According to my tools, the phrase “job search” comes in at No. 2 behind “jobs” as the most searched term in our industry. Needless to say, it’s a biggie.
As an SEO for employment sites, I’m constantly tracking the popularity of niche keyphrases and changes in rankings. In a recent perusal of results for “job search” on Google, I noticed a site in the Top 10 that hadn’t been there previously: Simply Hired.
What stuck out immediately was how it had quickly leapfrogged competitor Indeed, cracking the Top 5 as of this writing, pretty much out of nowhere. I had to investigate, of course, and the road to discovery lead to Simply Hired’s new blogs with jobs product Job-a-matic (powers the Cheezhead job board, by the way; check my sidebar).
Take a look at the code that makes up the Job-a-matic widget:
You’ll notice, within the code, between the NOSCRIPT tag, the anchor text “Job search” (highlighted) link to Simply Hired’s homepage. The text is invisible to the naked eye (see my sidebar), but not the all-seeing eye of the search spider. As a result, every user who adds this widget to their Web site is helping launch Simply Hired into the stratosphere of the No. 2 search term around “jobs,” estimated at approximately 12,000 searches daily.
I’m of the opinion that the engines will one day crack down on this tactic. Much like meta tags before them, if humans can’t see this stuff with their own eyes, deductions in effectiveness soon follow. But for now, it clearly works quite well.
Popularity: 3% [?]
February 27th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
very interesting – good research as well. but like you’re saying i think also that search engines will ignore this kind of tactics pretty soon. its like keywords in the same color of the background of your site. i dont think google likes that kind of “tricks”.
April 7th, 2007 at 1:01 am
I really appreciate this posting. It makes me understand just how important these widgets are. My company also offers Job Posting Widgets. The difference is that these are on the contingency recruiting model, not the pay-to-post model. In a tight job market, there is more money to be made as a contingency recruiter. In slow job markets, we offer free job boards.
I invite everyone to check us out. I run one job board for each industy. So check out
http://plone.specialtyjobmarkets.com/Resumes/Widgets