Recruitment websites are full of constantly evolving, fresh content in the shape of new vacancies. The big UK recruitment agencies (not to be confused with “jobs boards”) can have as many as 1000 jobs at any one time live on the site. Better still, there’s always a few new jobs posted every time the site gets crawled.

How do you take advantage of the traffic generating potential of these pages to supplement the rest of the optimization on the site and to bring in lots of relevant, highly targeted search traffic?

This post will talk about using simple dynamic optimization techniques to catch the long tail of search behavior in the UK recruitment business. I guess the US will be the same / similar, but my research only takes me as far as our green and pleasant pastures.

We work with the assumption that search engines are able to crawl your jobs in the first place. Using “latest jobs” links on pages is an important first step to make the content available to be crawled. Using ISAPI rewrite or something similar to translate those horrid dynamic query-based URLs is definitely the next. If you’ve got a session id-based CMS, make sure you’re stripping all that junk out with UA detection, too. Maybe I’ll cover this bit in more detail in another post, but for the time being let’s concentrate on matching search behavior to the end result: your vacancy page appearing in the search results pages.

Looking at lots of analytics data first is a must. Understanding the keywords specific to job seekers will help us form a dynamic optimization strategy. I’ll skip through the fact that your website is already optimized for the obvious stuff: “accountancy jobs” for an accounting recruitment agency is very likely to be found on a specific page, with lots of links pointing to it. We’re talking about the dynamic content. So, thinking about search patterns job seekers use, here’s a simplified guide to what’s happening out there in relation to what you’ll have in your database:

*The keywords job seekers are using. Note I’ve used square brackets [ ] to indicate a phrase relative to the data in your database, and “” quotes where the actual phrase (salary, description, etc) is used.

** Where I’ve used high / medium / low I’ve looked at conversion rates – the number of people who go on to apply for that job.

***Volume indicates the number of queries we receive for that phrase structure.

With an understanding of what the long tail could look like, we can form meta code based on the information available in the vacancy database. I always try to create something that will give us the best chance for a click though in the SERPs, too. Maybe like this:

<title>Job: Design Admin Assistant vacancy in London</title><meta NAME="description" CONTENT="Design Admin Assistant required in London. Salary: £18,000-£20,000. Company X is a leading recruitment agency in the fashion / retail industry. Click through to view job description & vacancy salary details, and apply today."><meta NAME="keywords" content="design admin assistant job, design admin assistant vacancy, design admin assistant description, design admin assistant salary, design admin assistant job london">

Where the dynamic template looked like this:

<title>Job: [jobtitle] vacancy in [location]</title><meta NAME="description" CONTENT="[jobtitle] required in [location]. Salary: [salary]. Company X is a leading recruitment agency in the fashion / retail industry. Click through to view job description & vacancy salary details, and apply today."><meta NAME="keywords" content="[jobtitle] job, [jobtitle] vacancy, [jobtitle] description, [jobtitle] salary, [jobtitle] job [location]">

When I’m clicking around and looking at the various sites out there, it’s the dynamic pages that are often forgotten, and often the most valuable, especially in a quickly developing market where, finally, good SEO is really getting going.

By the way, I had trouble with creating a table that i could paste in to the blog editor. Anyone know how to create a proper table?