Optimize Job Listings for Simply Hired Search - Simply the Basics
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Simply the Basics
Simply Hired can find your job postings two ways: its custom crawlers can find your jobs or you can submit sites and feeds. Even if the postings on your site are already on Simply Hired because a crawler found them or from them being posted on another site that that Simply Hired crawls, submitting job feeds is still much better than leaving it to the automated system. You will have more control and detail in your listings.
To create an optimized site or feed, there are a few basic rules, and the first rule is the format of your feed. Simply Hired can recognize and use a lot of XML or delimited feeds, and it can also harvest the data from your web page. RSS-XML feeds are not acceptable for submitting jobs. The company is developing a standardized Simply Hired XML format for you to submit your jobs. Submitted feeds in this standardized format are given a slight advantage. I’ll touch on a few tips for an HTML job posting, but I am going to be building our SEO Chat job posting in an XML feed since it is given preferential treatment.
Besides the type of the feed, you need to pay attention to encoding. Your feed should be encoded in basic ASCII, Latin1, or UTF8. Unfortunately, some characters in Windows ANSI encoding don’t parse correctly. In delimited feeds, Simply Hired says that almost any delimiter is acceptable: comma, tab, pound symbol, any single-character or multi-character.
Finally, stay aware of keywords as you get into this. Be especially careful in the job title and fairly attentive of the job description. You’ll need to think like a job searcher and do a little research of job position titles to see what titles are conventional. For instance, if SEO Chat was looking for another editor to help me out, using the job title “Editor” is much too lazy. Anything that general is garbage, though there’s a lot of it on the job searches. To get more targeted results and relevant hits, it should be “Web Editor and Writer.” Also consider adding words like “Trainee” if you want to attract entry-level applicants. Some companies may have less flexibility in optimizing a title in the XML file, but the job description is always an opportunity for keywords too.
HTML Pages for Job Spiders
Simply Hired XML may be the preferred format, but you may be stuck with HTML or PHP pages for your employer. If you have enough job postings (Simply Hired FAQ says you need at least 100 jobs to use HTML) you can have them try to harvest the jobs from the site. There are a few things you can do to make your pages easy for job spiders to collect. First, be sure that all your content is in a table or other very structured format.
Also, there are a few pieces of required information that you need to include, or the job spider won’t know what to do with you. Be sure to have at least the job title, job description, location including state or zip code, and used appropriate tags to label the posting. Also, you must include the company name on the page, even if the page is on you corporate website.
Finally, and most obviously, make sure your HTML is well formatted. Check that all your tags are closed and follow standards. You can use an HTML verifier to check.
Now with HTML out of the way, let’s get into the best way to format the listings: the Simply Hired XML standard.
Next: Simply Hired XML Fields and Skeleton >>
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