Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

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.

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