SEO Practitioner Confessions

2011-09-28T02:31:00.001-07:00

Martin Shaw joins Lander Associates

2011-09-28T02:08:00.001-07:00

ICT recruitment in Prague move to Recruitwise Technology :) and take our mobile enabled website

2011-09-28T02:06:00.001-07:00

High Finance Group upgrade their marketing budget to support new SEO plans to be implemented by Recruitwise

2011-09-28T01:36:00.001-07:00

Recruiters are talent funder as well as talent finders given they provide the cash flow funding for temps, contractors and interims

2011-08-11T09:22:00.001-07:00

How the web is used, http://ping.fm/UUdun

2011-08-10T06:29:00.001-07:00

http://ping.fm/8dltt all new look for Manzi

2011-08-06T12:44:00.001-07:00

www.acumin.co.uk went live today

2011-08-06T04:22:00.001-07:00

Take a look http://ping.fm/VJuZg

2011-08-05T06:57:00.001-07:00

www.ojassociates.com selects Recruitwise to replace its website and to set in place a new SEO/SMO/SMM marketing strategy :)

2011-08-05T06:53:00.001-07:00

congrats to Laura & Paul who gave birth to a new recruitment website today, Recruitwise was the Midwife http://ping.fm/gKfT9

2011-08-02T12:52:00.001-07:00

Ask for my mate Milan, he will hook you up. http://ping.fm/NfmHW

2011-07-28T09:20:00.001-07:00

Tha daddy is back http://ping.fm/0WHru

2011-07-28T05:24:00.001-07:00

ukhost4u Network has crashed, RWT sites are affected it happened 1 min ago and we are on the case.

2011-07-26T06:39:00.001-07:00

Check it out http://ping.fm/X11x8

2011-07-26T03:42:00.001-07:00

Who is best to make your website? http://ping.fm/zCOZI

2011-07-22T05:34:00.001-07:00

beware what you do inline http://ping.fm/LBdYg

2011-07-21T09:26:00.001-07:00

Recruitwise wins Manzi Recruitment website project

2011-07-21T09:25:00.003-07:00

Recruitwise wins Red Recruitment Project

2011-07-21T09:25:00.001-07:00

Recruitwise wins Head Start Recruitment website project

2011-07-21T09:24:00.001-07:00

Recruiters you need to know this http://ping.fm/GHBwB

2011-07-20T11:22:00.001-07:00

Google Panda says no more 'tiepose' so :) http://ping.fm/em8WR

2011-07-20T09:29:00.001-07:00

test

2011-07-20T08:50:00.001-07:00

FYI :) www.hubspot.com/essential-guide-to-internet-marketing/?source=email-the-essential-step-by-step-internet-marketing-guide-l-20110718

2011-07-19T09:19:00.001-07:00

The Murdochs have a huge 'tell' which shows when they are lying, watch closely. Their lips move when they lie. http://ping.fm/VjjYX

2011-07-19T02:38:00.001-07:00

Let it be so, please

http://ping.fm/lEx4y

2011-07-19T00:37:00.001-07:00

Are the good times on their way back?

http://ping.fm/trsMF

2011-07-19T00:18:00.001-07:00

Want to know the scoop on your SEO and your competitions? Go here http://ping.fm/jZDss

2011-07-17T09:54:00.001-07:00

Every boy needs one http://ping.fm/kY3Lf

2011-07-16T07:26:00.001-07:00

Make your twitter work for you with http://tweepi.com/

2011-07-16T07:22:00.001-07:00

Time to tweet? Check out this great tool.
http://www.tweriod.com/

2011-07-16T06:49:00.001-07:00

Google+ for recruiters http://ping.fm/nYlDJ

Social Spying Online for Recruiters

2011-07-16T06:32:00.000-07:00

For me Social Media Marketing works in favour of the recruiter, then the candidate and least of all for the employer.

Why? Because what you do online gives some guides to your skills, moral, social and intellectual footprint etc for sure. However as Tom Peters updated his ‘In Search of Excellence’ advice to be the exact opposite of what he wrote in the first place. The insight he provides mirrors the social & employment market place today which is takes all sorts and don’t be over fixated on a persons past. You get out of people what you put in, in most cases.

I grew up watching Bruce Forsyth and in my household he was loved, in my wife’s household he was hated. So people choose people for different reasons, naturally if you tweet you are the next Fred West not many will hire you.

The sting in the tail for me though, is the social footprint online has more ability to harm the employer than the candidate. 10 people who tweet, blog etc that the account manager for acme cosmetics, in acme store is a read head case will do more harm to acme cosmetics than it will that acme’s talent manager may be able to tweet back how one or two of the candidates got a little too carried away in their Ibiza holiday snaps. Now imagine 10, become 100 and/or 1000! In my recruiting career we had clients who managed to hide their dysfunctions and each year a new set of, in my case IT contractors, would come to me with tales of woe about a company, its managers, its policies etc.

In my own career I met one numpty who threw out all the tea and coffee so the recruiters could not have a drink, because someone left some coffee rings on the kitchen side. So forty staff without drinks for the sake of a couple of members of the team, I had been there two weeks and decided that this guy was not for me so I resigned. No great loss but a couple of weeks later their two biggest billers left and set up a firm which has made millions, one of them was my boss and he commented to me when I resigned how he could see the writing on the wall if they could not retain new staff. Now I am not saying I am the reason they left, they had plenty of others, but what they went onto create was a place where people were happy and motivated to work. This was about 20 years ago and there was no Social Media to out this numpty. Imagine if this was today, would the company have survived?

I have tried a sample in LinkedIn this week about a mate of mine who went for an interview with a firm whose agenda for hiring was, well, just plain wrong!
As it was an experiment I did not mention the candidates name and/or the firm but the feedback from the commentators was 60:40 against what the employer did. I am confident if I had named the firm and their social footprint were more developed, I would have found some failed applicants at some point who would have shared their views. Naturally I got the odd ‘Wally’ but so long as you steer clear of those, the trend for employers being outed online is a serious challenge for HR. Don’t agree with me? Read Ranstad’s survey on Recruiter this week then. Equally Jobsite are paying celebs to provide videos to tell candidates to do Social research on the employers and interviewers they will meet.

So yes Social Spying as ‘ Andy Drinkwater’ puts it really rather well in his blog, Social Spying is becoming more and more of a selection process. I just think its more a process that will be used to select or more importantly de-select employers as the candidate market comes back to power post recession.

Recruiters this is your time to shine. As and when the next employers give you poor to nil feedback, or does not hire people who are clearly qualified and/or mistreats your temps, contractors, interim’s etc. Simply point the candidate to the nearest computer terminal with instructions on how to open a Pin.fm account and then stand back and enjoy the fun.

Finally then, there is a cure for ‘middle management’ effect to on ‘Talent Attraction’.

God (or any faith you follow) Bless the Internet. May the Google be with you.

Google Local Business Centre Listings

2009-11-05T01:31:00.000-08:00

Take a look at this tool, might be great for your company and regional client connections.

Measuring your SEO Partner

2009-10-31T06:24:00.000-07:00

SEO to some is about the number of visitors they can bring to your site, certainly I have worked with other SEO people and former business partners that thought this to be the case.

What then does a real SEO partner bring you? They bring you knowledge of who your exact user type is, what their real world habits are, how those real world habits interact with computers, software, the internet and thus your site.

In bringing you this knowledge your SEO partner enhances your marketing strategy and increases the viability of your business generation/market exposure online.

Anyone can get you clicks, that lead to new visits but if they bounce and or don't engage with what you are doing, what the point?

Remember than if your traffic goes down but your sales go up, this is not a bad thing this is an SEO partner bringing you your exact user type. Less sometimes really is more.

Are Job Boards Dead or Dying?

2009-10-31T01:22:00.000-07:00

The same generic question has been asked about recruiters every year for the past 20 years I have been in the sector and the answer always is no.

Moving recruiters opinions is like turning an oil tanker, slow and takes place over many, many miles. Recruiters have trained their workforces that for the past decade they cant do their job unless they do have a job board to advertise on. It will take at least 10 years to undo that habit, when the industry decodes to, by which time the job board will offer a different value platform.

I specialize in recruitment seo, this is the practice of using search engine optimization to bring recruiters candidate traffic direct, and clients if they need them. There are 301 million searches for job in Google and the other search indexes per month and only 20% of that volume goes to job boards. The rest could go to recruiters but it does not as they don't try to get it

Having canvassed 4000 recruiters in 4 years, we have 65 clients and 80 websites under management, this being a prime example that when recruiters are offered tools/services that compete with job boards they don't respond. In 5 years of selling this service we gained as many new clients in the last 3 months as we did in our first 3 years, so now the market begins to take up this idea, but 5 years was the gestation period.

Direct employers have not been quit so slow, with 100 of the worlds largest companies now using recruitment seo to reduce the need for recruiters, the same does not apply for the 100 largest recruiter of the world, only 5 have proper seo strategies.

Twitter is cool, but the reality is you just got another tool to use, not one to replace all you have.

Recruitment Halloween

2009-10-30T08:06:00.000-07:00

What is the most scary thing about recruitment SEO? Is it the HR department hearing a sound in the basement of the building and deciding to go down and cjeck it out all alone without any Recruitment SEO to protect them?

Or is it the amount of zombies walking around dead from the neck up who still have not caught on to what Generation Y and Web2.0 is all about for recruiters and employment?

Or is it that we know we will be getting a Christmas special with James Caan in a Santa's costume telling us how he invented Christmas?

Hang on, one of them just crept up on me argggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

Recruitment Online

2009-10-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

If you want good quality CV's and or new business inquiries just optimize your website, then you will gain quality candidates, and new business income at the same time.

There are 201 million searches for jobs in Google each month, and a further 100 million in the other indexes. Less that 20% of these find a jobs board so you can imagine the minute traffic an individual board gets and then they have to get that person to register and submit their CV.

Bring the inquiries direct to your website and you not only get the talent you want but you get exclusivity, or at least a head start. This is the fastest growing trend in the USA for recruiters and clients to optimize their jobs, using recruitment seo methods.

Time for the UK to catch up. Oh and yes for the doubting Thomas-es yes you can optimize and out rank jobs boards for jobs, its actually quite a simple process.

What is good writing? Check out Jon Morrow he is brilliant

2009-10-28T08:38:00.000-07:00

What is good writing?

Ask an English teacher, and they’ll tell you good writing is grammatically correct. They’ll tell you it makes a point and supports it with evidence. Maybe, if they’re really honest, they’ll admit it has a scholarly tone — prose that sounds like Jane Austen earns an A, while a paper that could’ve been written by Willie Nelson scores a B (or worse).

Not all English teachers abide by this system, but the vast majority do. Just look at the writing of most graduates, and you’ll see what I mean. It’s proper, polite, and just polished enough not to embarrass anyone. Mission accomplished, as far as our schools are concerned.

But let me ask you something:

Is that really good writing?

I think most good writers listen to the way English teachers want them to write and think, “This isn’t real. It has no feeling, no distinctiveness, no oomph. You’re the only person in the world who would willingly read it. Everyone else would rather chew off their own eyelids than read more than three pages of this boring crap.” And they’re right.

Compare an award-winning essay to a best-selling novel, and you’ll notice that they are written in almost completely different languages. Some of it has to do with the audience, sure. It’s natural to write differently for academics than you would for everyday people. But my question is: who are you going to spend more time writing for?

My guess: everyday people — your family and friends, your blog audience, your boss at work, maybe even a Letter to the Editor every now and again. None of them are academics. None of them want to read an essay.

Personally, I think good writing doesn’t have to be educated or well supported or even grammatically correct. It does have to be interesting enough that other people want to read it. Much of what comes out of high schools and universities fails this test, not because our students are incapable of saying anything interesting, but because a well-meaning but flawed academic system has taught them a lot of bad habits.

Let’s go through some of them.

1. Trying to sound like dead people

It’s a sad state of affairs when the youngest writer on your reading list has been dead 100 years, but that’s the way it is in school.

I don’t know who exactly decides what’s worth reading and what’s not, but they (whoever “they” are) believe in reading the “classics,” and most of those classics are centuries old. What’s worse is that many teachers hold up the classics as examples of what good writing is, and they expect you to mimic those writers with your essays.

Sure, Chaucer and Thomas More and Shakespeare were the stud muffins of their day, but you don’t see them on the New York Times Bestseller List now.

Not because they aren’t good (they were freaking great), but because people can’t connect with them. By mimicking their style, you might make a few teachers happy, but you’re essentially handicapping your writing in the eyes of the public.

If you want to make a connection, you’re much better off studying the hot writers of today — like Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and Seth Godin. Watch what they do, and play with using some of their techniques in your own writing.

Yes, you’ll still be mimicking the work of another writer, but at least you’ll be mimicking something people want to read.

2. Expecting someone to hand you a writing prompt

Looking through the eyes of an educator, I can see why telling students what to write about would be useful. You have a bunch of students who couldn’t care less about your curriculum, and making them write a paper about the assigned readings is a great way to force them to read the material.

Makes sense . . . but it doesn’t make it any less damaging.

One of the biggest challenges of writing is figuring out what to write. Whether you’re writing a memo, an article, or a letter to your mother, the process is always the same: you start out with a blank page, and you decide what to put on it.

Sure, that involves considering what your audience will want to read, but no one but you makes the final decision of what to put on the page. That act of deciding is what writing is all about.

3. Writing long paragraphs

Once upon a time, it was acceptable to write paragraphs long enough to fill multiple pages with big blocks of text.

Not surprisingly, that’s the way most of us were taught to write: long paragraphs, topic sentences neatly organized, lots of supporting evidence in between assertions. It was the “correct” way to write.

Not.

Any.

More.

Nowadays, most paragraphs should be a maximum of three sentences. It’s also a good idea to include some shorter paragraphs with only one or two sentences, using them to punctuate powerful ideas.

It’s not so much about having a “correct” length as using paragraphs to give your writing rhythm.

4. Avoiding profanity at all costs

I admit it; this is a controversial one. Many excellent writers still hold that profanity has no place in a professional publication, while others curse like a lovable two-dollar, er, paid companion.

The rest of us sit around feeling uncomfortable and wondering whether it’s okay to express ourselves “that way” or not.

So who’s right? Well, I think Stephen King says it best:

Make yourself a promise right now that you’ll never use “emolument” when you mean “tip” and you’ll never say John stopped long enough to perform an act of excretion when you mean John stopped long enough to take a shit. If you believe “take a shit” would be considered offensive or inappropriate by your audience, feel free to say John stopped long enough to move his bowels (or perhaps John stopped long enough to “push”). I’m not trying to get you to talk dirty, only plain and direct.

‘Nough said.

5. Leaning on sources

Most kids I knew hated digging up sources and quoting them in their papers, but not me. No, the sneaky little bugger that I was (and still am), I realized that sources were an escape route from creativity. With enough quotations from other writers, I could fill up an entire paper without coming up with a single original thought of my own.

And I was rewarded for it. From kindergarten to getting my masters in English Literature, I got an A on all but like five papers.

Here’s why: a lot of teachers care more about solid research than original ideas. They don’t want to see daring and inventive arguments, challenging the foundation of everything we hold to be true and arguing boldly for a new worldview. To them, it’s much more important that you understand the ideas of others and be able to cite them in MLA format.

But real life is the opposite.

Go around citing the sources of all of your ideas and people will start avoiding you, because it’s boring as hell.

They don’t care who said what, and they aren’t interested in hearing the chronology of an idea. What they want to hear is a new perspective on a favorite topic.

If it comes from you, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too.

6. Staying detached

We are taught that good writing puts the focus on the subject, not the writer. It’s unemotional. It gives equal attention to opposing points of view, presenting them all without singling out one as best.

And sometimes, it’s true. If you’re a scientist, engineer, or a doctor, then maintaining your role as a detached observer is a great idea.

For everyone else though, it’s a disaster.

Have you ever read the stuff scientists, engineers, and other so-called “detached observers” write? It’s boring! Outside of their exclusive circles, you couldn’t pay people to read it.

If you want people to want to read what you write, then you should do the opposite. Be more like Oprah Winfrey, Howard Stern, Gary Vaynerchuk. They are opinionated, have a unique style, and are prone to emotional outbursts.

It’s no coincidence. That’s what makes them interesting.

7. Listening to “authorities” more than yourself

Who am I to criticize the writing habits you learned in school?

Well . . . nobody.

Yes, I’m a professional writer. Yes, I have a literature degree. Yes, other writers have paid me up to $200 an hour to edit their work, and they’ve been amazed when all I did was correct the above mistakes.

But that doesn’t mean I’m right. In fact, that’s probably the most important lesson you can learn about writing:

No one but you is an authority on your writing.

Not me. Not your English teachers. Not Strunk and White and their highfalutin Elements of Style.

The longer you write, the more you’ll realize that other writers can’t tell you what to do. You should listen to more experienced writers, sure, but never more than you listen to yourself.

Great writers don’t learn how to write by sitting in writing courses, reading writing blogs, or browsing Barnes & Noble for yet more books on writing.

They learn how to write by coming to a blank page, writing something down, and then asking themselves if it works.

If it does, they keep it. If it doesn’t, they don’t. Then they repeat the process until they finish something they feel is worth publishing.

Sadly, most writers don’t know this

They labor under the mistaken assumption that there is an invisible standard of good and bad. And they worry that the Writing Police are going to show up at their door any minute, handcuff them, and haul them off to jail for failing to measure up.

If that was true, you wouldn’t see a single writer walking the street without one of those blinking bracelets around their ankle.

The truth is that you’re in charge. You. The blank page is sitting there, and you can fill it up with whatever the hell you want.

So stop sitting there, silly.

Go for it.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger and Cofounder of Partnering Profits. Get more from Jon on twitter.

Top French law firm Fidal has chosen Stepstone to provide its e-recruitment solution.

2009-10-28T03:41:00.001-07:00

And still the solution does not have recruitment seo in the package, just plain old web access software and job board ads. Will these people never learn?

SEO cant do it alone

2009-10-28T03:41:00.000-07:00

The key to most recruiter relationships with candidates, be they commercial recruiters and or in-house recruiters, is the ammount of rapport/regular communication levels the candidate receives in the short, medium and long term relationship with a recruiter/employer.

Applicant tracking systems deal with the storage of data, they don't by themselves create and or facilitate in most cases ongoing communications/rapport building within talent communities. This means that the job seeker becomes a bit like a foot fall client to a retail outlet, if you miss this one today then there will be someone walking past tomorrow. I have studied 1000 recruiting firms and trained 5000 recruiters and have only ever seen databases update exercises/rapport building exercise with the area of the candidate database that was rare/specialized.

With rare/specialist skilled workers the value is easy to see and their skills are marketed as a commodity, this falls apart when the candidate is a vanilla type worker bee. The clients themselves are equally to blame as they treat the rare skilled workers as A lister's and the worker bees as Z list, making it hard for the recruiter to maintain momentum in the process.

In the US there is a big move by recruiters/direct employers to optimize their career sites to get the talent to come direct to their site (recruitment seo/jobs seo) but what Kevin Wheeler will tell you is that once you get them there you need to build an engaging brand experience and a talent pool that they can join where they can gain regular interaction. In the US the recruiters rely heavily on Job Boards, here we do have a but more skill than that, but none the less both the recruitment industry and the direct employer needs to up their game in rapport building and a long term commitment to communicating with their talent pools

Google Horse shit

2009-10-23T02:10:00.000-07:00

On you tube there is a man from Google telling us that if you have multiple page content on your website Google does not count that for ranking purposes. While the page count does not affect your page rank it does affect the way your website can be found for volume linguistics.

So if you have 100 job titles and cover 1000 locations as recruiters you cant deal with that on one page, for that you will need more than one page. That page does not even have to have a page rank, just get indexed.

This is why the broad cast is the typical Google horse shit, it misleads you into thinking you don't need content when all SEO people know you do. The guys smug laugh at the end only goes to prove these video are provide by the Google disinformation department.

Theo Paphitis

2009-10-23T01:26:00.000-07:00

Theo Paphitis is on national radio ads telling us how to save money, and his head of HR for Rymans wont take a call about .... saving money!

We all know that TV land is well full of lovies and lies and we have to live with the egotistical ranks of the Dragons but when it spills over into credible agencies paying them to promote savings. Savings their own companies cant be bothered to hear about, then we must say shame on you Theo and Rymans.

Nothing to do with SEO

2009-10-19T05:27:00.000-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/8313453.stm

Congrats to Jenson

If I had not read it with my own eyes!!!!!

2009-10-15T02:40:00.000-07:00

Read this news story, then read my reply. I case they dont publish it.

http://www.recruiter.co.uk/mining-the-millions-of-online-talent/1002979.article

There are 201 million job searches per month in Google, and 100 million in the other indexes like Bing ASK etc.

Having studied 3000 job boards in the past 4 years, and 4000 recruitment websites only 20% of that traffic finds its way currently to job boards/recruiters websites.

This leaves a massive volume of searches to tap into for those who are ready to pick up the ball and run with services like Recruitment SEO for talent generation.

The problem for the most part with job boards is there is no one major player that has a large enough market share to have a site the build standard for others to follow, the consequence is only a few of the 3000 or so job boards have well defined sites for picking up talent who search Google and alike for jobs. Until that happens its open season for recruiters to get the traffic they want direct.

John Salt's comment therefore being that recruiters cant get enough volume is therefore unfounded, the real stat of not is Total managed just 1,55 million unique visitors from 300 million searches made for jobs!!!, You pay for the visitor to your job regardless of if they are right or not as the job boards charge for ad space, not based upon success. Take a look at the US markets and you will see recruiters have already moved to Recruitment SEO en-mass. Besides the argument of mass, most recruiters don't need 1.55 million of anything (accept profit :) ), they just need to the 10-20 people that day, week or month who will fill their jobs. That is what Recruitment SEO delivers that is what recruiters need to be doing.

Sound like anyone you know?

2009-10-10T01:38:00.000-07:00

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a man below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The man below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 42 degrees north latitude and between 58 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.
"I am," replied the engineer, "but how did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me I am sure is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost."

The engineer responded, "You must be a manager."
"I am," replied the manager, "how did you know?"

"Well," said the man, "you don't know where you are or where you are going. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are exactly in the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

Organic SEO

2009-10-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

The clue is in the name, it has to be grown. Liek any thing that grows effort, time, expertise and patience is needed to gain the benefits. If I see another post about why should SEO firm charge per month and/or on an ongoing basis I will explode.

Googe the Truth Engine

2009-10-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

A UK OfCOM report discovered that 32% of 12- to 15-year-olds believed Google & other major search engines rank pages in the results by their “truthfulness”. In short, a truth engine.

Wonder what the adults think?

Key SEO Mistakes of 5000 recruitment websites

2009-10-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

The top mistakes we have found when looking at 5000 recruitment websites in the past 24 months are listed as follows:-

SEO

1 Jobs dont get indexed
2 No Titles for the page
3 Titles of web pages repeated
4 No Keywords for the page
5 Standard keywords repeated for every page
6 Met description unwritten or written badly
7 No linking partners
8 Non trust rank compliant link partners
9 Poor use of on-page links, passing the spider away from your site
10 Poor use of free tools to boost the sites ranking in multiple engines
11 No analysis of the site, visitors, traffic per keyword etc
12 Lack of overall content

Functions

1 Job baskets, people hate them
2 Long winded application processes
3 Lack of multiple communication tools via your website, quick reg, link to my yahoo etc
4 Lack of information pages
5 Out of date news
6 Lack of news/views
7 Lack of content on sub pages

Content really is SEO gold

2009-10-04T08:43:00.000-07:00

OK, so I know its Sunday and I really should be just relaxing and enjoying time with my wife and son, but today is a landmark achievement in Reruitwise websites growth. We have proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that using copy and growing content [ages on your own website that we can out rank other sites with linking programs, linking programs that cost varying degrees of money, copy costs you nil

Hip, hip, hooray. Hip, hip, hooray. Hip, hip, hooray.

When asked a question you may later rely upon in court

2009-09-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

I recently joined a linked in discussion group, and a job board question came up. My reply was

Ian, I have been building job boards and working in the recruitment SEO market for 7 years and 1 million visitors to 52 boards does not represent value for money, nor would 1 million to a single board based upon key market sectors. In just Google alone there are 201 million searches per month for the term job. I million is only a big number if its not compared to this 201 million per month, 6 months ago it was 150 million, in 6 months still it might be 250 million etc. The top ten job boards between them share only a fraction of this traffic.

Setting up a job boards with state of the art SEO costs about £3000 if you buy from the right vendor. The technology/site will then happily run and optimise itself based upon good content for Google and its peers to index for no cost at all per month, past month 2 or 3.

An example of this we made click4teachers for a client, it only ever managed 200 live jobs but gained 35000 unique visitors a month at its peak, 24000 over a 24 month period as an average. Using long tail recruitment SEO principals the site gained traffic from 12000 keywords and phrases associated with teaching jobs etc per month. The accuracy of these keywords being terms like "ITC teaching jobs harrogate", or "primary school teaching jobs maidstone kent".

So while a low traffic number it was highly accurate from a visitor point of view. However we knew the total traffic for the education sector to be 500,000 visits a month, with 2000 jobs a month and about 8k spent on linking strategies we could of hit that traffic. As it was the site ranked in the top 10 for multiple terms in 7 countries, and in the top 20 for a further 11 countries. The site used a content only strategy for SEO, that is to say linking partners were limited to a few other sites in our network.

We ran the same exercise for construction /engineering in these secotors, where you need 2-3 million visits per month to get the accuracy and quality. Companies like mine can offer recruiters the ability to run targeted SEO campaigns to bring accurate candidate traffic to their websites, and at the same time bring them client enquiries to.

So I think its time a major job board group stepped up and gave a results only advertising deal to recruiters, that is you pay for the ad if you get a quality application. In respect of the CV database job boards hold, in 20 years and having consulted with 1000 recruitment firms and 5000 recruiters I have yet to find more than a handful of companies that could manage volume candidate data well. I would suggest a great usp for your boards would be to have accurate, reliable and upto date CV data, that recruiters could use and/or network from.

The battle for the recruitment web begins

2009-09-23T05:30:00.000-07:00

www.careersite.co.uk launched in September by some geeks who say that, as they are not recruiters you can trust them. Despite the fact that their service model still requires the client to pay for failed placements, they have also taken to bribery by paying part of the fee they charge to the candidate. It will be interesting to see how they make sure the candidate pays tax on that income as is the law.

Some clients will sign up for this service, and some will not. Our best advice tot he employers is optimise your own careersite, you'll get far batter returns and then use recruiters like you always to have to get you the hires that you cant and/or wont be able to find. As for the recruiters, our feeling is that recruiters should take the service to court. Jobserve was taken to court many years ago by employers saying their site gave recruiters unfair advantage and had to let employers in. Time them we think for recruiters to do the same for employer only services like this.

Clients and recruiters have co-existed for 100 years+, this site is what happens when you let techies out of the dark room. Probably they are ex-contractors who have hate issue with IT recruiters.

Why are recruiters so slow to pick up on recruitment seo?

2009-09-17T06:58:00.000-07:00

Ok yes I am biased because I am in the know, but after 20 years in the recruitment industry I am still keen to know about the next level of recruitment service that I can offer and/or service.

Why them am I among the very few who have taken up the challenge of Recruitment SEO?

All ideas welcome.

Is it just me?

2009-09-16T11:31:00.000-07:00

If I had a pound for each time I was asked can SEO work be validated I could have bought Sir Richard island from him by now!

With £3 billion in annual income being shared amongst SEO/SEM service providers yes it can be validated, yes it can be proven and yes the next time I am asked, the fee for the answer will be £1.

What is wrong with these people?

Web Developers & SEO

2009-09-16T11:10:00.000-07:00

I cant speak for my industry peers but in my company our Recruitment Website Developers are just as aware of SEO as our SEO workers. We find it better that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and cross train our co-workers to appreciate each others art.

In the 5 years we have been working in Recruitment SEO roughly 40% of our advances in SEO have come from our developers inventing some form of tool, or feature like our artificial SEO intelligence component.

At the same time the bulk of our technical enhancement work is specified from the SEO team, direct to the developers.

Some total numpty on the web likened developers to brickies and SEO workers to architects, with this kind of ego nonsense no wonder the client in most cases get a poor deal.

Site Design and SEO

2009-09-16T11:01:00.000-07:00

Too much gets written and/or said about site design and how it might or might not affect your recruitment website design. A good SEO worker can adjust and use compensation strategies if the design is anti-seo, flash increasingly can be understood and so can other forms of rich media.

Your branding is that, your branding and if that's what you chose that's what you can have, unless you want to change.

If your told otherwise, sound to me like an excuse to bump up your design bill, and or build costs for no reason other than more profit for the supplier.

Job Boards

2009-09-11T01:50:00.000-07:00

How do you know if your getting value for money?

Never, never, never pay for a trial. I have made job boards for 10 years and there is no way on earth the Job Board owner can justify the cost. The software which runs the site is designed to take on new users, there is no way that your trial account cost them money via the use of this software. Their cost is in the sales and marketing exercise they follow to get you on board.

If they are so confident of their boards ability to fill your jobs, they will give you free access if they don't they are asking you to pay the costs of their new business sales and marketing program and to fund the cost of their research and development to see if their job board works for you, your jobs & your sector.

Follow this simple test in Google to rate the board. If you place Accountants and you work say a geographical patch like Kent, then place a search in Google for accounting jobs in Kent and see of the job board ranks in the top 10 links. If it does not move on and don't waste your time on their job ad package. Even if the trial is free/application driven the site will not get the visitors you need to read you adverts so move on and don't waste your time.

Find out how many direct employers they have using their CV/Resume bank service. It has become common place now for internal recruiters and/or HR to look up the names of candidates you supply them in their Job board CV account and then tell you they have the CV direct.

Recruitment SEO Tip 1

2009-09-11T01:46:00.000-07:00

Having looked in depth at 2000+ recruiter websites in the past 2 years 99% had the following problems which if fixed would help to improve the sites to win more clients and quality candidate traffic at nill cost to the recruiter.

Take the flash intro page of your website, use flash sparingly on the home page instead.

Produce and/or publish a site map/site structure that allows the web spider to index your jobs, jobs are what you promote and Google will see this as relevant content.

Tune your page Titles, Keywords and Meta tags to reflect the on page relevancy or buy a content management tool for you website which can do this for you.

Promote your placement track record, its all-good copy for Google.

Promote examples of the candidate collateral you can provide to clients, again its all good relevant copy and when you run out of ideas for other copy it’s a welcome pot of recruitment SEO content gold.

That’s all for now folks, check back later for more or read about Recruitment SEO on our site here …………..

All new Recruitment SEO team

2009-09-11T01:39:00.000-07:00

Recruitwise Technology buys Attract HR and in the process Karen & Darren Revell take sole charge of operations. We wish the best of luck to our mate and best friend Adrian Corcoran who departs to join the ranks of the Headhunting elite and is now building a career and reputation in the investment markets search space.