter

Recently I wrote about the Google basics, the simplified view of what Google does and how it does it. This month I want to give you some idea on how to make your recruitment website and your SEO strategy with a ‘Recruitment SEO' twist.

We have surveyed several thousand recruitment websites and the problems we have found are as follows.

1 Flash landing pages block the spiders
2 The jobs on the site can not be found by the spider
3 Iframes are used which block the spider from viewing content
4 Content Management System provides no automated page linking for the spider to follow, so the spider hits dead end
5 No tracking packaged used on their site, Google Analytics is free!!!
6 The site is multiple browser incompatible
7 The site is on slow, run on cheaper than cheap technology
8 News if present, is not indexed
9 Case studies if are placed on one long page, plus often not an index page. Testimonials, Sector pages etc often the same.
10 Web addresses are not registered with all obvious search engines (Google Uk, Bing, Ask, Yahoo)

So why is this important and how does it stop Google seeing you as a recruiter?

In simple terms you can place about 10-15 (opinions vary SEO to SEO) keywords on any one page and write content around them, which is both SEO compatible and will be valued by the reader. Note there is no point in bringing lots of traffic if they don't like what they find when they get there.

Now if you're a recruitment company in Accrington Stanley and you deal with Accountants in Accrington Stanley, then having a recruitment site with these faults may not be so bad. There are simple standard SEO tactics, which can get you ranked, along with the fact this maybe a small niche so natural ranking occurs due to little to no competition.

As the competition grows for the terms, like if there are 50 firms recruiting for Accountants in Accrington Stanley so there are 50 sites vying for Google's attention if those 50 firms then uses 5 job boards each, that's 55 sites and potentially 10 more aggregations sites the job board use to boost their visitors (note most aggregators kill your job level SEO stone dead). Your now up to 65 sites competing with you for the term Accountancy recruiters Accrington Stanley.

If there is no other factor to measure and all things are equal. Google will look at each site and measure them on how many pages they have on a subject, the quality of what is on those pages ( is it repetitive or expands the subject) it will then decide if your site is the best site to advice its users on ‘Accountancy recruitment in Accrington Stanley'. See May issue for a reminder of what Googles crawling and robot files do.

So by now then it will have dawned on you that if you have more pages then your competition, and those pages have relevant information and expand the theme to comprehensively cover a subject then your site has a better chance of ranking well. Note multiple pages of repeat information are a bad idea. Many recruiters ask us can they have a feature to repeat a job advert without needing to change it content at all, that's not always the best thing to do for your SEO and/or your readers.

Equally there is a new theory doing the SEO rounds that if you don't write an original job ad copy per site the job is featured on, then your site will somehow be harmed due to Google's new Panda update. Panda is looking to downgrade duplicate content on sites as not being none SEO worthy. I did not buy this argument for recruitment sites before Panda and I don't buy it now.

That is the beauty of SEO because right now there will be a few thousand who disagree with me. I can only base my knowledge on experience and our clients that have moved forward post Panda not backwards. The reason I don't buy the argument is Google is seeking to find duplicate information you passed off as your own for personal gain at someone else's expense (like you took Newton's theory of relativity and changed the name to your own). The reason the SEO's who disagree with me, disagree is they have seen some high profile sites like www.eHow.com confirm they have a problem post Panda and they don't miss use data. My view other than our clients is, how many retail sites like eBay, Amazon etc and/or job boards have reported Google Panda harming them? Google knows recruiters and for that matter job boards are advertisers, advertising is not quite so harmful as other forms of content, otherwise only Hugo Boss could sell Hugo Boss, do you think Google would let that happen?

Ok get to the point then.

Jobs provide you multiple opportunities to tell Google you're a recruiters, so do testimonials, case studies, news items, on site blogs etc etc. Each time you deliver one page of this kind of information you have an opportunity ot prove your authority. In the same way when an employer asks you why should they use your firm and you spread out for them your pitch, so do you need to use each page on your site to is maximum advantage. Then you will have ‘Recruitment SEO grade 1'

How does my theory and or experience stack up in the real world?

In 2004 the number of searches using 3 terms was 7%, by 2009 the use of 3 terms or more had grown by 34000%, stats can be varied with Experian, in the recruitment world this shows a shift by the job seeker from searching for accounting jobs, to accounting jobs Lancashire, to permanent part qualified accounting jobs in Accrington Stanley. Try fitting all of that onto your home page and still have a nice looking online brochure!

If you recruit for more than Accountants in Accrington Stanley you now know why your website is key to your SEO.