We’re excited to announce the addition of the ability to post news articles to your site. This allows you to keep your site visitors up to date on new developments with your site, and keep them engaged. The news system allows you to enter a title, write the body of the text, and select a publishing date. You can also choose a custom permalink to help with SEO.

We hope you like the new addition!

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Many popular job boards have a resources section with helpful articles on how to write effective resumes, or hiring tips for employers. We’ve added support for creating articles in webJobs, along with an entire article section that your visitors can read through.

Our administrative interface allows you to create a title for the article, and write up the article using our built in WYSIWYG editor. You can also choose your own META tags and permalink to optimize the articles for search engines, and add another great way to get listed by Google and others. You can also categorize articles into different sections. For example, you may want a separate category for job seekers and employers.

Once posted, the articles show up on your site in the resources section, and can be easily found by your visitors!

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webJobs is getting a whole lot more multilingual. In 3.4, we’re adding translations for: German, Italian, Hebrew, Bulgarian and Latvian. This is addition to the languages we already have, which are: English (of course), Spanish, and Dutch.

This means your users will be able to view your site in all those languages (if you want them to). The translations are especially useful to our international customers who don’t want to translate the software text themselves. Hope you like it!

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1. Make your page titles count
   Page titles are probably the single most important on-page factor in search engine optimization for your job board. Make sure the title is short and sweet, and includes your keywords. For example, if you have a local job board for programmers, make your page title something like: Programming jobs in Albany, NY – MySiteName. How many job boards are there that compete at the local level for a specific profession? Probably not many. This gives you an opportunity to rank better than the big guys by focusing on your targeted audience. If you’re running a nationwide job board similar to Monster, then focus on more obscure keywords, because it’s too hard to compete with their advertising budgets. Use the Google Keyword Tool to find keywords that are relevant, but are less competitive.
2. Make your other page titles count too!
   A common mistake is to only optimize the front page. That’s great and all, but if you only optimize one page, then you’ll only rank well on one page. Typical job boards have thousands of pages which the search engines crawl. There’s no reason you can’t rank on those too. Most of the pages that make up your job board site will be….jobs! So it makes sense to optimize the page titles for the individual job pages. If an employer from Troy, NY posts a job titled “PHP Programmer Needed”, use that information! Make your page title something like PHP Programmer Needed Troy, NY – MySiteName. It’s like having your own customers do SEO for you!
3. Check your keyword density
   Keyword density is the percentage of times you use the keywords/phrases that you’re trying to optimize in relation to all of the words on the page. Let’s say you use the keyword one, and you have 100 other words on the page. Your keyword density would be 1%. That’s a good number to have. Don’t go over 1-2% of the search engines will know you’re spamming. Keep the density around 1% for all the keywords/phrases that you want to optimize. To make keyword analysis easy, there’s a handy tool that does that.
4. Use heading tags
   Make sure to use h1, h2, and h3 tags around your anchor text. Google weighs text around heading tags more heavily than in the regular text body.
5. Build relevant backlinks
   Backlinks are the crux of SEO. Google and other search engines determine your ranking in the search engine results by seeing what backlinks you have for specific anchor text. Anchor text is the text around which a link tag is wrapped around. For example, if you have a link such as: <a href=”http://mysite.com”>jobs in albany</a>, the anchor text would be jobs in albany. The more backlinks you have with that anchor text, the better. But quantity isn't always enough. Google knows if the page that is linking to you has relevance to your keywords. For example, if you buy a sponsored text ad (which some do), but it's on a totally irrelevant site that has nothing to do with jobs, Google will not weigh that backlink very heavily. On the other hand, if you get a link from a page that talks about employment or jobs, it will be weighed much more heavily. So it's not only about quantity, but quality too.
6. Add dynamic META descriptions
   META descriptions are picked up by search engines, and are used as the text for the description of your site in the search engine results. For example, you can see the META description under this site's page title Sales Jobs - Sales Recruiters - Sales Careers Online

   

   META description do little for your search rankings, but do a lot for getting people to click. If a person searching for something seems a captivating description, they're more likely to click on that page. So make this count too. Create an attention grabbing headline for your main page, but don't neglect your other pages either. Take part of an employers job ad, and use that as the META description for that job ad page. It'll show up in the search results, and look catchier than the random text Google chooses if it can't find a META description.

7. Create a robots.txt
   Create a robots.txt file in your root folder and tell the search engines where you want them to crawl.
8. Create a sitemap
   All the major search engines now accept XML sitemaps, so be sure to create one for them to see. Generating sitemaps gives the search engines a list of URLs you want them to crawl. Don't leave it up to the search bots to find all your pages, it'll take longer and they could miss something. Feed it right to them, and be sure to include this line in your robots.txt:
   Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
9. Update your site with new content often
   Search engines love information. They'll visit and crawl your site often if they see that your pages are changing in content. So update your content frequently.
10. Make sure your URLs are SEO friendly
    A lot of PHP job board software packages out there have URLs that are very hard to read for search engines. For example, an "unfriendly" URL might look something like http://www.example.com/index.php?page=view_job&job_id=12034. This confuses the crawlers, because it thinks index.php is just one page. When the job_id starts changing (to link to other job ads), search bots don't realize it, and crawl just index.php, and think they're done.

    Make sure that your site's URLs look static to the search bots. That is, instead of having the URL mentioned above, make it look like this instead: http://www.example.com/p/view_job/job_id/12034-php-programmer-albany. This way, Google will crawl all of your pages with ease.

    Take a look at the URL of this blog post. Yours should look similar!

11. Fix your broken links
    Broken links are not only embarrassing, but search engines hate them as well. Don't send the search bots to pages that don't exist. You might hurt their feelings.




Guess what!

Our job board software has all of these features, and our clients are very successful in implementing them for their career websites!.

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We’re happy to announce yet another new version of webJobs today! webJobs 3.3 brings a few great new features we’ve been blogging about over the last several weeks:

• Coupon codes/promotions
  Run promotions on your site and give employers coupon codes to use towards their purchase.
• Mass apply to jobs
  Allows job seekers to apply to many jobs at the same time with the click of a button.
• Spanish language pack
• Dutch language pack
• Various small bug fixes

We hope you like it!

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We’ve been working with quite a few translators to push out new language packs, and we’re glad to announce that Spanish and Dutch are ready for release! Your members will now be able to view the site in either language by selecting it from the language dropdown menu.

More translations are currently in progress, so we’ll keep you posted as soon as more become available.

webJobs 3.3 is planned for release in late March 2010.

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Acme Corp. wants to post ten jobs and wants a price break. Want to give them a free one to keep them happy?

Run an ad for your job board in your local paper and offer a coupon promotion for the month of March. Want to track the results?

A commonly requested feature has been the ability to add coupon codes which employers could use when buying job postings or resume views. Now, it’s finally here!

What will coupon codes do?

The premise behind coupon codes is pretty simple, and works just like coupon codes you use at most online stores. Employers will be able to redeem a coupon when placing their order, which will reduce their total by the amount specified for that coupon. This is also a great way to allow certain employers to perpetually have discounted prices. For example, many job board owners have asked us for a way to give them larger clients price breaks since they post so many jobs. Now you can!

How do they work?

We’ve made this feature incredibly flexible. The basic functionality allows you to create a coupon code (presumably some type of obscure code that’ll be hard to guess unless you give it out to someone). You can make the discount a fixed value (for example, $100 off) or a percentage (for example, 10% off).

That’s the basics, but we didn’t stop there. Our coupon code feature allows you to restrict the coupon to only work with certain billing items. For example, say you want to run a promotion for your 5 job postings package, but not anything else. Simply check the billing items you’d like this coupon to work for, and you’re done!

You may also want to set an expiration date on the coupon. Let’s say you want a monthly promotion that expires at the end of the month. Simply set the expiration date in the field, and your coupon will automatically stop working on that day.

You can even restrict the number of uses of the coupon. Want to offer a promotion that’ll only work for the first 100 customers that use it? All you need to do is set the number of uses field to 100, and the coupon automatically expires after 100 people have used it!

What will this do for my site?

This is a great feature that allows you to run promotions on your site, which will hopefully generate some buzz and help you bring in new business. It’s also a great way for you to offer your big clients a price break for being loyal customers. The flexibility of this feature makes the different ways you can use it endless, and we hope you love it!

webJobs 3.3 is planned for release in late March 2010.

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Imagine you’re a job seeker looking for a job in the medical field. Your search yields many jobs you’re interested in and you save them for future reference. Now it’s time to apply. Applying to each job would be time consuming, wouldn’t it?

Many job seekers apply to dozens of job openings at the same time while browsing job boards. It can get a little tedious to apply to each individual one. That’s why we’ve added a feature to allow job seekers to conveniently apply to all of their saved jobs at the same time!

Now, all job seekers need to do is save a job they’re planning to apply to, and they’ll be able to apply to all of them at the same time. It provides a great convenience for your job seekers, and saves them lots of time.

After selecting the jobs they wish to apply to, job seekers simply need to click on Apply to selected jobs. webJobs will then ask them to choose one of their available cover letters and resumes, and send those to all of the employers that the job seeker applied to.

webJobs 3.3 is planned for release in late March 2010.

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On Friday, we pushed out a maintenance release for webJobs. Version 3.2.2 fixes some issues that have been reported to us by e-mail, forums, and chat. Here they are:

• Fixed: When a new logo uploaded, only Orange Green theme is affected
• Fixed: Pagination on view employer page is broken when SEO URLs are enabled
• Fixed: When a language is deleted, it is sometimes still visible in language dropdown
• Fixed: State field doesn’t affect Indeed results on advanced search page
• Fixed: HTML tags are not stripped in the XML feeds for Indeed, Simplyhired, Googlbase and Oodle
• Fixed: Employer’s contacts table doesn’t show up if Google Maps is not displayed on the page
• Fixed: Billing history form redirects to a blank form (without user id) when an entry is deleted
• Fixed: Edit job page (in smartway) outputs “ID is required” error

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