- 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. - 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! - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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.
- Create a robots.txt
Create a robots.txt file in your root folder and tell the search engines where you want them to crawl. - 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 - 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. - 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!
- 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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