Since there are countless job boards already online, and more on the way, you’ll need to have a strategy in place to make your board stand out from the crowd. One part of that strategy should be Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Why is this important? Because research shows that about 2/3 of all job seekers begin by using search engines. If your job board isn’t implementing proper SEO best practices, it’s likely that your site will fall to the bottom of the search engine results and be seen by very few people looking for a job.

SEE ALSO: How to Maximize SEO for Job Boards

Here are a few things you can do to supercharge your job board for the search engines.

Backlinks

When it comes to SEO, there isn’t much that beats high quality backlinks. What are backlinks? They are links to your site from other sites.

Why are backlinks important? Those backlinks are fed into the algorithms that search engines use to calculate the most relevant matches for a keyword. The more backlinks you have, the more likely your site will rank towards the top of the search results.

However, there is a caveat. It’s not good enough just to have a lot of backlinks from sites that nobody ever visits. You’ll want backlinks from sites with a high Page Rank (PR).

One of the best ways to get backlinks is to create them yourself. Seek out opportunities for guest blogging on non-competing websites. You may even have friends who operate high PR websites. Ask them if you can create a guest post with a link back to your job board.

When creating backlinks, be sure to use relevant keywords. For example, if your job board is meant exclusively for Java developers, then make sure your anchor text for the link reads “jobs for Java developers” or something like that. The anchor text should be similar to whatever you would expect people to type into a search engine.

Optimize The Site Itself

Be sure to also optimize the website itself. You can do that by ensuring that your keyword is on the website, especially in the title and the description. A word of caution, though: Don’t get too exuberant with populating your website with your keyword. That will actually work against you as the search engine algorithms check for that.

Also, make use of H1 tags within your content. The search engines love header tags. Be sure that the content of those header tags is descriptive.

Finally, create a job board blog and post content relevant to your job board at least once a week. You’ll increase your exposure by continually adding keyword rich content to your site. If your blog posts are helpful, they will also get some social shares which adds link juice to your job board as well.

SEO is easier than most people realize. With a little added effort, your job board can rank highly for keywords specific to your site.