Search Engine Optimisation BlackDog » Services

SEO tweaks for jobberbase

Paul Savage — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:00:35 +0000

Jobberbase [www.jobberbase.com] is a rather powerful jobs board software which we’ve been testing on jobsinireland.org for the last year or so. Overall it has become a rather mature and stable software, offering the ability for companies to post open jobs.
Aside : In fact, if your company doesn’t already have a career portal on your website, this software would be a great way to avoid recruiters. In the business of hiring, recruiters & agents have gotten a bad reputation for either being too expensive or for simply wasting employers time. With jobberbase you could have your HR staff post jobs openings directly on your website, and candidate could apply directly to you. With recuiter fees being in the thousands of Euros for a successful new hire, having your own jobs board could be a real money saver.

Some issues with jobberbase

Although the software is strong, there are a few weaknesses, especially for the SEO side of things. The first problem is that the footer template (located at /_templates/default/footer.tpl) is a global footer. This means that the same footer is used right across the whole website. Generally your homepage is your strongest page on your website and you should use this. We recommend adding a custom footer for the homepage and adding some extra text or perhaps deeper links to your site from here. Also if you are linking to other websites the effective difference between a site-wide link and a homepage link is minimal.
Another, and perhaps less known issue with jobberbase (in versions up to 1.8 at least) is the fact that the error page template returns a HTTP status of 200 (page found), rather than a 404 (page not found) error code. With jobberbase, once a job is removed, the page is no longer listed and if you call the URL of this job you will be redirected to a generic “unavailable page”, but this page is served as a real page (that should be indexed) rather than as an error page. My quick solutions to address these two issues are highlighted below (file references here are made for version 1.8 of jobberbase)

Jobberbase custom homepage footer

copy the file /_templates/default/footer.tpl to /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl
edit the file /_templates/default/footer-home.tpl to add in more navigational links or text.
edit the file /_templates/default/index.tpl and change the last line from

{include file="footer.tpl"}
to
{include file="footer-home.tpl"}

Jobberbase proper error page handling

copy the file /_templates/default/header.tpl to /_templates/default/header-404.tpl
edit the file /_templates/default/header-404.tpl and add at the top of the file

{php} header("HTTP/1.0 404 Not Found"); {/php}

edit the file /_templates/default/error.tpl change the first line from

{include file="header.tpl"}

to
{include file="header-404.tpl"}

Advertise your open jobs

And finally if you are an Irish company, and want to find good quality staff for free, then we recommend you submit your jobs to jobs in ireland where you have total control of the applications and best of all it’s completely free ! www.jobsinireland.org

Keyword Tool – July Offer

Paul Savage — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:18:31 +0000

Just read (via Richard) that Wordze are having a nice promotion in July for their Keyword tool software. For less than $5 you can have a month’s subscription to this service. Anyone serious in SEO simply needs to have a keyword tool. In fact I’ve just signed up myself to trail it. Knowing search volumes is necessary to leverage search traffic. With this knowledge you can make sure that your content contains the keywords that people are actually search for.

To get the special introductory price you need to go to Wordze voucher page and sign up from there. Offer ends in about a week…

Btw. I’ve just noticed that the Google Keyword Tool is now providing search volume data. This is something that google has watered down in the past, by only giving a relative indication but now they have actual numbers. I would wonder about the accuracy of the numbers, I do look forward to reading about further investigations and comparisons. Here are the results for searching for “black dogs” in Ireland.

Welcome to BlackDog.ie

Paul Savage — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 07:39:26 +0000

Hi and welcome to BlackDog.ie (woof !) !

Introduction

In the coming weeks I will be fleshing out the website, with details of the web services we offer. So please be patient and check back soon. If you want to contact us, please fill out the online webform here. BlackDog.ie offers a whole host of services, from design to hosting to search engine optimisation.

If you have any questions about getting your company online, or even the benefits of having a company blog, please get in touch. Having a presence online is important, but that is not where things stop. A simple webpage may not be enough. While it is important to have a website, once you have one in place you need to start to ask some more questions & here are some examples.

Is it possible to find your site easily ?
If someone google’s your company name will your website be the first link shown ?
What are the services that your competitors are offering online?
Is the information on your site easily navigated and is it up to date ?
Have you checked your website for silly mistakes, like broken links or spelling mistakes ?

These points are just some of the things we cover when we are taking care of your website. Let us worry whether you have enough relevant incoming links. Let us take care of your website, so that you can spend more time on taking care of your customers.

Consulting

Our consulting services offer a detail plan of action to improve your company’s website. We will put together a free proposal about what steps are necessary to bring your website to the next level. By gaining more visitors and giving these people the right information your sales & customer satisfaction levels will improve. You can get a free consultation and quote by letting us know your needs, via this contact form here.