Recruitment SEO Tactics That Are Total BS

I don’t think anyone would argue that when the SEO industry was born (Over a decade ago) it was easy to achieve search engine visibility with tactics that are now considered questionable. As search engines evolved many of these tactics became outdated and basically useless in determining search engine relevancy. Sadly, so called SEO experts are still indorsing these as legitimate SEO tactics and selling these outdated tactics to companies for big bucks. There are a lot of outdated SEO tactics around that are still being used today, below are a list of the four most common.

Most Commonly Used Outdated SEO Tactics

• Say “No” to Keyword Stuffing - Back in the 1990’s search engines were not as smart and sophisticated as they are today. The more times a keyword appeared on the page the better visibility that page would have. That said, people would aggressively repeat keywords within the content. If as a reader you can point out the SEO optimizing it’s often a sign that it’s been over optimized.

• Blog Comment Spamming – Have you ever read a blog post and then saw a comment completely out of topic such as “nice post, we sell orange trinkets” This is blog comment spamming. Thanks to the “no follow link tags” Most of the time search engines don’t count these type of links anyway but they especially won’t count them if your comment is not considered as adding value to the post. If you write thought-provoking comments you are more likely to naturally generate editorial links that will count towards building search engine trust.

• Search Engine Submission – I still can’t get over of the number of companies that charge for “search engine submission” You don’t need to manually submit your website to the search engines in order for them to find your website. Search engines will find and index your content all on their own. Paying a company for search engine submission is worthless. If you still want to submit your website, do it on your own – it takes 3 seconds and its free – below are the links.

• Meta Keywords Tag – There was a time when the meta keywords tag held a lot of weight when determining search engine relevancy. However site owners, webmasters and SEO’s that were into “gaming” the system abused this tag by including keywords that words that were highly searched (Brittney Spears, Sex, etc.) but had nothing to do with the content of their websites. Consequently, most search engines ignore this tag altogether. While still best practice to include relevant keywords in this area it is certainly not an element that will make or break your SEO strategy.
  

At the end of the day today’s successful SEO strategies include, linkbuilding, social media, user experience and digital media components. It’s an organic process that happens continually over the lifecycle of your career website. Because of this, it’s impossible to achieve search engine visibility in the long term with a plug and play strategy. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Career Site Bounce Rate - What You Need to Know

A common question I often get asked is “why is my website bounce rate so high and what can I do to improve it?”

Well, let’s first start by defining what bounce rate means and why it’s important. The bounce rate is a statistic you can pull from within your website analytics program. Bounce rate describes a percentage of website visitors that leave your website directly from the page they entered without clicking through to any other page on your website. For example if your career site bounce rate was 50% it would mean that half of the people coming to your career site are leaving without clicking though to any other pages.

The reason why bounce rate is important is because it’s a metric commonly used to measure visitor engagement. High bounce rate can often equal low visitor engagement. Below are some elements that might be contributing to your career sites high bounce rate

Does your career site appear in Search Engine Results pages for irrelevant keywords? Appearing for irrelevant keywords is a common flaw of a PPC campaign not being properly managed or set up, but it can also affect organic listings. If your website is ranking for poorly-chosen keywords, visitors clicking through expecting to find something specific will be disappointed when they look at the page that doesn't reveal what they were looking for.

Does your career site offer a clean design and user friendly interface? Presentation is important. If your career site design is cluttered, incorporates dark color backgrounds or lots of blinky text or flash animations it can make visitors feel uncomfortable, and distract them from clicking further into your website. Chances are if your career site includes some of the mentioned elements above, you’re likely to have a high bounce rate.

Is your career site navigation clean and easily understandable? Navigational issues are one of the key factors that contribute to the bounce rate. If you want your visitors to move around your website provide them with a clear intuitive navigational structure.

Does your career site content add value to the visitor? Make sure your website content adds value to your visitors. In addition, ensure that the content and information flow is good enough to carry your visitors from one page to the other. If you have great content but visitors can’t find it or your career site puts up barriers to entry such as “set up an account” or "subscribe to our email list” before they can access the content, this may be adding to your high bounce rate.