10 SEO Tips for HR Recruiters

This situation happens more often than many HR recruiters would like to believe. As a growing numbers of recruiters now use Web sites to enlarge their pool of potential candidates — as well as to promote their organizations — it's becoming very easy for sites to slip under the radar. That's not a good thing, of course.

The best way to boost a Web site's profile is to ensure that it is listed on, and ranked highly by, the Web's leading search engines, including Google, Yahoo! and Ask.com. In fact, boosting a site's ranking is critically important for raising its traffic flow, since few search-engine users bother to look past the first page or two of results.

SEO (search-engine optimization) is the technique that savvy site owners use to ensure that their sites get noticed by the Webcrawler robots that search engines use to scout and rank Web sites. Here are 10 basic SEO tips that you can use to raise your Web site's profile.

1. Focus on quality keywords. Insert carefully selected keywords into each page's title tag to allow Webcrawlers to become aware of each page's content and focus. Using keywords that you think are important isn't nearly as good as using keywords that you know are good. One way of uncovering quality keywords is to check competing Web sites to see which terms they use. An even better approach is to use a keyword-search service such as Wordtracker or Google's AdWords Keyword Tool.

2. Don't stuff the Web site's description or tags with meaningless keywords. Webcrawlers have grown far more sophisticated over the years, and an avalanche of keywords can no longer trick them into raising a site's importance. In fact, stuffing descriptions and tags can actually degrade a site's rating.

3. Create multiple pages. A single-page Web site may be easy to create and maintain, but it won't impress search engines. A multipage Web presence tells Webcrawlers that the site is substantial and probably crammed full of information.

4. Create a site map. Besides enhancing visitors' navigation abilities, a site map will help Webcrawlers find all of the site's pages. On small sites, a navigation bar can serve the same role as a site map.

5. Create deep links. Work with other Web-site owners to create links that lead into as many of your site's pages as possible. Such "deep linking" tells search engines that your site offers plenty of worthwhile content. On the flip side, links leading to just a single page will cause search engines to think that you have a shallow site with little useful content, or that the links were generated by automation rather than by your site's overall value.

6. Research your competitors' links. Since search engines place a lot of importance on the number of links that lead into a Web site, knowing how many incoming links your competitors' Web sites possess can be immensely useful. Take a look, judge for yourself and try to "out-link" the competition.

7. Publicize your site. Posting comments, articles, blogs, podcasts and other forms of content on multiple Web sites is a good way to spread your name, as well as the name of your business, around the Web. Search engines attach greater importance to names that appear in multiple places on the Web. Just make sure that all the content links back to your site (preferably on multiple pages).

8. Give your Web site a unique name. A Web site with a plain, nondescriptive name is just like a coin in a piggy bank — largely indistinguishable from all the other coins. A unique name, one that actually contains some type of meaning, has the best chance of standing out from the competition in search-engine listings.

9. Don't use the same exact same title tag on every page. Webcrawlers that see identical titles might conclude that all the pages are the same. If this happens, the pages might not get indexed.

10. Don't waste time or money on search-engine software or submission services. Despite providers' claims to the contrary, these offerings won't help raise your Web site's profile, and they may even get it penalized or banned.