If you are in recruitment or HR you know that getting quality response for your jobs is essential. Many of you are using job boards and job board aggregators like Broadbean to get your vacancies broadcasted. Hopefully you are also using indeed.com and trovit as these are free and all you need to do is make sure your posting is well structured (specifically the xml) in order to get the best out of them.
What about your job posting page itself? If you are using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or recruitment software that creates the posting pages you need to check whether these getting reach. By that I mean if you go to one of your pages on your website – is it optimized for SEO?
Firstly a quick primer on Search Engine Optimisation basics:
With SEO you need view your site/pages in two ways. These are called “on page” and “off page” seo factors and these are what contributes to your page being found online.
Offpage factors are what Google (and others) use to assess the quality and demand for your type of information, and it uses the concept of backlinks to measure these. Think of them in terms of votes. Links to web pages with anchortext set to your keyword will create higher rankings in Google. The quantity and quality of the links dictate the ranking. You can measure the quality of the link by analysing the Page Rank (PR) of the page the link is coming from.
Onpage factors relate to the structure of the page itself, the content and the words relating to the search phrase or keyword. The following points are the most important:
- Ensure that there is traffic for the keywords you are trying to rank for.
- The keywords are in the Meta Title and description of the page.
- The keyword is in the URL
- The keyword is in the H1 tag.
- The text on the page should be at least 400 words, with the keyword being mentioned at least 1% but no more than 4% of the text.
So how does this apply to my job postings?
- Ensure the job posting has its own page and is well formed (ie meets the points above)
- The page title must be accessible directly – ie. no iframes – Check with your ATS vendor that your jobs aren’t framed.
- The page title must be the role, location and skills
- The page description (Meta Description) should include the same elements, but written as text someone can actually read. It should also include similar locations and skills and roles.
- The job role should be in the H1 and should be written similar to the title.
- A google compliant sitemap.xml file needs to be published with the references to the pages, with the correct indexing frequency defined.
OK..so that seems straightforward…but what about traffic?
One of the key factors to check is that your Job Title keyword is searched upon using generic traffic. What this means is that if you post a vacancy with the jobtitle directly related to the position the candidate is going to fill and not what candidates are searching for, then you will your time. For example if your position is “Head of Prepay Voice Commercial – Wapping” then the job posting should be written “Sales Manager – Telecomms – London”. So you need to put yourself in the candidate’s shoes and think about the types of positions that they will be searching for and write your postings with that in mind.
Of course your ATS vendor should be doing that for you, and automatically converting your specific titles into generics to reduce the work and streamline your posting process whilst optimising your postings to get the most traffic possible. They should also be mapping for similar locations and job types to ensure you are covering the maximum possible searches both short and long tail.
Let me know if you have any questions with this, as although I’ve tried to keep this topic simple, it can get very advanced and detailed, and its a key point to get right with your careers site or recruitment agency job board.
image credits: flickr.com/photos/sillyjillyPhoto Courtesy of U.S. Army
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Couple of days back I have started my local recruiting agency and now i am looking for some good highly professional place that is dedicated in placement of professionals, that can help me to grow my business of recruiting. I am also having many professional candidates looking for professional jobs and I do also have professional companies seeking professional from different areas right from restaurant jobs to highly trained engineers job and also management jobs. Can anyone know about any special site?