Categories
Blogs Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO SERP

Recruitment SEO: Googoe Index Saturaton

Imagine the following scenario:

First in Google for your keyword!
Your web site has one page, and the site is with that page linked first for your main keyword. One would say this is the search engine optimisation done very well. The site is first for its keyword. What else can one ask for?

First in Google for all your keywords!
When will realise there are multiple keywords your site need to be first for in Google searches. One page will not make it easier. You will create one page for each keyword. It usually starts with the page for ‘Clients’ and ‘Job Seekers’. You will optimise each of those pages to get on top of Google searches for your search keyword of the search phrase. Most recruitment agencies would naturally want to be ranked on top for the phrase “Recruitment Agency” – to attract Clients. Then there are similar keywords targeted to Job Seekers like “Jobs in IT”, or whatever your agency specialises in. If you get first for those search keywords – have you done your SEO good? Of course, you are first in Google for all your main keywords.

Highly ranked in Google for every single one of your jobs, pages and blog posts (and having tons of them!)
In this scenario, you are not really first for search phrases like the usual hot one “Recruitment Agency”. Instead, all your jobs are on top or close to the top for ANY relevant keyword to that job. You cannot really define what keywords you are highly ranked for since it depends on what jobs you have advertised on your site at that time.

If you don’t have jobs in a particular industry, or for some reason, they don’t rank as well as your competition, you write blogs about those industries. In essence, what you are doing is you are creating more content and publishing it on more pages on your web site. Those new pages then start ranking for the keywords you are writing about. What you are doing is you are saturation Google index and the Google search results pages with your entries. This enables you to capture traffic for any search phrase you are interested in. Your web site becomes an inbound marketing platform that is quite simple to use. Need some Java developers? Just write about the Java development on your site. Get that content in Google index, and anyone searching for Java Development will see your site listed in the Google search results. If you write interesting articles and they are nicely presented in the search results – anyone looking for a Java development will come to your site!

This is what I call Google Saturation. It is a process of submitting the content on your web site to Google, for various search phrases you are interested in. Notice the difference between the top two scenarios. We don’t have the ”Main Keyword(s)” we want to rank for on top of the search engines.

The table below shows the Google Saturation of 29 recruitment agency web sites and www.JobsBlog.ie as a marker. The number next to each web site shows the total number of pages Google has from each web site.

Note that this table is the first on in this Recruitment SEO series that show really drastic differences between the 29 randomly chosen recruitment agency web sites.

URL Google Index
http://www.cpl.ie  496000
http://www.morganmckinley.ie  291000
http://www.hays.ie  184000
http://www.eolas.ie  10700
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie  7580
http://www.icds.ie  6980
http://www.brightwater.ie  5680
http://www.peoplegroup.ie  5490
http://www.rftgroup.ie  4810
http://www.Vantage.ie  4660
http://www.jobsblog.ie  4430
http://www.frsrecruitment.com  2390
http://www.hrm.ie  783
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie  610
http://www.careerwise.ie  602
http://www.Stelfox.ie  601
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie  533
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie  528
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie  471
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie  446
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie  302
http://www.gempool.ie  190
http://www.Recruiters.ie  189
http://www.placeme.ie  145
http://www.hudson.ie  138
http://www.harmonics.ie  100
http://www.Brompton.ie  62
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie  37
http://www.solasconsulting.ie  5
http://www.Sigmar.ie  n/f

By looking at your web site visitors logs in a program like Google Analytics you will notice that even linked first for your most important keyword it still delivers traffic that is a very small percentage of your total visitor’s traffic from Google for all the other keywords combined. If you have a high Google Saturation – meaning hundreds of thousands of pages featured in the Google search results, the traffic for your main 10 most important keywords brings less than 1% of your total traffic! And as such, the ranking for one individual keyword becomes irrelevant to the overall traffic of the whole site. If you want to make a success in capturing the largest possible amount of free traffic, this is definitely the route to go. Think big! THINK BIG!

Google Saturation is one of the key factors of SEO. It is also the most often ignored one.

Categories
Internet Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment SEO: Links are the currency on the web!

Search engine optimisation is in essence a huge amount of statistical analysis and a lot of trials and errors. There is not book about it, since by the time it gets printed it is completely outdated. There are two SEO Rules:

Content is King
Links are the currency on the web

Nothing else matters as much to your web site ranking as the content you have on your site and the links from other web sites to your site. If you get those two things right – you will get the free traffic from the search engines. Relevant traffic – people searching for what your web site text copy is about.

We looked at the Google PR, MozRank and Alexa rank of the 29 recruitment agencies. Today we will look at the links towards those 29 web sites. The numbers next to each recruitment agency web site show the total number of links found on the web pointing to each domain. The more links to it – the more search engines ‘Like’ the domain, and hence show it’s web pages higher in the search engine results.

This site JobsBlog.ie is within them again as a tracker for performance.

URL

SEOmoz Link Count

www.hays.ie 117643
www.cpl.ie 59629
www.morganmckinley.ie 34688
www.eolas.ie 8333
www.brightwater.ie 6766
www.jobsblog.ie 6552
www.peoplegroup.ie 4235
www.hudson.ie 3357
www.careerwise.ie 2689
www.3qrecruitment.ie 1707
www.Sigmar.ie 1630
www.hrm.ie 1453
www.EdenRecruitment.ie 766
www.rftgroup.ie 580
www.collinsmcnicholas.ie 578
www.icds.ie 539
www.frsrecruitment.com 491
www.qedrecruitment.ie 358
www.accountancysolutions.ie 318
www.Recruiters.ie 305
www.gempool.ie 189
www.Stelfox.ie 187
www.recruitmentplus.ie 177
www.Vantage.ie 149
www.harmonics.ie 141
www.solasconsulting.ie 110
www.MatrixRecruitment.ie 92
www.placeme.ie 25
www.enterprisepeople.ie 23
www.Brompton.ie 12

Any surprises above?

Categories
Internet Recruitment Recruitment Agency Search Engine SEO

Recruitment SEO: Alexa traffic ranking

After ranking the Irish recruitment agency web sites based on the Google PageRank and less known SEOmoz rank here is the one most marketers are familiar with: Alexa. What Alexa does exactly and how does it do it was a topic of a debate from the day Alexa have started publishing the traffic ranking scores. Some people like it, and some don’t. As with most of the ranking algorithms, it is usually the people featured on top that agree with Alexa’s results, and the ones ranked towards the bottom would have a different opinion. But that is the nature of every semi obscure ranking system. And in the world of SEO, nothing is really that straight forward!

What does Alexa web site ranking number mean?

What does Alexa say about their ranking number? They say that the Alexa number associated with each web site is its ranking in the overall global web traffic. So a site with the Alexa’s No. 1 is the web site with the most visitors, and as the ranking number grows the lower you are on the list of the sites based on the number of visitors. So the smaller the Alexa ranking score, the more traffic your web site has (according to Alexa).

So here is the same list of the 29 Irish recruitment agencies and the www.JobsBlog.ie within them so you can use it as a benchmark. There are some results that are just “screaming out” in this Alexa web site traffic ranking list. I’ll let you be the judge of it yourself:

URL

Alexa Rank

http://www.cpl.ie

291100

http://www.morganmckinley.ie

336866

http://www.hays.ie

803824

http://www.brightwater.ie

874987

http://www.peoplegroup.ie

1274311

http://www.Vantage.ie

1441180

http://www.eolas.ie

1769945

http://www.jobsblog.ie

1817137

http://www.icds.ie

1854172

http://www.frsrecruitment.com

1997184

http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie

2428334

http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie

2595232

http://www.hrm.ie

2811817

http://www.recruitmentplus.ie

3457055

http://www.careerwise.ie

4564311

http://www.Stelfox.ie

4828821

http://www.Recruiters.ie

4831059

http://www.rftgroup.ie

5312061

http://www.3qrecruitment.ie

6804532

http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie

8119435

http://www.accountancysolutions.ie

8669731

http://www.gempool.ie

8720144

http://www.solasconsulting.ie

9507536

http://www.hudson.ie

12469855

http://www.enterprisepeople.ie

12578768

http://www.placeme.ie

17197072

http://www.qedrecruitment.ie

18446204

http://www.harmonics.ie

18661080

http://www.Sigmar.ie n/f
http://www.Brompton.ie n/f

Why are there two web sites that have no data in Alexa? I have absolutely no clue.

Now, if you compare the Alexa ranking above and the two lists we have looked at before: The Google PageRank and SEOmoz MozRank, there are some obvious similarities. It is especially obvious towards the tops of the lists. The same recruitment agency web sites feature the top spots, and there are no “Big Surprises” there. If your site is high in one listing, it is high in the other two as well.

Categories
Internet Job Site Recruitment Recruitment Agency SEO

Recruitment SEO: 29 Irish recruitment web sites SEO Ranking by mozRank

102 people have visited the Recruitment SEO: Google PR yesterday, where I listed the 29 recruitment agency web sites based on their Google PageRank. It even stirred some comments and discussions in social media. Mostly on LinkedIn as it is expected since the recruitment social network LinkedIn is a “natural habitat” for an average recruiter.

Google PR has its quirkiness. It is fantastic and horrible at the same time. It needs to be looked at relative to each web site as opposed to the absolute ranking number. That makes it almost useless to the people outside of the search engine optimisation industry. This is why so many people dismiss Google PageRank. It is not the easiest to “get” actually.

Today we will look at the same group of the 29 recruitment agency web sites and this blog www.JobsBlog.ie and compare them a different by third party ranking mechanism. We will look at the ranking by the SEOmoz: MozRank. Here is what the SEOmoz site says about the MozRank:

What is MozRank?

MozRank represents a link popularity score. It reflects the importance of any given web page on the Internet. Pages earn MozRank by the number and quality of other pages that link to them. The higher the quality of the incoming links, the higher the MozRank.

How is MozRank Scored?

We calculate this score on a logarithmic scale between 1 and 10. Thus, it’s much easier to improve from a MozRank of 3 to 4 than it is to improve from 8 to 9. An “average” MozRank of what most people think of a normal page on the Internet is around 3.

How can MozRank be improved?

A web page’s mozRank can be improved by getting lots of links from semi-popular pages or a few links from very popular pages.

Note that MozRank is all about links. The number of links to your web site and their link quality. It is very safe to assume that a higher MozRank results in the larger amount of the referral traffic – from the web sites linking to your site.

Recruitment   Agency mozRank
http://www.morganmckinley.ie 6.22
http://www.cpl.ie 6.17
http://www.hays.ie 6.11
http://www.Vantage.ie 5.84
http://www.eolas.ie 5.62
http://www.brightwater.ie 5.49
http://www.hudson.ie 5.42
http://www.gempool.ie 5.04
http://www.jobsblog.ie 5.01
http://www.peoplegroup.ie 4.95
http://www.3qrecruitment.ie 4.93
http://www.hrm.ie 4.92
http://www.frsrecruitment.com 4.84
http://www.placeme.ie 4.74
http://www.harmonics.ie 4.56
http://www.Sigmar.ie 4.34
http://www.rftgroup.ie 4.33
http://www.collinsmcnicholas.ie 4.29
http://www.careerwise.ie 4.15
http://www.icds.ie 4.09
http://www.EdenRecruitment.ie 4.08
http://www.Brompton.ie 3.9
http://www.qedrecruitment.ie 3.75
http://www.Recruiters.ie 3.69
http://www.accountancysolutions.ie 3.68
http://www.recruitmentplus.ie 3.63
http://www.Stelfox.ie 3.55
http://www.MatrixRecruitment.ie 3.43
http://www.enterprisepeople.ie 2.71
http://www.solasconsulting.ie 2.67

Notice the difference and the similarity of the SEOmoz MozRank ranking of the 29 recruitment agencies above and the Google PageRank ranking from the blog post yesterday. How to judge if your MozRank is good compared to the other recruitment agencies? This blog http://www.jobsblog.ie/ has a MozRank of 5.01. The general rule you can adopt is – if your company web site is below a personal blog, you might want to do something about it.

Any surprises in the recruitment agency web sites ranking by SEOmoz MozRank above? Do you find it more or less relevant than the Google PR ranking?

Categories
Internet Job Site Jobs Recruitment

Advertise with CVrecruit.ie

Jet another Irish job site is born. You know how I love those!

The difference that CVrecruit.ie brings to the Irish jobs advertising marketplace is… Well let me be fair and let them explain it in their own words. Here is from their ‘Advertise with us’ page:

Advertise with us
If you are looking to reach a wide audience via relevant fully branded advertising then CVRecruit could be the site for you. With a large database of both employee and employer/agency users CVRecruit works by providing a cost efficient HR solution for those looking to find staff. It also allows potential candidates to upload their CV’s for the attention of employees, for free.

Through advertisement on CVRecruit you will be able to begin networking via cost effective banner ads throughout our site and system.

The full branding of your business can be expressed through banner ads viewed by hundreds of users. You will receive free links to your business website which will gain international exposure.

If you wish to project a professional image of your business to a varied professional audience (both employers and employees) we promise to help make this happen for you, with dedicated support at all times. We also offer affiliate business possibilities for those interested increase your business levels today by advertising with us !!

At CVRecruit we are also launching a new service, CVRecuit.ie TV, using the latest software this will allow advertisers and employers to create relevant and targeted videos or text ads to be viewed by CVRecruit users in the latest and most advanced media styles , high impact and outstanding visuals will get your service and products featured in high definition on our site take a look at the cvrecruit tv link we believe this will gain you great exposure in an explosive new way also incredibly cost effective

Also our search engine optimisation team will make your wording reach the correct audience you seek and not waste time with irrelevant audiences you are our priority !

So if I am not wrong, the differentiator is that this site will have a good SEO team making sure you do not get wrong applicants, and there is also some kind of video involved here. Kinda alike CVEye, Sonru, CVizz or other video CV sites that popped up lately in Ireland.

Categories
Blogs Jobs Recruitment Search Engine SEO

Job Boards and SEO in Ireland

Year 2008 started funny for the Job Boards in Ireland. Job boards started understanding that the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the core of their business.

The reason the big job boards understood the y need to invest in SEO is because the year 2007 was the year where a largest number of the niche small job boards appeared in a single year. More than 20 new job boards requested to be included in the multiple job posting software eRecruit.ie in the year 2007 only! Those small niche web sites are in most cases industry specific, and usually have some link with some existing organisation or publication, or are just set up by someone who does know the industry. Knowing the industry helps in organising and running the small niche job board, so more often than not the niche job sites have some success as well. That hurts the job big boards, and it hurts them badly! So the national job boards decided to fight back in 2008, and to do so they are looking for the SEO people.

Irish Jobs - SEO JobIrish Jobs looking for the SEO Specialist:
http://www.irishjobs.ie/JobDesc.asp?ID=5125108&MID=3233

Due to continued expansion and focus delivering maximum jobseeker traffic to our websites worldwide a vacancy has arisen for an SEO specialist.
Job responsibilities:-
Knowledge and experience of SEO, Web 2.0 concepts, traffic and SEO analysis tools (Google Analytics, Google Webmasters Tools, keyword and structure research spiders)… Web 2.0?!

Jobs.ie Jobs - SEO JobJobs.ie (owned by Irish Jobs) are looking for that same SEO Specialist:
http://www.jobs.ie/ApplyForJob.aspx?Id=652847

This is actaully the same job in the same sompany as advertised by Irish Jobs. BTW Jobs.ie was purchased by Irish Jobs a year and a half ago.

Loadza Jobs - SEO JobLoadza Jobs made the adverts sound better by naming the job Online Search manager (SEO/SEM)
http://www.loadzajobs.ie/view-job-details.jobs?jobId=1077057

The Job Description finishes with the very funny sentence:

“Please do not apply if you have not got a good solid knowledge of the internet.”

That clearly shows they know what they are looking for!

Recruit Ireland…. nothing? About 20 different agencies have a job that appears in the search result for the word SEO, but no SEO jobs from the job site itself. Do they not need a SEO staff like the rest of the ob boards? Do they not trust the web site to deliver the candidate and have advertised in their papers?

Monster have a new site with a bit strange front page, and again they are not looking for a SEO specialist in Ireland. In all fairness, their SEO needs are probably managed from the head office in the US.

Ok, Ok,… EmployIreland.ie – no we are not looking for the SEO Specialist, we do have our SEO Consultant (that is available for projects!).