I’ve recently talked about building your Talent Network and the value that it can provide as a inexpensive recruiting channel that can produce results for your recruiting marketing organization.  In this blog post, I would like to talk about a similar inexpensive recruiting channel that can have a great impact if done right and that’s Recruitment SEO.

First, let’s define what Recruitment SEO is and why it’s important.  Recruitment SEO is the practice of optimizing your recruiting and jobs content so that it is found by interested job seekers who search Google and other search engines.  This is important because if you optimize your content correctly, you should be able to good traffic to your Jobs Site and more applicants coming in from search engines.

Best of all, once you get the technology and processes in place to continuously create new pages and content on your site, you should see the number of applicants through these channels continually increase for little to no extra cost to your organization (while hopefully being able to cut down costs to other recruiting channels.)

While building out a Recruitment SEO process may seem daunting at first, it can be relatively easy to do.  Here are some Recruitment SEO tips to live by that can help you attract more candidates when you build your SEO jobs site:

Every Job as a New Page:  First things first, you need to make sure the content that you create the most is optimized.  In this case, this is your jobs.  Whenever you create a new job requisition, make sure that you create a new single webpage for that position on your Jobs or SEO site.  Every job that you recruit for should have it’s own page with it’s own keywords and optimization.

Keywords in the Page Title:  As you are creating new webpages for all your jobs, it’s important to make sure that you are choosing keywords that candidates might search for in their job search process.  Make sure to include the job title, your company name and potentially the location of the job.  But try not to make the page title too long as the importance in terms of SEO is diminished with every subsequent keyword.  Here’s an example of a page title:

Optimized Content:  The best Career Sites don’t just have jobs on them but have interactive recruiting content as well.  This can be in the form of videos, blog posts and other recruiting content.  Make sure that all of your content is keyword optimized to drive traffic to this content (and in turn your jobs).  Most of this starts with focusing on your blog and content titles as this is typically what will appear in the Page Title of your webpage.  Most CMS’s will enable you to determine this page title.

Social Network Capability:  What better way to spread your content than making it easy for candidates to share via their social networks.  This is important to SEO for two main reasons.  First, the more your content and jobs are shared, the more likely it is that this content will be linked to.  Inbound Links are the most important aspect as SEO so the easier you make it to share and link your content the better.  Second, with social networks growing in influence, search engines are taking notice and integrating networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google + into search results.  The more updates of your content the better it will be for driving candidates to your Jobs Site in the future.

Meta Tag Descriptions:  Depending on the system you have for changing and creating new content on your Career Site, you probably have the ability to add a Meta Tag Description to every webpage.  While the Page Title is what Google looks at to determine what keywords a webpage is about (and displays it as the link in search results), the Meta Tag description determines what is included as the description in search results.  If you don’t determine a meta tag description, search engines will just display the first text it finds from the webapge.  See below for example of page titles vs. meta tag descriptions:

To take advantage of the meta tag description, you can include things like perks for the position, salary or other reasons that an interested job seeker should click on the link for the position.  By doing this, you should see your click-throughs increase, however, make sure to keep your description to under roughly 155 characters as it will cut off at that point.

If you focus on these 5 things with your Career and Jobs Site SEO, you will see more traffic from Google and other search engines and eventually see more applicants from this channel.  The key is that you need to create processes that enable you to optimize all your recruiting content including jobs, every time you start a job distribution campaign.

The more content you produce and optimize for SEO, the higher your content will appear in search rankings and the more applicants you will get from this recruiting channel.