When released, all urls posted through twitter, including from all apps.

This probably isn’t much of a concern to most people, however, I’m concerned for a couple of reasons.

First, Twitter can barely keep their servers up at their current growth pace now. How are they going to manage redirecting millions of links every second, each and everyday?

I expect they will have to roll it out really slowly.

Second, this really isn’t a concern, to me, but it should be to a lot of people. Twitter will finally know exactly what users are doing with their service. They will know what sites they are sending clicks to, who the user is who created the click, and who the user is who clicked on the link. This will create a massive amount of user data that sites like google and facebook don’t have.

From a business perspective, I think Twitter just figured it out.

If they can use that kind of data to “prioritize” tweets, to sell ad space, or to customize twitter search results based on the number of clicks (kind of like relevance based on user conversions / click),  they have a real business model.

I can’t wait to see where it all leads.

Has Cheezhead lost his mind, selling to Jobing.com?

Yesterday, September 9, 2009, Jobing.com announced the acquisition of the Cheezhead Group, with infamous HR blogger, Joel Cheesman.

Why would a Aaron Matos, CEO of Jobing.com, want to buy a notoriously outspoken blogger?

While the answer might seem strange, but Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is probably the #1 reason.

Over the years, Jobing.com has been purchasing a lot of undervalued or distressed recruiting websites, including; Employocity, ColoradoJobs, JobSummit, the California Online Job Network, Rhinomite, Careers Colorado, LocalCareers Network, CanJobs.com, and WorkMetro.

Most of these properties were small and barely profitable websites, but they all had one thing in common, hundreds of very valuable job search related domain names.

OLD Jobing Strategy = Defense

In the past, Jobing’s purchasing of other websites and domain names seems to have been a defensive strategy. Buy the companies and domains, do some limited integration, but generally keep others from acquiring and competing on a local basis.

That strategy might finally be over.

New Strategy- Low cost Job Seeker and Employer Acquisition

Jobing now controls one of the largest collections of the most valuable job search related domain names. The value of these domain names has yet to be exploited to its full potential, from a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) standpoint.

Joel Chezman is one of the few people who could unlock the value in the thousands of domain names that Jobing.com now owns. Bringing Joel on board to integrate the SEO strategy is a great move.

Each month, there are over 150 million job related searches originated on Google.com. The majority of these searches lead job seekers to the largest job boards, who have made significant investments in search engine optimization (seo).

The top ranked career sites are using search to generate upwards of 50% of their job seeker traffic. Meanwhile, search is one of the lowest cost of job seeker and employer acquisition models.

SEO is a Zero Sum Game – Jobing stands to Win, and Big!

Search engine optimization is also a zero sum game, by integrating the domain into a search engine optimization network of job seeker eyeball-grabbing domains, Jobing could quickly pull millions of job seekers from competing national and local job boards. There are only 10 Top 10 positions, and the Top 1 ranked position can receive as much as 65% of the search traffic.

Currently, Jobing relies on one of the most expensive job seeker acquisition models, utilizing a lot of offline and outdoor advertising. Additionally, outdoor advertising attracts a blue collar labor workforce, while online advertising and marketing, including both SEO and SEM, attract a white collar workforce.

Bringing in a recruiting specific search engine optimization strategist to integrate and leverage thousands of highly valuable domain names makes a lot of sense. If this is Jobing’s strategy, which it seems to be, Jobing could expand nationally much quicker, with not only lowering its cost of marketing to job seekers and employers, but also doing this at the direct cost of its competitors.

In the end, I think this is a real win for Jobing and Cheesman.

In my opinion, there are a couple of big reasons Google isn’t in the game, and might not be any time soon:

1. There isn’t enough money in our sector to worry about it. Yes, there is money, but it might not be that high of a priority in the over all Search Marketing Industry.

2. Google can’t easily get the jobs out of the career sites, mostly due to the ATS systems. Most ATS systems have the job content, and that content is not optimized for the web.

3. This is the biggest myth in HR SEO, individual job postings will almost NEVER get enough significant job seeker traffic to make a hire.

This is for several reasons:

First of all, Google ranks pages primarily based on an algorithm that gives higher search engine rankings based on several factors, including the “authority” of the page, and several “on-page” optimization factors. One of the key criteria to “authority”, is the number of quality backlinks to that web page.

Individual job postings don’t have enough backlinks to be considered authorities, and therefore don’t get highly ranked in the search engines.

Another major factor is the number of candidates searching for that specific job posting on the web. Yes, there are over 100 Million “job” related searches performed each month on Google, but the number of searches for a “truck driver in los angeles”, may have only 20 searches in a month. Even if you did get all of the 20 searches to click on your web page, which isn’t likely, you still only had 20 people view the site. Then, you still have to get them to apply to the job… another issue.
A good HR SEO strategy uses Keyword Research to find the right keywords to optimize for, and then builds web pages that will bring in candidates based on the keywords that candidates are already using to find jobs.

In this model, the individual job postings are NOT the primary factors on the web pages, instead, the keywords uncovered in the research are.

I wonder how long the “long tail” is for HR SEO Job Search keywords?

From our experience, the tail is pretty long, but the mass quantity of “job and career” related searches is still focused on the shorter-tail phrases, with the sweet spot slowing after any 4 word phrases.

There are more and more companies marketing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services in the HR  marketplace. While competition in any market is good. It is equally important, as a buyer, to know what you are buying.

Being successful with an HRSEO campaign takes designing a strategic plan, and implementing that plan with a partner who has proven SEO experience.

Scraping jobs from your ATS and putting those jobs on a micro site IS NOT Search Engine Optimization.

Building your Brand and driving candidates to your career site takes Researching keywords, and marketing the career site.

We wrote an article to help you get under way with creating goals for your HR SEO campaign. You can read the HRSEO Goal Setting article here.

Good luck with your campaign.

Lots of speakers, including Brent Reichow, from TMP, Matthew V. Adam, of NAS Recruitment, and Gerry Crispin, of CareerXroads are evangelizing the importance of Corporate Career websites in the recruiting process. There have been lots of mentions of Career Site Optimization, and of course, SEO4Jobs.com, and driving job seekers your the sites from Google, MSN, and Yahoo.

The buzz is starting, and lots of companies are realizing that SEO isn’t just for the marketing departments anymore.