The landscape of SEO is changing and, well, you’re probably not ready to react. Many organizations are just getting up to speed with in-page optimization strategies. Those are all the things you do on a web-page for SEO, like focusing on a specific keyword with title tags, a good description and other fun details too geeky to get into right now. Some forward-thinking companies are exploring off-page strategies which involve building links to and from valuable web properties. And now, main-stream marketers are discovering something previously only exploited by hot-shot Internet Marketers: Social Media Strategies for linking are an SEO gold mine.

Yes, I know, you’re tired of hearing the S-word – it’s everywhere.  The S-word is ubiquitous and almost annoyingly showing up in every media source you encounter from blogs to TV news stories. Even the line-cook at Denny’s is talking about it – heck, he moon-lights as a social marketer. Haven’t you heard? EVERYONE’S promoting their personal brand in social media these days.

Whether you think times are ripe for a social backlash or not, social media spaces are only becoming more and more important to any online marketing and recruitment strategy. Let me tell you why social media is the next big thing for SEO.

You see, first of all search engines are very clique-conscious. The more popular and authoritative a site is, the more reputation it has to share. When one of those sites links to another site it passes a bit of credibility to the new site, making the search engines say: “Hey, if Amazon links to that site it MUST be worthwhile. I’m going to give it a better search results ranking.” In SEO this is called sharing ‘link juice.’

How powerful is link juice? Let’s just say that 1 link from a site with a lot of link juice can do more for your search engine results position than 20 links from sites with no link juice.

Who’s got the juice?

Right now, social media sites have a LOT of link juice. Google, for instance, isn’t stupid. They know that a lot of people are busy sharing information on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and other social media sites. These are real people sharing information they find valuable in real time. If you’re a search engine, it’s like being able to tap into the internet’s stream of consciousness and find out what site’s people really think are the most valuable about any given topic.

Google already gives certain social media sites extra exposure and the links from these sites carry the juice to prove it. In real-time news search, you can already watch topic-related tweets and Facebook status updates emerge among blog and news story updates on Google. Just click on the ‘options’ link on your Google search results and then click the ‘Latest’ link to let Google know you want the ‘latest news results.’

Google's Real Time Search Already Tracks Tweets in Real Time

How to get social link juice

Taking advantage of the new social-search phenomena isn’t as easy as just setting up a Twitter account or a Facebook page and linking to your career website or job listings. Nobody ever said anything worthwhile is easy. Your destination pages have to be optimized; your social sources need to be diverse and populated with worthwhile, interesting content; your use of keywords has to be selective but not spammy.

Really, the first steps to getting good social link juice are recommended best practices in their own right:

1)      Develop good content on your career website

2)      Build branded social media presences that provide interesting information to your candidate audience. (FYI: ‘Interesting information’ doesn’t mean job listings or blatant self-promotion.)

As attendees of the NAS Social Networking Boot Camp learn in our hands-on sessions, developing a effective social presence means you become an asset to your audience by giving them information and tools that help meet their goals – not necessarily yours. This alone transforms you from a suspect source of self-serving advertising into a valuable resource. And that’s an important key to building an audience…and ultimately a stream of link juice you can direct through your branded social media properties.

Social Media and SEO – The New Gold Rush is a post from: Kevin B Hawkins -- Career Sites, SEO/SEM, Recruitment PPC, User Experience (UX), Pop Culture and Beer.

There has been a lot of talk about Google’s new Sidewiki…a tool which allows anyone to comment about a web page, virtually ON the web page itself in a sidebar. These comments and postings are only available to people who have the sidebar installed but, no-doubt, Google’s hope is that more web surfers will use this as part of their pursuit of socializing and democratizing the internet. That sounds well and good, but just isn’t the case. Excuse me if I don’t indulge in a list of HR messaging pros and cons to Sidewiki. Frankly the issues at stake are much larger than ‘What do I do if someone posts something negative in Sidewiki next to my web site?’ and ‘How to I utilize this as a social media tool?’ Even allowing for the most socially enlightened usage of this technology, the simple fact is that allowing random people to place commentary on a web site they do not own is illegal. This is why hackers who hijack web pages and change them are charged with criminal activity. 

Maybe I’m being too subtle, perhaps a touch understated. This is Google-enabled property damage. Your web site is the wall and Google is passing out spray-cans. This almost makes  Microsoft’s ’Smart Tags’ look good. For those who don’t recall this little bit of technical brilliance, Smart Tags was a new feature around 2001 in Microsoft XP which allowed Microsoft to highlight content on web pages with links to Microsoft and its partners. In other words, Microsoft’s web browser would be able to place links on your web page content without your knowledge or consent. There’s nothing quite like that warm glow you get knowing that some third party can leverage (translation: monetize) your content as an advertising channel — or considering the prospect that any fool with a Google application can comment, slander and advertise almost right on your web site (think blog comment spam or signature spam — point in case, I just deleted a blog comment from this site promoting auto insurance).

Consider just these three of the many ways this tool can be abused:

• Competitors or disgruntled former employees can visit every page of your web site and post lies about your employment experience, hiring practices, etc.
• Job seekers and candidates could mistake Sidewiki for a company endorsed and managed tool, posting pri­vate information or details you are unable to effectively correct or remove.
• Have a target hiring audience? So do your competitors and a wide variety of advertisers, Congratulations! Your site has just become their new marketing channel! I’m sure you can’t wait for some technical training service to start spamming your I.T.-related career pages with messages about how they can help them gain valuable skills for the job market. (Come on…I can’t be the only person who thinks this way.)

Back in 2004 Google made it very clear they intended to be different, that the company was guided by different stars and their core philosophy could be summed up as “Don’t Be Evil.” 

In a Letter from the Founders titled “An Owner’s Manual for Google’s Shareholders” you can find their approach stated as follows:

DON’T BE EVIL

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better served-as shareholders and in all other ways-by a company that does good things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

Sidewiki doesn’t live up to the promise to do good things for the world. It opens up another channel ripe for abuse not only by those seeking to make malicious remarks but also for those who will use this space to promote completely irrelevant commercial messages and spam. It all depends on how much market penetration and use Google is able to generate — the more users, the higher the potential for abuse. While I am all for pro-active brand monitoring online, having to consistently police your own web presence so you can alert Google that you want something removed (which they may or may not act on) is just another daily task most IT and HR departments simply do not need on their plate. 

Google has a little legal wiggle-room to play with when it comes to Sidewiki. Technically the posts aren’t actually ON your site but rather posted in an application that ‘rides shotgun’ right next to your carefully crafted brand and message. No doubt Google is counting on this to provide them the legal room they need to sidestep any claims that Sidewiki promotes or enables illegal activity. And let’s face it, Google has the position of power here. As Chevy Chase might say: “I’m Google and you’re not.”

So what can you do in the meantime? There are some tools which can block Google Sidewiki, but rumors already abound that doing so may damage your search engine rankings. My advice: take control of your Google sidewiki content. As the owner of the web page you have the opportunity to have your content appear at the top of all posts. This is a great location to take control of the conversation by recognizing your audience, pointing out important site content or functionality (and even link directly to it!), you can even introduce Search Engine Optimized keywords since Sidewiki is indexed by Google. Check back soon (or subscribe by RSS) to find out how easy it is to set this up…heck, I might even post a video showing you step-by-step!

Remember, there are appropriate locations online for people to engage in dialogue and express their opinions about your organization. Your branded social media sites or profiles are appropriate places for such communications, like the Wall application on a Facebook page. To reap the benefits of social media realities you should get involved with discussions in these environments, especially those which are critical or negative, and use them as opportunities to promote your value, share success stories, clarify mis-conceptions, address grievances and provide solutions. This proactive attitude allows for you to build a reputation as a transparent and responsive organization. It also doesn’t involve random people spray painting on your web site.

Don’t Be Evil? Don’t Be Ridiculous.

Kevin B. Hawkins

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Three Ways Google Gets Evil with Sidewiki is a post from: Kevin B Hawkins -- Career Sites, SEO/SEM, Recruitment PPC, User Experience (UX), Pop Culture and Beer.

There is a lot of discussion about using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to attract job seekers to your career site and even directly to viewing your available positions. What isn’t very clear from these discussions is exactly what you need to focus on optimizing in your pursuit of candidates through organic search engine results. What are the actual words and terms which job seekers are most likely to use when searching? Is there a relationship between certain search phrases and the number of searches performed? To get some perspective on this lets consider what controls your search effectiveness: intent, keywords and competition.

The more specific your terms the more capable we are of determining the job seeker’s intent. Matching the searcher’s intent is what allows you to successfully engage with the search engine job seeker. The job seeker looking for ‘nursing jobs’ has a less specific intent than the searcher looking for ‘nursing jobs salary’ and their informational goals could be quite different. The ‘nursing jobs’ job seeker could be interested in locating sites where they can find job opportunities, maybe a job board or an aggregation site where they can perform a search. They could just as easily be researching how many different types of nursing jobs exist for a school paper. Typically speaking, the fewer the terms a person searches with, the more vague their search intent — and the more competition there is to gain a first page listing on a search engine for these high traffic terms.

We can place the keywords an active job seeker uses into four different categories, each with distinct traffic volumes and specificity of intent:

• Core Search Terms
• Position/Job Title Terms
• Location Terms
• Hybrid long-tail phrases

Core Search terms can also be considered job browsing terms — they are the highest level, least specific job search related terms for a particular area of work such as nursing jobs or nursing careers. These are search phrases which see very high volumes of activity but there is a distinct order of job seeker preference which echoes across different groups of job seekers. In fact, according to Google’s search volume reports, just adding one simple letter to one word can increase the search activity on a core search term phrase by over 100,000 searches per month or more. What letter could wield such power? The letter ’s’. Job seekers typically seem to favor the plural form of the words job and career. The terms jobs and careers consistently generate more searches than their singular forms: job and career. In some cases these increases can be as high as 1258% to 2400%.

Typical core search terms include the following (the term ‘nursing’ is used as a job field indicator for example purposes): nursing jobs, nursing careers, nursing employment, nursing job and nursing career. The search volumes for these phrases is typically quite high, especially for phrases containing ‘jobs’ or ‘careers’ and typically the organic, non-paid, search results for these terms are dominated by job boards. Arguably, at this phase of the job search experience the active job seeker using these search phrases is looking for job search resources although if the right job opportunity or company were to appear in these listings, it would definitely receive traffic.

Position/Job Title Terms could be considered ’strong active’ job seeker searches. These are searches specific to a particular position or job skill. For the core search term ‘nursing jobs’ a related position search phrase would be ‘registered nurse jobs’ or ‘nursing assistant jobs’. From a search volume perspective, it is not uncommon for more than half of the top 20 search related terms about a particular field to consist of these position specific terms. Again, depending on the job family niche these volumes can be quite high (i.e.: sales manager jobs with ~74K average searches per month) or noticeably lower (i.e.: accounting sales jobs with ~210 average searches per month). However, like the core search terms mentioned above, these search results pages are often dominated by both the general audience and niche audience job boards. Again, the seeker looking in this area is probably looking for job search resources but would welcome the appearance of a familiar company name in their area.

Location terms are even more specific variations of the previous search phrases. Why look for nursing jobs everywhere when you know you really want a nursing job in the greater Boston area? Depending on the job field these monthly job search volumes tend to be in the thousands for state-related searches, in the hundreds for city-related searches, and for some locations the search volume is so low that Google will simply report ‘not enough data’. Who is your competition here? It’s not your candidate-space competitor across town who’s looking for the same talent you are. Yet again these search results tend to be dominated by general and niche job boards. However, depending on the job niche and the city, it is not uncommon to see the occasional business show up in this type of search result.

There are syntactical variations to all of the above searches: people looking for ‘jobs in sales’, ‘nursing job finder’, ‘engineering vacancies’, ‘nurse job opening’ and the like. Some of these can even generate a fair amount of traffic but typically, as seen with the rest of the types of searches performed, the search listing competition is dominated by job board sites.

Finally, there are long-tail search phrases. Long tail phrases are typically very specific job search related phrases like ’sales jobs in fort lauderdale fl’ or ‘nursing jobs boston area.’ These search phrases typically see much less traffic than the more general search phrases mentioned above. And, although the competition for these phrases can be much less fierce than that seen for the other types of job seekers searches, it is still no cake-walk to get a first page listing for these phrases. The strength of the job boards in the other search areas still lends to them appearing in search results for these phrases. The key question that long-tail job search raises is: how much is a search phrase which may only bring in one click a month really worth? On it’s own, not much. This is why typical job search SEO long-tail strategies focus on hundreds, if not thousands of long-tail search terms. Variation after variation of ‘job name city’, ‘job name city state’, etc.

The goal of long-tail search phrases is to attract visitors who have signaled very specific intent through phrases which get typically get very low volumes of search on a monthly or quarterly basis. The intent of these long-tail visitors is typically more ’serious’ than your ‘browsing’ job seeker using a search engine. These are visitors whose intent, when matched with the appropriate information on your ‘landing page’ (the page they arrive at after clicking your link) are more likely to convert…either as an applicant or by joining a talent network, subscribing to an RSS feed, etc. The value of the actual volume and leads generated through these long-tail methods in search engines (not job search aggregation sites) needs to be carefully balanced against the cost of implementation and how the execution fits into your entire online recruitment strategy.

Why job boards are your search engine competitors.

When it comes to search listings, the search engines look to two primary items to determine if a page should be listed high in search results: content and confirmation. Yes, Google’s ranking algorithm is complex and yes there is more to it than JUST these two items, but these two represent the heart and soul of search. Google and the other search engines want to know what the page is about and the more closely the page’s content relates to the specific search term being used by someone, the more likely that page is to be listed. However it isn’t enough for your page to contain content about a subject or to be ‘optimized’ for a specific search phrase. The search engines want confirmation that your page REALLY IS about that topic, and even more importantly that it contains worthwhile content about the subject. To get that confirmation they look for links, links inside your site that point to that page and links from other sites that point to your page. The more links you have from credible online sources, the more certain the search engines are that your page is related to the search phrase. Optimizing for the exact search phrase is crucial, and subtle: under-represent the phrase in your strategy and you will get ignored, use it too aggressively and you risk being penalized for ‘over optimization.’

The job boards have plenty of what Google loves: Content and Confirmation. This translates into millions of page of content capable of linking to each other with keywords specifically created to align with the four job search patterns: core, position/job title, location and long-tail hybrid search phrases. They have strong networks of links pointing to them, reaffirming that the content of their pages is topical and relevant. Oftentimes, they are your search engine competition, not the company who is out recruiting the same talent as you.

So how do you get your career messaging and opportunities seen by search engine job seekers? How do you compete with the job board juggernauts? In part 2 of this post we will look at some solutions to this dilemma and your secret weapon for candidate engagement. In the meantime, please share your search engine optimization experiences.

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What you need to know about job seekers' search engine habits. Part I is a post from: Kevin B Hawkins -- Career Sites, SEO/SEM, Recruitment PPC, User Experience (UX), Pop Culture and Beer.