Ensuring that the Career Site Adheres to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Leading Practices

Optimizing your customer's career site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results. We follow SEO leading practices as we implement career sites and work with our customers to get their jobs in front of interested and qualified candidates. To achieve this, Career Site Builder manages some elements for successful SEO out of the box, through automatically incorporating elements that support SEO.

Career Site Builder provides the following for our customers:

• Search engine-friendly career site
• Responsive site
• Automatic daily sitemap updates

To further improve SEO, there are important considerations that a consultant must consider when building a customer's career site:

• Ensuring jobs are prioritized in major search engine results through the inclusion of metadata.
• Maximizing Career Site Builder features to improve SEO within CSB pages and job distribution strategies.

The following capabilities help to increase search engine optimization, helping customers get their jobs in front of interested and qualified candidates: 

• For most applicant tracking systems (ATS), search engine crawlers can’t follow links to get to the jobs, so their jobs don’t show up in search engine results. SAP SuccessFactors solves this problem by importing jobs from the ATS and putting them on a search engine-friendly site.
• One of the places search engines look to determine what type of keywords to associate with a page is the web address, or URL. Most pages in an ATS are filled with numbers, symbols, and unrelated text. Example: https://jobDetails.do?functionName=getJobDetail&jobPostld=140552&localeCode=en-us
• When we create pages, we include the name of the page in the URL to improve SEO. Example: https://careers.SuccessFactors.com/go/Boston-Sales-Jobs/242462/

Search engines rank sites not only based on content but also on how appropriate the site is for the device they are performing the search on. Responsive design is a way of designing websites that allows optimal viewing (meaning easy navigation and reading, and minimal scrolling) across a wide range of devices, including mobile, tablets, and desktops. Utilizing a responsive career site improves rankings for all search results across websites. All Career Site Builder sites are responsive.

Just before go-live on the production environment, the consultant will submit sitemaps to Google and Bing. Once the sitemaps are in place, no additional action is required, unless your customer changes the domain of their career site, such as a brand name change. When SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting runs its nightly maintenance, sitemaps are updated with any changes to the job collection or landing pages.

As search engine crawlers read the bottom of each job page, they come across links to related job categories. Like the segments on the bottom of the page, these links also increase relevant keywords and provide more links for the search engines.

The site-wide metadata is set from Settings→Site Configuration→Site Information. This information is used if it is not replaced at the page level. For the Description, include the company name, "jobs" or "careers," strategic positions the company is hiring for (for hospitals, for example, list doctors, nurses, and so on). If the company has just one location, also include that.

For the Description, include the company name, "jobs" or "careers," strategic positions the company is hiring for (for hospitals, for example, list doctors, nurses, and so on). If the company has just one location, also include that.

To populate page metadata, consider the following:

• Important: Unique metadata should be specified for every page of the site. This is a leading practice and increases SEO value.
• Do this by navigating to the page, selecting the gear icon, and selecting Tags or Meta Tags.
• Enter unique metadata for pages of:
  • Each page type (with the exception of landing pages): home, content, and category.
  • Each Locale, in the appropriate language.
  • Each Brand.
• On a category page for sales jobs, for example, include a description such as Apply online for Best Run Sales Jobs.

Metadata (also known as meta tags) help tell search engines and users what your site is about.

Metadata contains the following main elements:

• Page Title (or Title tag): Your site’s Page Title is the heading that is displayed as a blue link in the search results. The Page Title is considered the single most important element on the page for telling the search engines what the page is about and which keywords to focus on. Titles should be 70 characters or less including spaces and should lead with the most important keyword. In addition to site-wide metadata, every page should have a unique Title and Description. The Page Title also displays on the browser tab.

  

• Description (or Meta Description): The description appears directly below the title and URL in the search engine listing. For example, when a user is viewing search results on Google, the results will display the URL and the description.  Your page’s Description should contain similar information to your Page Title (namely a targeted keyword), but not be exactly the same; it should be used to describe concisely what the web page is about. The Page Description should be limited to approximately 160 characters including spaces.

  • If you go over the word count, the copy will not be shown on the search engine results page. Also be aware not to "keyword stuff" (use the same keyword more than once in your Description).

  • A well-written description not only tells users what is on your page, but also entices them to visit your site. A description is what shows up here in the search engine results. It is like good window dressing. Sites with poor descriptions will get less click-throughs and the search engines will demote your site in favor of other sites.

  • Do not use quotes or any non-alpha characters (Google cuts them out of the meta description).

  

• Keywords: The importance of including keywords has decreased in recent years, as search engines no longer view the keyword tag as a major factor when ranking results. The only search engine that looks at the keywords anymore is Microsoft’s Bing – and they use it to help detect spam.

  • It is still extremely important to conduct keyword research, keeping you aware of what terms visitors are searching for in order for you to optimize for those phrases.

  • Using keywords in the content is much more important than populating the keywords in the metadata.

Management of SEO settings for avoiding undesired search terms include the following considerations:

• Undesired terms may be widely linked on the internet and end up in Google's index. Then if a customer posts their jobs to Indeed and a candidate finds a job via Indeed's search, for example, that search term can end up in the Top Jobs page on the customer’s career site.
• Customers can use Terms to Avoid to prevent search engines from indexing specific terms and suppresses them from being part of the Top Jobs results.
• Start each new term or phrase in a new line and don't include the word "job" in your terms.
• Customers can enter specific terms under Terms to Demote so that those display at the end of the result set. This is not commonly done. In this example, the term shown could be entered in Terms to Demote, so that it does not display on the first page of the Top Jobs listing.

Building SEO value for a page takes time – more time than most job postings allow for. When we build customer career sites, we consider their hiring priorities and job collection to build category pages based on popular search terms. We include these search terms, or keywords, in strategic places both on page and in the metadata.

While the jobs on each page come and go, by building category pages to host the jobs, SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting builds lasting SEO value.

Career Site Builder also generates a page that lists the category pages built for the site. This is enabled in the footer using the View all jobs link. The leading practice is to include Top Jobs and View all jobs in the footer. These pages are indexed by Google.

Customers may choose not to enable Top Jobs to prevent undesired search terms from appearing on this page. View all jobs, the list of category pages, is especially useful to increase SEO value.

When candidates search for jobs they usually include the word "Jobs" in their search term. Including "Job" in the page title and in the URL helps identify the page as a job to the search engines, and as these jobs post to pages, they create relevant, dynamic content to improve the SEO value of pages.

As search engine crawlers read the bottom of each job page, they come across links to related job categories. Like the segments on the bottom of the page, these links also increase relevant keywords and provide more links for the search engines.

Considerations for the Organic Network include:

• Be sure to offer your customer free daily all-jobs delivery to a number of job boards that SAP has relationships with.
• For your customer’s jobs to be posted to the Organic Network, they must sign the authorization form from SAP PartnerEdge. You attach the form to the Referral Engine Task Support Ticket after the customer's career site is moved to Production.
• For more information and a listing of the partners included in the Organic Network program, see the XML Feed Sources & Job Board Distribution document, available on SAP PartnerEdge.