How to get your site found.

Businesses who want to get found on the web often spend lots of money trying to optimize their sites।

Getting to the top of relevant search engine page rankings is generally regarded as the holy grail of internet marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) - the way you get there - as a black art practised by the web equivalent of a Jedi warrior. In fact it is not that complicated. Here's how you should start:

Optimize your pages:

When you put a job on your website, you need to make sure that search engines like the way it looks। Normally when you put a job on the web the hidden things that give your page the edge go unchanged. If you want to do the things that Jobshout does automatically, then you would pay attention to the page title, the page description, the page keywords and the page URL.Would you do that every time? Definitely not. But with Jobshout you don't have to - the system does it all by itself!

Have great content:

Search engines are looking for great content, so try to give it to them। As well as posting jobs on Jobshout, you could, for instance use Jobshout Pages to add other content to your site too. If you are a niche market agency, then make it relevant to the sectors you serve.

The more content you have, the more likely you are to get found। It's as simple as that।

Have internal link:

Get those search engines moving around your site by having lots of internal links. Relevant internal links give you rankings. Jobshout creates them automatically.

Let search engines navigate:

You can have a back-end database for your job site without your jobs being searchable. It's quite common to have lots of wonderful content that never gets found, because of your site navigation.

Needless to say that's a problem you will never have with Jobshout - we make sure your pages get found again and again.

Keep it simple:

Simplicity can often be the best policy, especially on the web. Smart techniques can often get in the way of search engine rankings. using JavaScript to control your menus, for instance, could well result in them not being crawlable, so beware. If in doubt, use a text browser such as Lynx to get a good idea of how your pages will look to the search engine spiders.

Tell the world about your site:

You can tell search engines that your site is there. Submit it to Google, MSN and other search engines. You should also submit it to directories such asthe Open Directory Project and Yahoo and other industry specific directories.

There may also be other sites out there who would be interested to know that your site is there. Let them know about you as well.

Now you can use Jobshout to get the ball rolling.

Choose your words carefully:

When you are adding jobs to your site, think about the words that your potential visitors might use when searching and include them prominently, and possibly more than once in your text. Put the most important terms in your page headings.

Once you have done this, Jobshout will ensure that these terms are made really prominent when search engine 'bots' come looking at your site.

Get linked up:

Each page that links to yours can count as a vote in favour of it, so it pays to get as many external links as you can. You can ask people to link to you, or to exchange links. You could also consider supplying other sites with content, such as articles, or press releases in return for a link.

You could also consider setting up a blog (weblog). This could contain lots of search-engine-tasty content, and, of course link to your website.

Text it:

Sites that rely on images or Flash to display important textual content don't do well - search engines can't read images. Make sure that your most significant content is in text form.

Jobshout uses best practice techniques to publish your content and have it look great.

Want to know more?

We are happy to answer any queries you may have about improving the performance of your recruitment site on the web. Email me steve.gibson@jobshout.co.uk. Please be patient if I don't reply immediately - I get a lot of mail! But I will get back to you, I promise.

How important is your website's content?

It is a mistake to think that applicants have to be people who are looking for jobs. Yet it is one that most recruiters make. Strange, when experience shows that the best candidates are often those who are doing well where they are, are getting well remunerated and are not actively looking for work. They might still be interested in a position you are handling - it's just that they are much less likely to find out about it.

Traditionally recruiters used printed media to find candidates, advertising in the local paper, the national press or trade magazines, depending on the vacancy. That still happens, of course, but the power of the printed job ad is getting slowly eroded, as more and more people switch to the internet as their preferred way to job hunt.

Thursday, the dog-day of the week, emerges as the prime day for jobseeker activity on the web, with another spike on the graph on Sundays. So how do todays folk jobseek?

Research shows that there are three main ways. Firstly we have the web equivalent of print media - going to the website of your favourite magazine or newspaper. What that might be clearly varies from sector to sector. A good example would the strong position occupied by the Guardian job site (jobs.guardian.co.uk) in fields like design, media, health and education. In sectors like these, this site would be the first port of call for many jobhunters.

Next we have job boards. There are many of these and they vary in size and focus - from the very general, like Monster to industry specific ones like www.myaccountancyjobs.com. They have grown massively over recent years, and have made a profound difference to the process of recruitment, but they can seem big and anonymous, and, as such, not too appealing.

Thirdly we have recruitment agency websites, where, hopefully a sense of personality shines through. The appeal of an agency is that you still get to deal with a person quite early on in the process.

How do you get to find an agency site if you don't already know that it's there? You could get referred from a paid ad that the agency has taken on another site you have visited - Guardian Jobs, for instance. Alternatively you might have dealt with that agency in the past, heard about it by reputation, or seen a print ad. Or maybe you just found it by doing a web search.

Getting found in web searches is a very critical topic for recruitment agencies. How often you are found is a reflection of the prominence of your site on the web. The more likely people are to stumble upon your site, the more applicants you will get. And, critically, some of them will be people who were not actively looking for jobs in the first place, people who, as we noted above, can be some of the best applicants that you get.

So how do you get this "accidental" traffic? By getting other sites to link to yours, and by having as much relevant content as possible.

As far as content is concerned, the most important thing that a recruitment agency can do is to have its job details online - both current ones and filled ones - and to make sure that they are all optimized for search engines. This is imply fantastic content which could well be found when people are trawling the web in search of content which is relevant to their job. Similarly, creating other pages with interesting content will tend to draw the right kind of people to your site. Jobshout makes content management easy for recruitment agencies.

So, the message is: make the most of your website and you will start to attract applicants who were not jobhunting in the first place, as well as those who were.