A few months ago, I started writing about the importance of search engines, both on the web as a whole, and for each individual website. To sum up, "finding the answers" to your questions is both the blessing and the challenge handed to us by the Internet. Sometimes seekers even narrow down their search to a specific web site, but then fail to find the answer within that site.
As an interim solution while the first stage of the site was being built, I employed Google’s Site Search as our internal search engine. As some users noticed, this kept Google indexing our pages rather frequently, exposing user profile pages to the web with little effort. Unfortunately, some profiles became buried and weren’t indexed. We’ve taken some steps to correct this, and will continue to improve this system in the future.
Regardless, using Google Site Search was not the final goal for several reasons:
- We wanted to be able to separate various sections in the site to initially filter out certain pages, creating categories, such as Business Profiles, Buyer Profiles, and Blogs/Articles.
- We wanted to encourage user participation in exchange for higher placement on the search engine results pages.
- We wanted to allow for paid placements in the search results from our own users, and not depend on Google’s advertisers.
- We wanted to give our users a little more control over when their data shows up, using modern tags technology (read more here). We also thought tag clouds were cool.
As an initial set-up, all profiles have been updated with tags set to a variation of their title. All users are encouraged to modify their tags to include all keywords you think are applicable for your business. Note that keyword spamming is a nuisance to other users, and you will probably suffer more than you gain. Also, you have a limited amount of space, so use it wisely.
Also note, for the time being, search results are still being ordered by last modified date, so continue to modify your profile regularly, hopefully with new information. In the future, results will be affected by a number of factors, such as recommendations, reviews, referrals, accepted bids, forum posts, and blogs.
Finally, for the SEO mavens, you may have noticed that the JobShuk page rank is still quite low on external search engines. While we’ve chosen to focus our resources on building a useful and sticky site, we would still appreciate adding a link to the site or to your profile to help build our page rank, and that of all our hosted profiles.
As always, we welcome your feedback below. Thank you.