the top 100 job board categories and analysis

Posted by Eric Shannon on June 18, 2008 at 5:51pm

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this report took more than a hundred hours to complete and I believe many of you will find it useful. Not sure I would have done it had I known how much time it would take: the top 100 job board niches and analysis

Comment by Ken Levinson on June 18, 2008 at 7:15pm: Eric, I looked through your list with great interest, but was disappointed not to find Absolutely Health Care listed. I guess everyone that does these types of lists bases them on different criteria. I prefer Weddle's Users Choice Awards, which we were picked for 2008 and 2007 awards, and eQuest, where we were judged the most effective niche job board for health care jobs based on average number of responses per job posting. To me, being judged by the experience of our users and our effectiveness is the way I'd prefer to compete and be judged. Although I don't agree with your rankings in our niche, you did a very nice job, and should be commended for your effort. Sincerely, Ken

Comment by Eric Shannon on June 19, 2008 at 9:21am: Ken, actually you are listed as the only board in the - laboratory & technician - category. I agree that using Google search rankings is definitely not perfect. In fact, they drive me crazy and there has been a lot of turbulence in the rankings very recently. Thank you for your comments!

Comment by Ken Levinson on June 19, 2008 at 9:56am: Eric, I didn't catch that. Thanks! I looked under health care and medical, and also nursing. As a general job board for health care and medical, I tend to look there automatically. Sincerely, Ken

Comment by Eric Shannon on June 19, 2008 at 10:36am: ken, I should mention too that I agree with you fully that "being judged by the experience of our users and our effectiveness is the way I'd prefer to compete and be judged." and think that Weddle's is a shining light. I have not seen any equest awards. Where are they?

Our experience with equest has not been the best. We have found their customer service extremely weak. They tend to shove off costs onto job boards for the very things they charge their customers for. In other words they try to make us do the work they are charging their customers for.

I hope the report I put together may be useful to you for tweaking your seo rankings. A site with your history of awards and years in the marketplace should not have too much trouble rising in the rankings. in my experience, the most important tool that you have is the page title of your homepage. I think you have too many terms in there that are not relevant and I would experiment with changes. Typically a change in our home page title will be reflected in the rankings about three days later can cause us to rise or drop dramatically in the search engine rankings.

One of the reasons that I used Google is that because of their market share their rankings are influential. Google makes it very hard for new sites to rise up but easy for old sites to improve their situation.search on my name and you'll see one of the things that drives me crazy-- I have been blogging for three years and read way too much about seo and yet this pathetic bodybuilder with 15 links still ranks number one in Google for my name... lol. I wanted to test my seo knowledge against this challenge of ranking number one for my name and I failed. Probably because the bodybuilder site has my name in the domain, but nevertheless I failed against weak competition!!

Comment by Ken Levinson on June 19, 2008 at 11:22am: Eric,

I could not agree more about eQuest's customer service. Actually, what eQuest provided were not awards, but rather a report that they published. We have a copy on our site. Here's a link to it: http://healthjobsusa.com/equest.php. You'll see that your sites were recognized as well. As far as SEO, we recently started working with a leader in this field that I'll keep confidential. We're doing a face lift which should be completed shortly, and all SEO changes are being made to the new site, not the old site. Here's a link to what the new home page will look like. It's not fully functional yet: http://www.websitedesigner.net/new/absolutelyhealthcare/site/

Sincerely,

Ken

Comment by Julian Stopps on June 23, 2008 at 5:43pm: Good job Eric, my hat goes off to you for putting the effort into this - its no small task analysing 100 job boards.

Comment by Eric Shannon on June 23, 2008 at 5:48pm: don't know what I was thinking, lol. thank you Julian!

Comment by Brian Regan on June 25, 2008 at 4:00pm: My printing related job board is terrible from an SEO standpoint, but we outperform the printing site you list quite readily.

Our site is www.printworkers.com

Comment by Eric Shannon on June 25, 2008 at 4:14pm: that's a nice looking site Brian! I see your traffic is a lot higher.

you can fix your SEO problem in 30 seconds. just replace your page title on the homepage with this:

Print workers.com -- jobs for printing, digital, web, and copy professionals.

your rankings will probably shoot up in a week.

I will add you anyway.