Today there are more job boards than ever which increases competition for attracting relevant jobseekers. With so many job boards available ensuring your job board can be seen by search engines is vitally important for your job board’s success.

Research has shown that 67% of jobseekers start their job hunt on search engines. Without a well planned and sustained SEO strategy it could prove difficult to achieve your desired search engine rankings. With search being such an important channel for new user acquisition it requires constant focus.

For many SEO can seem like a daunting task to manage, but there steps you can take to optimise your job board to ensure that you have the best possible chance of being indexed in search result pages.

Optimise Job Listing pages

Compiling relevant, optimised information under one URL, which a user can access in as few clicks as possible dramatically improves your chances of conversion, whilst creating a positive user experience.

Ensure that you add content to your listing pages based around what your users are searching for. This can be in the form of sector hubs. These allow the opportunity for your job board to specialise in particular areas by compiling similar roles or industry’s with relevant information on separate optimised pages.

Another option is to create dynamic job titles; these are pages containing listings of popular job titles outside of your taxonomy and can enrich the taxonomy exposed for job searchers and SEO without over complicating your job board taxonomy.

You can also optimise all listing pages by creating rich introduction text and targeting the following page elements to ensure they are relevant to your industry and audience:-

Page titles – This will appear within the page tab as well as within search result page listings. You are afforded 70 characters for this aspect, however try to fit your keyword within the first few words for maximum SEO value.

Meta description – Meta descriptions appear in search results as a description of the page. You have 200 characters for your Meta description so ensure that you include a relevant keyword and work your page description around that phrase.

H1 tags – H1 Tags have also proven their weight within the search engine results, ensure that you enlist a relevant, searchable keyword to ensure visibility to search engine crawlers.

It is important to review these aspects of your pages on regular intervals to ensure that they stay relevant to your industry.

With mobile devices playing an increasing role within the average job search, there are further considerations that can be made to target a mobile audience. Google blend search results with where the mobile searcher is at the time. Therefore pages with rich location data are more likely to appear in mobile searches. This is made easier with the Madgex geo location search, which generates browse URL’s at a localised level to aid your mobile SEO efforts.

Relevant content, blog posts and articles

SEO has seen huge changes over the past couple of years, but the one factor that has emerged as un-changing in its effectiveness is quality articles and blog posts. In fact the majority of your impressions will usually come from blog posts and articles, well-established blogs have been proven to increase traffic by up to 434%.

It is important to remember the success of your site now directly relates to the quality of your content. Unoriginal and un-useful content can actually serve to harm your site. Learn about your users, what do they search for? What do they need to know? It’s also important to think socially, produce content which your users want to share. Madgex article pages have social bookmarks to encourage this process, allowing users to share your content without even having to leave the page.

If you have a blog run on a separate URL ensure that you link articles to a relevant landing page on your job board, to guarantee you benefit from your content within the search results pages.

It is important to also link all your articles and blog posts to the authors Google+ account.  Pages which are linked with a Google+ profile may display the author’s picture next to the page within the search results; this allows Google to confirm that the information has come from a trustworthy source. This can be done easily through the Madgex CMS when adding an article.

In addition you can add your Google+ company profile page as the publisher of your job board direct in the CMS.  This let’s Google know that your job board site is part of your brand.  Any +1’s from your websites are aggregated to your brand page, and it increases the possibility of getting a “knowledge panel” for branded searches.

Keyword stuffing and unnatural backlinks

Several tactics that were once utilised to help the crawl up the search results are now causing more harm than good. Avoid keyword stuffing your content, this involves loading your page with keywords in order to try and manipulate the search rankings. This has a negative impact on user experience, which is a factor Google is trying their best to preserve. By focusing on providing useful, quality content your page should gain rank naturally.

Backlinks are still one of the most relevant ways of gaining page rank, but they are a tool that has been heavily abused in the past. Sites that naturally link to each other due to content or industry are helpful, but chasing sites to link to your content is becoming risky practise. Sites with unnatural links are being heavily penalised by Google with whole sites being stricken from search results.

Create content which is relevant to the site you are writing for. Think of naturally linking topics and ideas, to share on sites relevant to your industry. Building good quality relevant content that other relevant sites want to link to increases your authority and help you stay high within the SERP’s.

If your content has already been penalised for unnatural links, this can be rectified either using webmaster tools to identify the links and using the link disavow tool to ask Google to not index that particular link, or you can contact the site directly and ask them to remove the troublesome link.

SEO can seem like a daunting task, but the main idea to remember is that Google’s focus is user experience. They want to ensure that their users are being directed to the most relevant and useful sites from their searches, their main focus is on answering user’s questions.

Good SEO is always preceded by thorough research to pin point your sites most relevant search terms. After that great content should be your main goal and primary focus.