Search Engine Friendly URLs
Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 4:01pm Sunday 26 July 2009
Job aggregation sites were one of the fist to fully embraced the search engine friendly (SEF) URL structure, as it generates high organic traffic from the search engines. Over the past few years, other job boards have been envious of MyCareer's SEF URL structure and now SEEK has implemented a SEF URL structure for each job advert.
Using relevant keywords within the URLs of your website is commonly referred to as using "search engine friendly URLs" or "friendly URLs" (SEF) and is a basic concept where the URLs of each web page properly reflect the content that's on that particular page.
Friendly URLs make a site a lot easier and usable for both humans and search engines to understand. You are probably wondering why such a long URL would be considered friendly; after all who would want to type out all of that?
You would be right on that point, but that is not what we mean by "friendly". What makes this URL friendly is that it is made of words, so the URL gives you an idea of the subject matter.
So ‘friendly’ = easier to understand. The only major job board not to fully implement SEF URL's is CareerOne. who are currently using the following structure URL/GetJob.aspx?JobID=[JOBID]
Let's have a look at the individual job advert URL structure of a number of job boards...
MyCareer
URL/jobs/[LOCATION][SUBURB][POSTCODE][STATE]/[CATEGORY]/[SUB-CATEGORY]/[JOBID]-[JOBTITLE].aspx
SEEK
URL/job/[JOBTITLE]/[LOCATION]/[JOBID]
JobsJobsJobs
URL/Job-[CATEGORY]-in-[LOCATION]-[JOBID].html
NowHiring
URL/[JOBID]+job+[JOBTITLE]+[LOCATION].aspx
CapitalJobs
URL/[JOBTITLE]-jobref-[JOBID]
MyCareer's URLs are quite long, but specifically target job seekers searching for local jobs (ie having Suburb/Postcode in the URL). The common unique parameter in all URLs is the JOBID. When the job board script receives the URL request, the script will look for the jobid and redirect you to that job advert.
Keywords in the URL in itself will not guarantee you great ranking, but it will enhance your chances. Placement of your desired keyword (ie. Job Title, Location, Category) in your URL will increase your search engine ranking. But it may be wise to consider not changing your existing URL or setting up a redirect to the new URLs.
This is because a change URL may result in broken link and that would greatly decrease you ranking, especially if one of your pages is ranking well in the search engines.
