Many seem to capitalize on the “Google Sandbox Effect,” which I believe to be an urban legend born in part, by poor SEO practices. When sites do not get indexed people have blamed Google instead of looking to the number of poorly-done websites. I have never had a site “sandboxed” but I do not launch sites that are not already as close to perfect as possible.

There is no point in paying someone to create metadata unless your website is well designed, has quality content, and friendly navigation for humans and robots. Why should Google (or any search engine) promote cruddy sites? Instead of blaming finicky search engines, blame your SEO company for site failure or for making promises they simply cannot hbnor.

I refuse to provide even basic SEO services to any client who’s website is full or bad links (or link farms) and malfunctioning scripts and navigation. What is the point of trying to drive traffic to a broken-down website? No one will come back – including web crawlers.

This is something I tell all my clients … robots, by nature want to crawl your site. No SEO company deserves bragging rights for getting a robot to visit your site they will do that on their own in most cases. A professional should make sure your entire site is working so that robots can crawl and digest information on your website in a way that helps you in search engine returns.

Anyone can get robots to come to your site – but will they index it? A true SEO professional will ensure robots have something to feed on besides metadata so they will keep coming back and indexing more pages. This will increase your chances of appearing in search engines.

Thank you for pointing out that SEO is not about keywords but about the entire website. Any SEO company that offers you canned services and who has not first looked at your site AND researched your industry, is one to run from.

However, I have to disagree about the work-a-rounds. Including a logo and limited information is not the same as fully branding the client and seems to be the standard practice. Many of these work-a-rounds do not even link to the career sites. That means the candidates that are applying are not learning about the employer or the employer’s culture, which is usually not good for candidate quality.

Also, the work-a-rounds are only temporary fixes. When those contracts are over and/or those mirror sites are shut down, the client’s ranking is no better off. It’s almost as if they have “leased” search engine placement. Those same funds could have been invested in meaningful changes to the career site’s usability, accessibility, organization, functionality and content that would have made long-term impact.

I understand the motivation for using a work-a-round, however I am advocating for optimizing the career site.

Keep in mind also that some career website’s would need a complete re-design in order to be search engine friendly. Career sites that are built with frames or pop-up’s don’t have much of a chance for being successful organically.

I agree that SEO should not be your only strategy but it is certainly an important one these days with all the job related searches being done directly within the search engines.

PPC or SEM is another tactic as Morgan pointed out but one thing to keep in mind is even paid advertising requires SEO, if your pages are not optimized to fit Google’s quality guidelines you’ll end up paying way more then the guy who has optimized their landing pages.

There are some shady service providers out there, if anyone promises you specific rankings or mentions being able to get you 100’s of links for pennies – Run!