A quick lesson in writing a recruitment blog post for job search traffic

One of my most trafficked blog posts is one written with the intention of driving less-active/passive job seekers to a casual job description for a great Sales Job in New York, ours!

That post is now steadily driving relevant traffic to a casual job description and ranking well(6 of 311,000,000) on a major search engine for the phrase I am targeting. The blog post acts as a net and funnels those less-active/passive job seekers to this casual job description.

Here's how I did it.

1. Set Goal
Drive quality and relevant job seeker traffic to the job description, influence those searching and put Yahoo! HotJobs Sales into this talent's consideration set for near term and future career decisions.

2. Find a related and hot topic
The Yahoo! Homepage was pushing an article on the 'Top Careers of 2007,' since I know that the homepage drums up a ton of interest...it was obvious to me that there would be a significant increase in search volume for this and related phrases. So, I set out on capturing that traffic and influencing that talent.

3. Write a post with search in mind
Once you decide what traffic you want, you need to create content to catch it.

I wrote about the topic on my blog. That put this web page online and in a position to capture the traffic that I was targeting.

When I wrote the post, I was sure to put the topic, 'Top Careers...' in the title. I also bolded the phrase each time it appeared and made sure to include the phrase early and often in the post. This tells the search engines that the post is in fact relevant to the topic that I am targeting.

Think about it. When you start a conversation about some topic. Don't you often open that conversation by referring to that topic(title) and don't you often emphasize that topic(bold)?

4. Tell the search engines that the post exists
Not all web pages are visible to search engines. (If you haven't read this, read it.) The pseudo-science behind making pages visible is what people refer to as SEO. I wasn't going to invest more than 20 minutes on this so I simply made sure to update my sitemap. Now, the file that Yahoo! and Google are referencing as a catalog to the content of my blog includes the post.

This put my post in a better position to be included in Yahoo! and Google's search results for the phrase that I am targeting.

5. Get links (what I didn't do)
Links from other relevant sites preferably with, 'Top Careers,' in the linking text would tell the search engines that other people(sites) think that my post is good and relevant to the topic.

If I had planned a linking strategy and spent time getting other sites to link to the post with with the phrase I am targeting in the linking text then my post might rank 1 for this phrase rather than 6.

That's it.

P.S. Did you notice the, 'Sales Job in New York,' bolded text linking to the casual job description? ;)

Comments

[Dan Schawbel]

I think this is a great strategy for collecting traffic. Researching hot topics is very important, especially in SEO.

Dan Schawbel
Personal Branding Spokesman
www.personalbrandingblog.com