Sellick Partnership at the cutting edge of Internet recruitment

ìWhen you buy businesses there are two things you look at ñ the bottom line and the number of hits on Googleî. Jo Sellick, MD, Sellick Partnership.

With a reported 9.8 million broadband lines now in the UK, many UK businesses are re-evaluating their websites contribution to the business. An innovative recruitment companyís recent investment in web accessibility to prevent discrimination has resulted in improved search engine performance.

Since Jo founded Sellick Partnership in Manchester in 2002, the financial and legal recruitment company has grown to 35 staff and four offices. Sellicksí exceptional growth has been supported by their earlier investment in a database website that lists job vacancies. In December of 2005 after an extensive review of their requirements, Sellick invested in an updated version. The requirement list included; accessibility to ensure DDA compliance and improved exposure to candidates on search engines.

Sellick engaged eConnected; Huddersfield based web accessibility specialists. Jo Sellick: ìOur old website was stale and redundant, there was no resource allocated to keep it fresh and up to date. When we met Mark (eConnected), it was apparent his specialism within ëoptimisationí would provide us with a crucial element of our new web site, he is very knowledgeable within his field and we were confident he would deliver exactly what was required.î

eConnected websites are designed so that they adapt to suit visitors with physical and sight disabilities. A commercially beneficial consequence of these sites is that the high standards of coding required often result in high search engine ranking. This is because Googleís robots are like blind users.

Sellicksí web site now adjusts in a variety of ways to suit the needs of Internet users with physical or visual disabilities. The main advantage for any user is that the text size can be easily adjusted. Holding the Ctrl key on the keyboard down whilst rotating the mouse scroll wheel adjusts text size to suit the user. Jo Sellick explains: ìIt was important to us to have a fully accessible website ñ itís like a microscope running over the textî. Web pages may also be printed with the text size adjusted to suit the user.

The Sellick web site also features metadata (data describing data) suitable for e-GMS 3.0. (eGovernment Metadata Standards 3.0). This allows the web site to be indexed by public sector information systems.

Mark Sheldon, Marketing Director, eConnected explains further: ìMetadata is unseen code that is added to each web page with a title, description and keywords. A search engine reads this information - this is the ìlistingî you see when you search on Google or other search engines. The government has a major initiative to improve the use of information i.e.. e-Government. The e-GMS 3.0 gives a specification for public sector web page metadata to allow exchanges of information between different public sector organisations.

Sellick has many public sector clients so we have applied the e-GMS 3.0 standard. This allows Sellicksí web pages to be included in any public sector web based information systemî.

eConnected also installed their own press release software which automatically optimises web pages to appear near the top of Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

The end result is a simple, easy to navigate web site which has been developed to an exceptionally high standard and tested for performance on both PC and Apple Mac computers with all widely used and historic browsers. Within a week the web site was indexed by Google with many pages appearing in the first ten results for phrases that were targeted.

Jo Sellick: ìeConnected are simply cutting edge. We gave them a complicated brief. Our website needed to encompass both the legal and financial areas as well as our geographical spread. With offices in Manchester, Belfast, Newcastle & Stoke, we needed to give each office a share of the website. eConnected developed an accessible version of our existing website and added new featuresî.

Mark Sheldon: ìMany organisations are still struggling to comply with the DDA (Disability Discrimination Act) in respect to web services. Sellick have bitten the bullet and reinvested. They have been rewarded with a web site that has considerable commercial benefits and is likely to achieve rapid ROI. Sellick are a very forward looking company and much of the success of the project was due to the contribution of Sellick staffî.