5 Myths About Job SEO – Search Engine Optimization
1. My Jobs Will Be In Search Engine Quickly
False! Search engine optimization takes a long time and a lot of tweaking to get sites indexed into search engines. I have seen our sites take 6 months to a year before they start showing up on the first page. Just because your site reaches a certain number in search rankings doesn't mean it will stay there. Sites will also change to get your rankings including looking at what your doing to copy and mimic you.
2. Search Engines Are The Only Place To Reach Job Seekers
False. We have found through our pay per click marketing efforts that we are able to capture get more conversions and get more people to apply through content advertising not search engines. One of the reasons why this is....is because people are reading about their job, industry or conducting research. As they are doing this you promote your job ad based on a keyword and thus being able to reach more people utilizing content than search engines.
3. Submit It & Forget It
False. People may think that they submitted their site into search engines once and that should be enough. Untrue, you need to make sure that your site is 1. search engine optimized 2. submitted to search engines every month. Search engines come and go on a monthly basis as well as change their search algorithms so you need to make sure that you submit to them every month. DON'T SUBMIT TO THEM MORE THAN ONCE A MONTH AS IF YOU DO YOU TAKE A RISK OF GETTING BLACKLISTED BY THEM.
4. Active Job Seeking Keywords Are The Best To Use
False. Active job seeker keywords are any keyword or keyword combination that includes jobs, job, resume, resumes, career, career, work, working you get the picture. The reason why I don't recommend these keywords in seo is that it's extremely difficult to get any positioning with them as you are competing with the likes of Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs etc. Instead of these what you should be doing is finding out what your priority hires and or departments would be and then use those keywords. If your a product company and your main hiring initiative is java engineers than use java engineers, java developers etc.
5. I Can Guarantee Your Jobs Will Be In The Top Ten In Natural Search
False. If anyone tells you they can guarantee you a top ten natural search ranking then you should be raising a eyebrow. The only person that can guarantee you this is the search engine company and they won't do this unless you buy paid advertising or url inclusion. Search engines are always adding, deleting and changing website listings from their engines on a daily basis.
I hope I have shed some light on seo and how much time, effort and work it takes to stay in the game!
Comments
Hi Jason,
I'm going to challenge you on each of these points.
1) It takes very little to get a site into the search engines, but it can take a lot to get a site ranking well. If you have any decent level of PageRank flowing to the page on which the job is located and you ping the search engines (if you have an RSS feed) when you post a new job, a URL should show up in the Google index pretty quickly. Yes, it can take a long time to get to the first page for competitive keywords (if you ever make it). How quickly you can get ranking depends entirely on how well you build links and manage the flow of internal PageRank. There aren't many secrets left in SEO, so worrying about someone else's copying you shouldn't be too much of an issue.
2) True, there are many places to reach a job seeker. How about blogs? News sites? Twitter? Facebook? LinkedIn? Job boards? Not only can participation on these sites be essential to reaching job seekers, then can also be essential pieces of an SEO strategy. You're saying that employers should use mediums other than search engines to reach candidates, but then you're advocating PPC campaigns that exist mostly on search engines. That doesn't really make sense. Are you advocating PPC ads across content networks like Google's as well? That is one strategy, but there are a lot better options that can get candidates engaged more easily.
3) Search engine submission doesn't matter. If you need to submit something, it means that you don't have any incoming links (internal or external), and no PageRank flowing in. With no PageRank, you're not going to rank. Submitting to search engines is almost worthless. They'll find you on their own if you're doing SEO right. I have no idea what you're talking about when you say that resubmitting will help when a search engine changes its algorithm. That is nonsense.
4) It makes sense to use less popular keywords to avoid competition, but it also means that your jobs aren't going to get in front of nearly as many people. You still need to use these keywords to pick up long tail traffic. Java engineer is pretty darn competitive term too. Ranking for that won't be easy either. The only way that you're going to be successful with this strategy is to do some really intense keyword research. It's easier to post jobs with a lot of content and information about the job and let the posting pick up long tail searches on its own
5) You're right, nobody can guarantee a top ten ranking for a specific keyword. I can almost guarantee a ranking for a gibberish keyword though.
I'm interested to hear your responses.
- Willy
Posted by: Willy | September 10, 2008 10:33 PM