for those experienced job boarders..an SEO question for benchmarking purposes

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Permalink Reply by Chris Russell on September 5, 2007 at 4:12pm

Good question David, here's a couple of samples from two of my boards.


FairfieldCountyJobs.com (online since 1999)

59% from referral sites
22% from Direct traffic
19% from Search engines

WestchesterCountyJobs.com (online since 2004)

45% from search engines
39%% from referrers
16% direct traffic

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Gorelik on September 12, 2007 at 12:46pm

Chris, how do you define "referral sites"? Does it include Indeed/SimplyHired?

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Permalink Reply by ContinuingCareers on September 8, 2007 at 9:44am

Yes, good question! I'm curious to see more responses.

For my board ContinuingCareers.com

50% Search Engines (Organic)
33% Direct Traffic
17% Referring Sites

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Permalink Reply by Gulliver on September 10, 2007 at 6:32am

www.mygulliver.com (6 months old)

Google (organic) 39.80%
Direct 15.75%
Yahoo (organic) 8.87%
MSN (organic) 2.96%

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Permalink Reply by Bryan Lewis on September 11, 2007 at 5:51pm

My site has only been live for about a month, but over the last two weeks Google has now indexed over 1,800 pages of the site.

The site, NorthBayJobFinder.com, breaks down as:

50% Search engine (a mix of organic and paid)
33% Referral sites
12% direct

I found that my indexing in Google really took off when I started publishing a daily updated sitemap.xml (see sitemaps.org) and hacked my job board software to include much more information in the meta description. Instead of the same meta desc, it now has the job title, category, and location.

Bryan

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Gorelik on September 12, 2007 at 12:49pm

Bryan, how do you publish sitemap.xml?
Do you have to push it to Google itself or you just update it on your web site?

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Permalink Reply by Bryan Lewis on September 14, 2007 at 1:42pm

A sitemap is an XML document which describes each page of your site. It is a standard which most of the big search engines have agreed on. My single sitemap file is used by both Google and Yahoo. I purchased a PHP script which crawls my site and builds the file for me. The one I used can be found at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. It was affordable ($20) and each to setup for me. Depending on how much experience you have setting up pre-built PHP applications, it may or may not work for you. They also have an online sitemap builder that is free, but limited to 500 pages an not automated (my auto script builds a new XML file each night).

You put the sitemap.xml file in the root of your web site, then you get a webmater account on Google (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview) and Yahoo (https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites). When they ask for your sitemap file, give them the URL to your sitemap (http://www.mydomain.com/sitemap.xml). Both of them will then automatically check your sitemap file for updates regularly.

Good luck,

Bryan

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Gorelik on October 13, 2007 at 6:18am

Thanks, Brian!

I finally implemented it myself.
But since I'm a programmer, I made PostJobFree's sitemaps not static, but dynamic:
http://www.postjobfree.com/sitemapResumes.ashx
http://www.postjobfree.com/sitemapJobs.ashx

+ site map index:
http://www.postjobfree.com/siteindex.xml

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Duarte on September 12, 2007 at 1:57am

Interesting Stats from everyone.
One common thread seems to be the age of the job board.
The older a job board is, the higher % of traffic it gets from referrals, vs SEO etc.

I think there are a couple of reasons for this.
1. Established job boards have established revenue streams, and have invested in their marketing referrals, either through PPC, SEO, SEM, etc.
2. Additionally, having a job board domain when there was less competition paid off, because and SEO or Directory submission plans back in those days lead to many current back links and referrals from university career centers, etc.
GO Jobs.com (online since 1996)
Our stats are a little different because we partner with a lot of sites, and are considered an aggregator.
60% Referral
25% Search Engines
10% Direct

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Gorelik on September 12, 2007 at 12:47pm

Jonathan,

What tool do you use to get this statistics?
I use Google Analytics.

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Permalink Reply by Jonathan Duarte on September 18, 2007 at 4:12pm

Dennis,
Yes Google Analytics... Free, easy to use.
We use Click-tracks and SmarterStats to track web log data, which is usually more reliable than javascript data.
JD

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Permalink Reply by Bryan Lewis on September 18, 2007 at 4:18pm

We use Google Analytics too. Raw log stats are generally more reliable than javascript stats, but one very nice feature that Google has is cookie filtering. Since our office is on a dynamic IP address, I cannot filter out a single IP to prevent our own company from skewing the stats. Google allows you to set a cookie in your own browsers which will prevent your company's browsers from influencing stat counts. In this way, Google's stats are better than our raw logs.

Just another thought.

Bryan

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