Optimising your homepage – guide to recruitment SEO part 2

In my last post I discussed planning the structure of your site and assigning keywords to each main content area of the site. Thinking in “keyword buckets” should have helped you out there too. This is part two of my recruitment seo guide.

This post discusses a basic guide to creating an optimised homepage on a recruitment website. I’ll give some specific examples along the way too.

Step 1 – What business are you?

What kind of recruitment company are you? An accountancy recruiter? A pizza company?! It sounds obvious but make this the main element of your homepage keyword optimisation and as a secondary element, you can add your main sector keywords. Here’s a really good example of why that strategy will work:

Query: audit jobs



Quite often you can get your homepage ranking with a sector page from your site with a well chosen keyword strategy.

Next you should consider including some important features on the homepage, either for SEO or for better conversion! Here are some items you should include in your design:

- latest jobs, a great way to get your jobs indexed by the search engines and your homepage content changes frequently. This IT Jobs has a featured jobs section as well as plenty of links to jobs pages.

- Use of H1, H2 and sometimes H3 heading tags to encapsulate your keyword rich titles

Here’s an example of how you could arrange those tags on a legal jobs homepage: (site credit: 4MAT.com)



- ALT tags. Use your main keywords in your alt tag for your site logo. In the example above, I would recommend something like “Search for the latest Legal Jobs at LawGazetteJobs.co.uk”

- Include links to all your sector pages. Secondary to your homepage, your sector pages are the most important asset on your site. Link to them!

- Use a sitemap. Might sound obvious, but you’d be suprised how many websites I’ve seen without a sitemap. Make a sitemap!

Now we have an optimised site structure and an optimised site homepage. The next step is to talk over some of the details of optimising the bulk of your website. The vacancy pages.