Design, Optimisation, Page Rank and Brand

How do you re-design a site that has great search engine rankings, is hugely popular and is already an award winning brand and site. The answer has to beÖ very carefully.

1Job.co.uk ñ The UK and Irelandís job search engine has been working on this problem for six months and plans to re-launch its sites ëlook and feelí by the end of November.

The site is built around its candidate attraction purpose and provides direct links to online job adverts throughout the UK and Ireland. Job boards, recruiters and employers utilising 1Job.co.ukís service receive well over half a million candidate referrals direct to their job adverts each month. For major job advertisers charges are based on a low cost per click (cpc) pay per click (ppc) model.

Julian Felstead MD of 1Job.co.uk says, ìThe site is firmly established as the leading job search engine in the UK and Ireland. It was voted an internet Superbrand winning site in March of this year, one of only a handful of online recruitment sites.

The problem we have is the site is already highly search engine optimised and has literally thousands of top twenty pages on the main search engines.

When your site has this number of top positions then making even a single, apparently simple change to improve the design, can mean your natural search engine rankings or page rank can be negatively affected.

The site is already hugely popular with job hunting candidates and is designed to be fast and efficient in taking relevant high quality candidate traffic directly to our customersí job adverts and CV registration pages. We have to go very carefully with any site changes we wish to make.î

1Job.co.uk wanted to make certain functional improvements and changes to the sites look, whilst maintaining its brand identity, its optimisation and page rank.

Their approach has been made based around three key decisions: firstly, to keep the highest level of control over any re-design; secondly, not to make any major changes to an already successful functional design; thirdly, to retain and carry out all the software coding in-house and avoid the use of external software engineers who may not have appreciated some aspects of the sites existing code and operation.

A number of individual design consultants in the UK and Europe were employed including some outside optimisation experts. A process of testing a number of small, but important, changes to the site over a number of months has already been undertaken to identify the right solutions for the site and its users.

A major design upload to the search engine pages is to be made by the end of November with various other changes to the site being made soon.

1Job.co.uk are open to share their experiences with others, and will possibly produce a newsletter or white paper on the subject if there is sufficient interest. If you wish to hear more about their experience then please email them at: designchange@1job.co.uk.