Drive more traffic to your Career Site - Part 1

This is the start of a short series looking at driving traffic to your career site (or jobs section of website). This first part is to do with organic (the best ) traffic, that comes from your site appearing high up in the search results on Google, Yahoo or MSN etc.This is achieved by addressing your website's Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

So, here are three key steps you need to do to improve your search engine ranking (obviously establish where your starting point is by carrying out some test searches on the three primary search engines):

1. Identify exactly what your website is offering and what each individual page is offering exactly. Then drill this down to a few keywords and phrases, that really explains what the site offers. Search engine spiders don't go looking for dense information, they like keywords and short phrases - so give them what they want!
2. Make sure that the content on each page is well written and includes the keywords and phrases that you have identified in stage 1. Most pages will only rank in searches based on one or two keyword terms, so really focus on one or two terms that really match the content of the page, and your traffic goals for that page. You also need to be adding relevant content regularly, which is why a blog format is so powerful for SEO.
3. Maintaining your website. You need to be constantly assessing your website and checking rankings with actions such as regular updates, new pages, adding organic links etc.  You need to maintain your SEO to keep your site well ranked and popular among the search engines.

There are of course many other factors that apply to SEO, such as website design , architecture, coding and applications used (flash) that can dramatically make a difference to rankings in search engines. But by just making sure you have great content on your site, you will go along way of dramatically improving your rankings.