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Maximising your job board exposureMaximising your job board exposure The growth in niche job boards, jobsites and recruitment websites in 2008 is staggering. with many new sites coming online every week. Whilst the cost of designing and constructing a jobsite has fallen considerably in the past few years, making that site visible and attracting a high volume of quality candidates is getting tougher by the day. To reach the top 10 on Google for a key phrase such as Sales Jobs is a mammoth challenge and one which may take years to achieve. There is however a new route to maximising quality traffic to the vacancies on a job board and that is the use of rss feeds and xml feeds, particularly when migrating the data to one of the many vertical job search engines, examples include, Job Rapido, Career Jet, Simply Hired and Jobster to name but a few. There are dual benefits to having your vacancies on this type of site; one great benefit is that the jobseeker can easily find results on the major search engines for the specific vacancy that they are looking for with a link to the vertical job search engine and a further link directly to the vacancy URL on the respective jobsite. The secondary benefit is the number of additional links generated by all of the vacancies linking back to the jobsite. Many of these sites are still free of charge and for much lower cost that typical search engine pay per click schemes sites benefit from highly targeted traffic, this in turn gives a much better ROI. Other means of distributing job vacancies and high quality targeted traffic that should be considered are Google Base and Feedburner, tests carried out using an XML feed and rss feeds have shown a rapid increase in traffic from blogs, forums, Yahoo and Google, all for a few minutes work and zero cost. The conclusion has to be that if you are currently one of the hundreds of jobsite owners struggling to commercialise your site or you are rapidly running out of money through expensive PPC systems and online advertising, it would be advisable to investigate these alternative sources of website traffic and if you do not have the technical understanding or expertise to carry out this work yourself, speak to an SEO or Internet marketing expert. To quote the Google Wemaster Guide "Quality guidelines These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit. If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts. Quality guidelines - basic principles Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking." Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?" Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links. Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google. Quality guidelines - specific guidelines Avoid hidden text or hidden links. Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects. Don't send automated queries to Google. Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords. Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content. Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware. Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first. If you determine that your site doesn't meet these guidelines, you can modify your site so that it does and then submit your site for reconsideration." About the Author: Louise G is the Managing Director of Ianson Internet Markekting and an expert in SEO and Internet Marketing for Jobsites and Recruitment Websites. Find out more about Internet marketing and SEO at www.internet-marketing-ianson.com ---------- This article is distributed on behalf of the author by SubmitYOURArticle.com SubmitYOURArticle.com is a trading name of Takanomi Limited. Takanomi Limited is a limited company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 5629683. Registered office: 31 St Saviourgate, York YO1 8NQ. Full contact details are at takanomi.com ---------- ------------------------------------
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