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By Rick Maré, Founder & CEO, JXT    Connect with Rick on LinkedIn

Perfecting your online recruitment marketing is becoming an increasingly complex task, for it evolves constantly at an increasingly rapid rate. Many feel as if they’ve worked out how it works, only to hear of something new that makes their own knowledge appear outdated. This is often the with those struggling with the ominous acronym SEO.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a ubiquitous term that a significant part of the digital population knows they have to grasp, yet few actually understand it enough to work with it in a comfortable and competent manner.

Many recruiters neglect to learn how to harness SEO due to the extensive amount of learning that it requires, dedicating three hours to SEO can take away valuable time from other essential tasks such as interviewing or even securing a successful candidate.

SEO isn’t something you nail in a week. Being a hard taskmaster, it demands long-term commitment, actual results (if done properly) appearing within six to twelve months.

There are plenty of resources online that will take you through SEO and its implementation. This article is going to focus on one key thing not to do in order to be successful in applying SEO to your recruitment website, this practice is known as keyword stuffing.

Keyword stuffing is one of the oldest short-cuts to boosting your site’s ranking, defined by Google as the practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate its ranking in search results. This method of “stack it up and they will come” approach will ultimately harm your site’s ranking. Whilst it is encouraged to focus on creating useful, information-rich content that applies keywords appropriately, stuffing keywords is still widely seen as a bad practice. Basic guidelines for webmasters are:

• Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines;
• Don’t deceive your users;
• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings; and
• Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, and engaging.

Keywords do have a part to play in your ranking. Whilst one or two relevant ones will effectively boost your rank, a continuous multiplication of them does not necessarily translate to a continuing improvement.  If anything, you will start to lose rank, the worst case scenario being that  your site will be penalised.

So, how do you pass go, collect $200 and stay out of the ranking jail? Keep the following points in mind to avoid these simple landmines:

• Drop long tail keywords (keywords specific to what you’re selling)  in your content too many times and your penalty will greet you around the next corner. So, instead of repeating “Australia technology sales recruitment quick hire”, simply using “Australia” a few times will deliver better results;
• Not adding enough high-quality content will hinder page rankings. The more pages you have, the more pages on your site will be indexed by search engines. When you have lengthy and substantial content, your pages will be more reader-focused;
• Worshipping keyword density is likely decrease your sites overall performance, your aim should be to shape content for your readers, rather than search engines.

So there you go. We hope this will help you consider breaking down your SEO approach into simple steps easily implemented into your site in order to maximise its potential