Today is our last post on the future of online recruitment SEO.  We thought we would end this series looking at the advances in how search engines are reading Flash.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing have previously been unable to take content from Flash files. This has been a stumbling block preventing some excellent, relevant and interesting content being found via search engines, upsetting designers, developers and searchers in the process! It is common knowledge that Google have been able to crawl Flash files for years but the main problem with the current technology is its error proneness.

Recent developments from both Adobe and Google indicate that this may well be changing in the near future with Adobe looking to supply specialist flash reading technology to Google. This change is predicted to improve search ranking results for users and give website owners a better return on their investment. The new technology will enable Google to read more versions of Flash, in a large variety of languages.

So what do these developments mean to the SEO community? As websites and users develop it is important that search engines constantly evolve at a similar rate to enable them to provide the optimum results possible. With this in mind we are pleased to see Google and Adobe working together to combat an unpopular problem and we believe that working on Flash based websites in the future should become an easier process.

We are pleased to release the timetable for tomorrow’s much anticipated conference.

9.00 – 9.45    Registration and light breakfast
9.50 – 10:00    Conference Welcome – Giles Guest

10:00 – 10.30    Jobg8 - Robbie Cowling
10.30 – 11:00    Madgex – Simon Conroy

11:00 – 11.40    Tea / Coffee

11.45 – 12.15    Linked In
12.15 – 12.45    Enhance Media – Giles Guest

12.45 – 13.55    Lunch
14:00 – 14.10    Welcome Back - Afternoon Session

14.10 – 14.40    Lawspeed - Adrian Marlow
14.40 – 15.10    CAPITA – Steve Newson

15.10 – 15.40    Tea / Coffee

15.40 – 16.40    Expert Panel: Google, Microsoft Bing, Monster, Trinity Mirror

16.45    Conference Close

We look forward to seeing you all there.

Today in part 5 of 6 we are going through some recent SEO techniques that are going to change the world of SEO in 2010!

Website References

Already part of the Google algorithm for local search. A web reference is made when a person writes about a website or business that isn’t shown as a link for example me writing about how NORAS is the largest online recruitment research project in Europe is a web reference. Web references are believed to be counted in a similar way to how links are (although they will probably have less importance than links currently do for the Google algorithm) and will indicate trust to a search engine. Interestingly this opens up a new can of worms with no-followed links meaning that search engines will now be taking note of no followed links from trusted/authoritative sources like Wikipedia.

Click through data

Josh Cohen of Google has recently revealed that Google News are using clicks and not links as an indication of popularity and quality. If the click data from Google News proves to be a successful way of ranking information then be ready to see it hitting the main search engine over the next 12 months!

Page Loading Time

It is generally believed in the world of search that a website that loads quickly vastly improves user experience. Popular Google engineer and blogging king Matt Cutts has discussed using this as a ranking factor and if it can increase the quality of results for a user then I’d expect this to be a part of Google’s search algorithm by the end of 2010.

Following a tough year for the recruitment industry in 2009 we begin 2010 looking ahead to the key issues that will be faced by all parties in the online recruitment space in the coming year.

From job boards to business networking to social media there is certain to be many developments that will affect the way we search and apply for jobs and the way we recruit.

There will be plenty of discussion on the future of online recruitment at the Enhance Media year ahead conference on January 28th. Topics will include: the legalities of using social media to recruit, the move of recruitment from job boards to search engines to Twitter and some bold predictions for 2010.

Last year was surprisingly good for Enhance Media. Our focus on providing online recruitment research and consultancy to enable employers to make better decisions (and therefore save money!) proved very popular.

Equally, the demand for online recruitment training courses increased as more employers wanted to upskill their internal staff to recruit directly. We’re looking forward to 2010 for the same reasons; more employers wanting to understand online recruitment and hire internally which fits our research, strategy and training market position very well.

The management of instantaneous large scale communication with clients and customers, and the brand protection that goes with this, are now key parts of the Enhance Media service.

Here’s hoping that we all have a very profitable 2010!

We are delighted to announce that Google and Microsoft Bing will be speaking at Online Recruitment 2010 – The Year Ahead Conference.

In an exclusive industry first, the world’s leading search engines will participate in an expert panel and discuss their vision of the industry and the direction of online hiring in 2010. With one third of all job searches starting in a search engine, this insight is not to be missed!

Google and Bing are joining an outstanding line-up of speakers and topics including: Linked In, Capita, Madgex, Jobg8, Lawspeed and Enhance Media.

The conference looks set to be a fantastic day and we hope to see you there.

For more information and to book your place visit the Online Recruitment Conference website.

You may have heard quite a lot about recent changes to Google and the key update to (codename “Caffeine”) could change the way people search online forever! The update, which has been designed to make Google both faster and more accurate, should be fully live in the UK by January 2010. 

Between November 2009 and January 2010 Google will be making their “Caffeine” changes in segments, meaning that a Google dance (changes in rankings due to changes in the Google algorithm) is expected. 

We have recently completed some analysis and found that some websites have improved or dropped rankings in Search Engine Results Pages. These changes could be the result of a number of different factors, but it is definitely something that everyone should be keeping their eye on over the coming months. We’ll keep you posted on what we find.

Today in part 4 of 6 we are going through an SEO technique that isn’t particularly well known in the industry… Phrase Based Indexing!

Definition – The classifying and ranking of a webpage depending on its frequency and ratio of relevant keyword phrases. Phrase based indexing retrieval has been created for spam detection, duplicate content issues and most importantly to improve the quality of search results in Google.

Why was it needed? It is well known that “Boolean” search has limitations when it comes to providing searchers with relevant results. It works brilliantly when you use exactly the right search phrase i.e. Eggplant, however you won’t see search results containing related keywords i.e. Aubergine. This is particularly frustrating when you’re not sure exactly what you’re looking for.

Don’t panic! There is a solution… Google has been developing a method of indexing and ranking webpages using both specific and related keywords – Phrase Based Indexing. This change to the Google formula allows the search engine to identify keywords that are related to the term you typed into the search box. This has massive implications for how best to optimise your web pages! For example a page about “SEO Recruitment” would benefit from including related terms such as:

· Long Tail SEO
· SEO Recruitment UK
· SEO Specialist
· SEO Consultant
· Google Analytics SEO
· and many more!

Ensuring that you have the related keywords within your page will result in higher ranks for your target keywords, and we believe this will be an increasingly important factor over the next few years. Ensuring that you have the related keywords within your page will result in, and we believe this will be an increasingly important factor over the next few years.

· Detecting spam documents in a phrase based information retrieval system
· Phrase identification in an information retrieval system
· Multiple index based information retrieval system

We’ve just announced the date for our annual conference, the largest online recruitment conference in the UK. 

Online Recruitment 2010: The Year Ahead will take place in central London on 28^th January 2010. 

With more speakers still to be announced, we already have an outstanding line-up of speakers including LinkedIn, Capita, Madgex, Jobg8 and Lawspeed who will discuss the key issues in online recruitment for  the coming year. Topics so far include: The use of business networking sites for recruitment; The future of recruitment technology and the job board industry; The legal implications and dangers of hiring using social media. 

The 2009 conference was attended by over 300 delegates and I’m sure they will testify, it’s a really interesting day. This year looks set to be bigger and better. It also offers a fantastic opportunity to meet with other delegates from the UK’s leading employers, job boards and recruitment agencies. 

Visit the Online Recruitment Conference section of the Enhance Media website to find out more and book your place now! 

We look forward to seeing you there.    

Back in October we launched our latest online recruitment research project, ‘How e-hireable are you?’. The test has now been completed by almost 800 graduates and some very interesting results are emerging. So far Journalism is topping the list as the discipline with the most e-hireable candidates, followed closely by Land Economy, Surveying and Property. 

The information provided by the survey will help employers improve the way that they communicate with graduates but should also give candidates some useful ideas about what they can do online to improve their chances of finding their next job. 

If you want to take the test or find out more visit www.howehireableareyou.com.     

Today we are going to highlight the third aspect of SEO that we believe you should be keeping your eye on over the coming months.

Block level link analysis - Regarded by many top SEO’ers as the future of link building, block level link analysis was invented by Microsoft to improve the quality of their search engine results. It works by segmenting a web page into blocks.

By researching the quality of links in relation to where they are on the web page, Microsoft has been able to work out the relevance of web pages more effectively. Basically this means that not all links on an individual web page are equal - relevancy and trust are determined by where the link is located on that page.

This has massive implications for the link building process, it now not only matters what page you get the link from, but where on that page the link is located!