Sites with rapidly changing content and rapidly changing
keywords, before you even start…
I was talking to a web designer last week who is preparing
a new site for a recruitment company. I am often asked to
promote sites that have intrinsic problems that make them
nigh on impossible to get good rankings for competitive
keywords. By talking to designers at an early stage, a lot
of these issues can be avoided.
The aim of a recruitment site must be to have individual
vacancies feature in SERPS. For example, if a job is being
offered for a widget minder, the page with details of that
vacancy should be featured on the first page for searches
for
Widget minder vacancies
A good ranking would also be desirable if the geographical
location of the job is also included, for example
Widget minder, Dorset
(I am assuming that the phrase ‘widget minder vacancies’
is the most commonly used one. Keyword research coupled
with a good knowledge of the market is vital before any
keyword phrase is selected, whatever type of site is being
considered.)
A particular issue with this type of site is that the content
of individual pages is constantly being updated and that
the keyword phrases that require high rankings are also
constantly changing.
There are a very large number of factors that a search
engine takes into account when determining rankings. However,
for a recruitment site, the three most important (that we
have control over) are
- 1. spiderability – that is whether the search
engine spider can access the individual page that is targeting
rankings for that particular vacancy
- the textual content of that individual page, and specifically
certain areas of the page where important text is placed
- the anchor text that is used to link to the individual
page.
Spiderability
It is essential that the search engine spider can find and
then index the individual widget minder page. This requires
that both the link to the page and the address of the page
are spider friendly. Database driven sites used to be notoriously
difficult for spiders to work with. The situation is now much
better but it is still vital to give spiderability some thought
before the database is built. A sitemap should always be available
to spiders; this can be inconspicuous (but not invisible)
to human visitors. The sitemap is often also used as a work
around for difficult link structures. The site can also be
structured so that for example, the links from the site map
do not have session id’s and other problematic parameters.
On page text
With frequently changing content, a search engine spider has
to rely almost exclusively on the words on the page when determining
rankings. Therefore it is vital that the important keywords
feature in important parts of the page. For example, if a
Content Management System is used then it should construct
the page so that the keyword phrase (ie title of the vacancy)
in the title tag, description and keywords tags. Very often,
CMS simply give every page the same title, typically the name
of the company and this puts the page at a huge disadvantage
when the search engine is determining which page to rank well.
I know that Google for example does not use the description
tag for the description in the rankings and the keyword
tag is usually considered not to affect rankings. However
adding both these tags helps with the theme of the site
which is increasingly important. Also, who is to say that
next week, Google will not change its mind and suddenly
give the keyword tag great importance.
Anchor text
Search engines use anchor text as one of the ways of determining
what a page is about. Hence it would be far better to construct
links from the ‘latest vacancies page’ as
more information on Widget minder
vacancy
rather than
more info
Note also that spiders can’t understand images, so
the link should be a text link, rather than an image, javascript
etc.
Search engine optimisation is a large field so the above
information is not intended to be comprehensive but simply
to draw attention to particular topics that need to be considered
before a new site is commissioned.
Sally Kavanagh
25 April 2005
