What is SEO and what are the benefits?
SEO stands for search engine optimisation.
Search engine optimisation is all about making your site content more available for search engine 'spiders' to find, and to make sure that each page performs as well as it possibly can when users do searches. Spiders are the algorithms that Google and other search engines use to find and index web pages. Data returned by spiders is analysed to determine the ranking of your page, and consequently how prominently it will be listed on search engines finding.
SEO is not something that you have to pay for - in its purest form it is the result of having interesting focused content. and a page which is judged by a search engine like Google to be the most interesting page for a particular search can have dramatic effects on the way that your orgainsation is perceived. It is fantastic marketing - potentially costing nothing.
'I'll never reach first place on Google'
Organisations often think that it is impossible for them ever to appear at the top of search engine listings, but they'd be wrong. You will never get to the top of a search on the word 'job', nor probably for 'job in London'. 'Music teacher job in London' might be a different thing - a place in the top five would be very achievable. This effect is sometimes called the 'long tail', amd means in effect that while there may not be that many jobs for music teachers in London, or people looking for them, the internet has the power to help you reach both, and that there could be a nice strand of business in music teacher jobs in London, if you choose capitalize on it. Good SEO is the key that can help you reach these relatively modest but quite profitable goals.
How is SEO done?
There are many ways in which a page can be optimised, many of which Jobshout will do for you automatically. You can also optimize the system to perform in exactly the way you would like.
Some SEO practitioners try to outsmart search engines and pretend to be something they are not. They are permanently at war with Google & Co, so that what worked yesterday may not work today. This is known as 'black hat' SEO.
White hat techniques are the polar opposite of black hat.: you improve your ranking by having good content, geared towards likely searches, have as many relevant inbound links as possible from good quality sites and update the site and placing keywords in relevant places. This makes the spiders find new material to index and therefore push the rankings up.
Grey hat is… guess what? They utilise a bit of everything to improve their ratings. There isn't a definitive way to be but if you don't want to be banned it is probably best to stay with the guidelines from Google & Co. That's the Jobshour approach. Basically we automate as far as possible what is a very detailed and often rather tedious job..
How does Google work?
At the simplest level Google uses a system called PageRank , for which there is apublicly available specification. This system looks at how many incoming links a site has, and counts each as a vote in favour. Each link that your page gets is almost like a vote for your web site but it is better to have a higher ranked page linking to yours.
Google also ranks your site for content and updates. Page rank isn't the single most important aspect but if you add content then other pages will want to link to you which in turn will push up the rank of you own page. There are also many, many technical secrets that Google will not reveal and which are, in any event constantly changing.
Further reading…
Job boards for recruitment agencies
How is RSS valuable to the recruitment i...
Frequently asked questions
How to get your site found
Ethical SEO methods
Jobshout and web marketing - answers to ...
Rant on the Agency Workers Bill
Google's PageRank system
Using the Jobshout Styled Text Editor
Ethical and unethical SEO
Unethical SEO methods
Building links
Jobshout deploys state of the art techno...
Elements to avoid when creating or updat...
Interview with the CEO of Jobshout on ce...
Targeting passive candidates
