Job-a-matic

Job-a-matic Turns Three!

Yesterday marked the third birthday of Simply Hired’s Job-a-matic, now the largest hosted online job board service. In the last year, Job-a-matic achieved a number of milestones:

- Pagination! Long gone are the days only one page of results. Now your users can view pages of jobs, to see every job that matches their search.

- New Job Widgets - Add jobs to your site with flair! Our new contextual job widgets have search functionality and can match the look and feel of your site.

- Partner Badges! Show your connection to Simply Hired and partner network by displaying our Partner Badge on your site.

- Job Search XML API - Blend our job content into your site with our XML API -- now available under the “Advanced” tab of your Job-a-matic account. Here you can also find international job content from all 17 countries in which Simply Hired has a presence. For technically inclined users only!

- International Widgets & Job Search Box - Add widgets or a search box to your site to add job content from our English-speaking countries: US, UK, India and Australia.

More to come! Stay tuned.

Happy Birthday, Job-a-matic!

Best Practices: SEO for your Job-a-matic Board

With just a few small tweaks to your Job-a-matic board, you can rank higher in searches performed on popular search engines. While there is no secret for making your site rank first, there are a number of modifications you can make to your site, as well as Job-a-matic job board to place higher in the searches that you want to show up in.

The first step is to know what you want to rank for and try to optimize your site for those keywords. Do you want your site to show up on top if someone searches for "accounting jobs", "jobs in Missoula", or "computer engineering jobs in Mountain View, CA"? When linking to your job board from your site, you should set the anchor text to those keywords. It is also helpful to include a link to your job board with those keywords in the footer of your website.

Set the title of your job board to something unique and descriptive. This can be done in your account in Configuration > Name & Pricing. This should be a short, accurate description of the page, and if your Job-a-matic board is part of a larger site, create a title for your job site which is different than the other pages of your site.

Content, content, content! This is one of the most important aspects of good SEO. When users see good content, they like to direct other users to see it. Further, the more inbound links to your site, the more search engines are likely to recognize it as quality content and boost your ranking. Keep your audience in mind -- if they can easily read the content on your site and if you are using the same language in your content as your readers do -- your site is likely to be more easily read by search engines as well.

In addition, make sure to include the keywords that you want to rank for into the text of your job board. Setting those search terms in your account under Configuration > Categories should also help, as well as setting the Backfill for your site.

There are many resources for SEO out there, and we recommend you to check out the following resources:

Google Webmaster essentials
Bing's Guidelines for successful indexing
Yahoo's Search Indexing and Ranking Help

Spotlight: U.S. News Best Careers 2010

Want more than a Job-a-matic board on your site to offer quality job content to your readers? Our customizable widgets not only get job info onto any page of your site, but they can be tailored to match the look and feel of the rest of your site. A great example of the customizable widgets being used by one of our larger partners is U.S. News.

Recently, U.S. News, a platform of the U.S. News Media Group, launched their annual list of the 50 Best Careers for 2010 online at www.usnews.com/careers with Simply Hired’s nifty contextual job search widgets on each career’s profile pages. Using the source code for the customizable Job-a-matic widgets and making some minor tweaks, U.S. News implemented job widgets that are incorporated seamlessly into the site, both in look and content.

To implement widgets like U.S. News, sign into your Job-a-matic account, navigate to the Promote tab, and click the link to Customizable widgets. There you can customize the content and color of the widgets, and pull the HTML code to insert the widget into your site.