Search Engine Optimisation, most commonly referred to as SEO, is the art of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
So you've invested your time and money in designing and building a website. The next phase is ensuring that this content can be seen and accessed by the audience you are trying to target.
Unfortunately, there is no magic SEO wand. Volcanic, an Access company and global leader in recruitment websites, often encourages clients to think about their website in the same way as a gym membership. If you use all of the gym equipment available to you in the right way, you will soon start to see results. If you don't attend the gym, or use the equipment effectively, you won't see the results you're hoping for. In a similar way, your recruitment website CMS gives you all the tools you need to optimise any content you produce on your website. If you utilise these effectively, you will soon be rewarded with improved visibility and conversions.
So, what is SEO? It stands for Search Engine Optimisation, and in short is the art of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
How does it work?
When you type a question into a search engine, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo etc, you are presented with pages of links related to your question.
But how does the search engine determine which links to show you, and which order they are shown?
Now this is the clever bit. Google (or any search engine) works by sending it’s team of digital ‘bots’ to crawl your website, and will then create an index to feed into their algorithm, which decides where to rank a website, based upon several factors.
So each time you do a Google search, the search engine will crawl all content relating to your search, index those sites and rank them in an order that will most likely satisfy your search.
This is where SEO comes into play.
There are certain things you can do with your recruitment website to make it more ‘SEO friendly’ and therefore more likely to be listed higher when the search engine crawls, indexes and ranks your site.
10 SEO basics to get started
SEO is a vast, wide world, and it can be intimidating for those with little experience to start their SEO journey.
We’ll give you some pointers on the best way to start making your website as SEO friendly as possible. Volcanic's platform is a great foundation for setting up your website, with all of your job posts automatically correctly indexed and displayed in Google for jobs, and a suite of optimisation tools easily available to you in your CMS.
Here are 10 key basics to get started:
- Run an SEO crawler on your website - Volcanic customers have an inbuilt crawler called "SEO Console" available in the admin of their website, but there are also tools you can use like SEMRush, Screaming Frog and Moz.
- Heading tags - make sure your pages have the appropriate tags (you may think of it as a format and you may recognise the terms H1, H2, H3 and so on) applied to your headings. This helps Google bots to read your content and understand the page structure.
- Meta titles and Descriptions - Adding titles and descriptions essentially provide the context behind your content. Your meta data isn't displayed on the webpage or blog post itself, but it will be picked up by bots when crawling your site, and creates your Google search listing. See example below.
- Alt tags on images - this not only helps bots understand what your image content is about, but can also be used by screen-readers for those who are visually impaired.
- Have a robots.txt file for your website which allows entry for Google bots (If you have a Volcanic website, this is created automatically).
- Have a Google-bot friendly sitemap on your website to allow the bots to crawl through all pages (Again, this is created automatically on Volcanic websites).
- Produce quality and relevant content, that is keyword rich.
- Regularly add fresh, new content to your website (jobs and blogs are great ways to do this!)
- Set up a Google Analytics account - this will help you to track and analyse your traffic and performance of your content.
- Set up a Google Search Console - this tool helps you monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site's presence in Google Search results, and learn more about the search terms that are leading people to your website.
Now that you have grasped the basics behind SEO, remember to stick at it and keep generating content to keep your website fresh and relevant! If you'd like to learn more about Volcanic's suite of SEO tools as well as other features of their recruitment website platform, arrange a personalised demo or watch on demand.
