META tags are a powerful tool that is used for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We’re glad to introduce dynamic META tags in our job board software.
What are META tags?
META tags are HTML elements which show up at the top of the HTML source code. There are two important META tags which search engines use: description and keywords.
META description
META descriptions are used in the search engine results to below the title of the page.
For example, in the picture below, the META description is show in the Google search results under the Sales Jobs – Sales Recruiters – Sales Careers Online link.
Effective SEO means that you should optimize this META description to make it attention grabbing so that users are more likely to click your link when they read the description.
META keywords
The second type of tag is the META keywords tag. This specifies the search keywords you’d like to rank higher on. Different search engines give this tag different weight. For example, Google relies more heavily on page content than on the META keywords, but they still carry some weight for SEO.
How do dynamic META tags work?
webJobs will dynamically adjust the META description fields of your site, and allow you to specify the META keywords in the administrative area. META descriptions for view job pages will be optimized to include a short description of the job and its location. Combined with our dynamic page titles, this maximizes SEO for your job board site. Now, instead of having search engines determine your descriptions for you, you can tell them what to show in the search results and attract more traffic with attention-grabbing descriptions.
How does this help make my site better?
We’ve been doing everything we can to improve your site’s search engine rankings. This is another great piece of the SEO puzzle. Not only will it help search engines figure out what search phrases relate to your site, but it’ll make you site look great when it does show up in search results. We hope you like it!
Employers who post jobs through your site are not techies, but at the same time they want to make their job ad attractive to prospective job seekers. Most of the things that make a job ad attractive (such as bolding, colors, fonts, etc) require HTML knowledge, this can be difficult. That’s why our job board software will now have a built in WYSIWYG editor to allow employers to easily make their job postings stand out.
Employers can add font types/colors, a background, bold/italics, bullets, numbered lists, and much more. This is a feature that your members are sure to love.
webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.
We’re wrapping up development of webJobs 3.2 with a few more exciting features that we’ll announce shortly. In the meantime, we’re happy to announce a couple great new features for the next version.
A Portuguese translation has been added to webJobs. It’s the sixth most popular language in the world, and for those of you running international sites, is a great addition.
Other improvements
We’ve also added the ability to set the number of featured employers that show up on the front page. Previously, you could only have one. Now you can choose to have as many as you’d like simply by changing a setting in the administrative area.
Stay tuned for more updates on the new release!
webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.
Leaving it to the Google, Yahoo, or Bing search bots to crawl all of your pages is a risky proposition. That’s why we’re including a new sitemap feature in the next version of our job board software. This will ensure that all of your pages are indexed by search engines, and give you greater exposure in search engine results.
Sitemaps are a list of all pages accessible within a particular site. webJobs 3.2 will automatically build an XML file readable by all major search engines. All you will need to do is tell the search engines to look at this file, and you’ll be doing all the heavy lifting for the search bots, instead of hoping that they crawl all your links correctly. Even more importantly, this will help get your pages crawled more quickly and start ranking in the search results.
webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.
We’re excited to announce another great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) feature in our job board software: SEO friendly titles!
How SEO friendly titles work
Site titles will now be dynamically generated for each page on the site. For example, let’s saying you site name is MyJobBoard, and you’re visiting the advanced search page. The title of that page will not become: Advanced Search | MyJobBoard.
More importantly, this comes in handy when viewing jobs. Titles for the view job format will be in the format – | site name. So, for example, let’s saying you’re viewing a job for a PHP programmer in Albany, NY. The title would not look like this: PHP Programmer – Albany, NY | MyJobBoard.
What does this mean for my site?
Simply put, this will help you rank better and increase traffic to your site. By having more diverse titles for your pages, search engine will index your pages more accurately.
The most important aspect of this feature, however, is the SEO friendly titles on the view job page. By having optimized view job pages, search engines are more likely to pick up your site for local searches. For example, let’s say that someone does a search for “php programmer albany ny” on Google. Because your site will have those keywords both in the title and the body of the page, you are much more likely to show up at the top of the search results!
webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.
Building a job board site from scratch is hard. We’ve been releasing several features that make getting your first members easier, and in webJobs 3.2 we’ll be adding yet another one: social bookmarking support.
What is social bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a method of sharing and organizing your bookmarks. It’s similar to bookmarking through your browser, only your bookmarks are public to others. This allows you to see other people’s bookmarks that have similar interests, and find new sites that you may have not known about before. This also allows other people to find your bookmarks which people can view and follow.
Why is it good?
There’s three main reasons social bookmarking is a great feature.
Traffic, traffic, traffic
Social bookmarking is a great (and free) way to get some extra traffic to your site, with almost no effort to you. By having your members bookmark jobs, it is a fast and viral way to promote your site.
Search engine optimization
Although not fully proven, social bookmarks have been linked to helping in your search engine rankings. The more people that bookmark your site, the more backlinks you build. And backlinks are the most important thing in building your rankings.
Engagement
Let your users share a job they found interest with a friend. They can post it in Facebook, or Twitter, or email, and easily show their friends a job that they found was a great fit.
What does it look like?
Here’s a screenshot of how this button will look. There are over 40 social bookmarking sites your members can share your site with!
Imagine if just a few of them post it to their Facebook or Twitter accounts. If a person has 50 friends of followers, 50 more people will see your site from that person’s news feed, and be more likely to click and view the site!
webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.
Is your job board getting a lot of emails or submissions from those pesky spammers? Well that’s all going to stop! CAPTCHA support has been added to webJobs 3.2 to all forms that automated bots may attack.
CAPTCHA forces a user to type in a verification code based on an image. Since these images are difficult for bots to decode, it serves as a great way to ensure that the person submitting the form is actually a human being.
The CAPTCHA support will be added to the following forms:
- Employer registration
- Job seeker registration
- Apply for job
- Contact us
You’ll be able to easily toggle which forms you’d like to have CAPTCHA support enabled for. Want to have it on the apply for job, but not employer/job seeker registration? You can do that with the click of a button in the administrative area.
webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.
Some boring job boards show you just the basic information on a particular job. The title, description, location, and other standard data is shown on almost every single job board. What separates your view job page from the rest? Not much. Until now, of course.
Add maps to your job board
The next release of our job script will have a new feature to add Google Maps support to the view employer and view job pages. When site visitors view a job or an employer, they can easily see the job location on a map. This integrates directly with Google Maps, so it’s possible to see how far they’ll need to travel to a potential job, and a quick view of the surrounding area.
This feature is unique to our job script and will really set you apart! Here’s an example of what it looks like:
webJobs 3.2 is planned for release in late December 2009.
Throughout parts of Sunday, November 9, and most of Monday, November 10, we experienced downtime on webscribble.com. For that, we apologize. This was an unusual event that resulted from a failed hard drive.
On Sunday we began seeing error messages on the main webscribble.com server indicating that some hardware may have been going bad. We immediately began transferring files to a new server. Unfortunately, the hard drive failure degraded quickly and we began to experience downtime while transferring files. It ultimately caused so many problems that our entire web server went down.
Luckily, we had a backup of all our files so it was just a matter of transferring them all. We finished transferring the files on Monday and simply waited for the DNS to propagate to the new server which took several hours. While we’re still working on fixing a few lingering issues, the majority of our site is back up and operational.
Again, we apologize for the unexpected downtime and any inconvenience while you tried to access our site yesterday. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
Just two months after webJobs 3.0 was released, we’re excited to announce the released of webJobs 3.1.
To upgrade webJobs follow the instructions in our documentation.
New Features
- iPhone compatibility
When a user logs on to your webJobs site using an iPhone he will see a iPhone-compatible version of the site. The site and navigation have been tailored specifically for the iPhone screen size.
- New theme system
You can now make new looks for webJobs without overwriting any existing templates. New themes make it easy for you to try out a new look or change between existing looks. It also allows you to share themes with others in the community.
- Ability to charge for featured jobs
The featured job on the front page can now be charged for. If you choose to use this feature, only those who pay for the featured job will be shown there. Instead of rotating between random employers, webJobs will rotate between those who have paid for the upgrade.
- Backfill jobs from Indeed
Don’t ever worry about having an empty database ever again! webJobs will feed in jobs from Indeed to fill in your search results wherever yours are lacking, making your job board look more complete.
- Ability for job seekers to apply for a job without signing in