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Articles from Diggings

10 Reasons The Writer’s Strike Sucks 2007-11-07 09:34:04 10. Whenever the next season of the ShowBiz Show With David Spade was going to start, it might not 9. Jay Leno’s monologue is always worth a laugh 8. Conan is still the best late night TV show and reruns are slightly less funny 7. Gossip Girl is sort of entertaining (maybe watch an episode before mocking me too harshly) 6. Entourage’s next season might be delayed 5. Boston Legal’s William Shatner & James Spader are one of the all-time best duos on TV 4. South Park is the best show on Comedy Central, and one of the best shows on TV 3. The Office is just as humorous as ever 2. 30 Rock is getting better and better, and it was hysterical to begin with 1. If Season 4 of Lost is delayed, I might slash my wrists The writers are absolutely ‘in the right’ in this debate and have a legitimate claim on a fair and reasonable portion of the proceeds generated by new media. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers cannot possibly defend their position ...

Newspapers Try To Change The Rules Of The Game 2007-11-06 20:36:49 Like the playground kid who owns the bat and the ball and gets to pick the teams so he always wins, newspapers this week are making an attempt to change the rules of the game to try to stave off certain defeat. The nation’s newspapers and the Audit Bureau of Circulations announced that in reporting circulation numbers, they will begin including online readers and non-paid circulation (which includes things like free newspapers at local hotels and bundles of papers dropped off at local high schools) in their rapidly evaporating paid readership numbers. While these additional two categories of readers and ‘Total Audience’ are relevant to some degree to advertisers, they are far less valuable to advertisers than paid readership and should be reported separately. The dailies should be reviled for this pathetic attempt to change the rules of the game to artificially pad their sagging paid readership circulation. Fortunately, they don’t own the bat and the ball and th ...

This Is A Tough Job… 2007-11-06 16:15:15 On a recent trip to New York, I came across this guy standing on the SE corner of Central Park. Dressed in a statue of Liberty costume, complete with the metallic green face paint, this guy poses with people for pictures. This I would classify in the tough job category. Tags: New York City, Statue of Liberty, Photo Opportunities, Face Paint, Tourist Photos ...

SEO Tip #10 - Frames Are Abysmal 2007-11-05 09:26:13 The last tip (actually there will be a bonus tip tomorrow) from our SEO white paper for corporate job boards: Tip #10: Frames are abysmal Using frames, a technique involving the splitting the browser window into several independent parts, came into being in the 90’s. It was popular for a short period of time, but even as early as 1996, people started to recognize how cumbersome and clumsy frames can be as a primary method of navigation. Search engines actually give up when it comes to frames, and typically just ignore the site. They simply cannot send a visitor to such a site in the way the designers meant them to see it, with the navigation pane and the content pane. The search engine will most likely send visitors to the content pane, since the content there is what most likely facilitated the search result with the link to the site. Unfortunately, the content pane alone loses any meaningful navigation with out the corresponding navigation pane, and visitors will probably leav ...

Happy Halloween 2007-10-31 09:37:30 Tags: Halloween Costumes, Witches, Dogs Dressed Up As Witches ...

SEO Tip #9 - All the job information should be in text, not graphics 2007-10-31 09:29:02 From our white paper on helping companies improve the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) characteristics of their career section within their company’s web site: SEO Tip #9: All the job information should be in text, not graphics As a result of either unreasonable deadlines or lack of knowledge, web developers sometimes use a graphic of text rather than actual text. While this may lead to a slightly better looking page (though the difference is often indiscernible), search engines are not capable of interpreting images (yet) and therefore are not finding all the relevant words that you want them to index on your page. If, for example, you have a job title stated in an image, the search engine will have no idea what’s in the picture and will never be able to properly categorize that job or give it proper consideration in search engine results. To determine if your site is utilizing images instead of real text, right-click on any text in question (which will stand out by havin ...

Strange SEO Results For Google Search: Craigslist + Death 2007-10-29 21:54:34 I wrote a post a few weeks ago about how writing a blog provides an excellent, hands-on education about some of the basics in understanding and appreciating how search works. It is something I’ve started paying more attention to as I track how people stumble across Diggings, especially the search phrases that direct people to this blog. In a very sad, strange twist to that phenomena, I received tons of traffic to my blog today from people searching on ‘Craigslist + Death’. This post was actually the 2nd search result on Google out of 1,960,000 results. What people were looking for was the horrific story that occurred in Minneapolis this past weekend of a woman, responding to a nanny ad on Craigslist, who was found dead in the trunk of her car shortly thereafter. It’s an appalling story and one that perfectly captures people’s fear about the dangers that lurk online and how sick people can take advantage of the power of the web. At any rate, it’s a ho ... Google

Who Killed The Newspaper? The Web In The Library With The Candlestick or TV In The Study With The Pipe? 2007-10-29 21:28:19 In a Sunday Op-Ed piece, The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby places more blame for the death of the daily newspaper on television than on the web. While the web has certainly accelerated the decline in readership over the past 5 years or so, Jacoby is correct in pointing out that readers began abandoning newspapers long before the web became a legitimate media channel. Jacoby also points out that predictions pertaining to the imminent demise of the dailies have surrounded the industry for at least 40 years. Perhaps none of us have a Clue. Tags: Death of the Dailies, Decline of Daily Newspapers, Declining Readership of the Dailies, Daily Newspapers, Clue, Parker Brothers, Hasbro, Classic Board Games, Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby ...

SEO Tip #8 - Appropriately Prioritize Information 2007-10-29 11:36:49 LinkUp, a job board operated by JobDig, recently exhibited at the ERE conference in Washington, D.C. For the show, we published a white paper on helping companies that have a corporate career section on their company web site improve the SEO characteristics of their site. The following is Tip #8 from the article: Tip #8: Appropriately prioritize the information on each page The goal of each page that contains a job opening should be to communicate to potential applicants the most important information that jobseekers will find useful as they browse and consider the individual job listings. Less priority should be given to less critical information. Priorities are established by font size and relative position on the page. By staying focused on putting everything where it logically makes sense for the jobseeker, and mimicking the layouts that other companies use to list their jobs, your jobs and the site as a whole becomes more search engine, and jobseeker, friendly. There are books tha ...

SEO Tip #7 - Make Pages Printer Friendly 2007-10-28 11:45:45 SEO tip # 7 from our white paper on how to improve the search engine optimization of your company’s career section on your corporate web site. Tip #7 - Make sure each page on your site is print friendly Make sure that every page in your company’s career section is easy to print, especially each individual job opening. There are huge benefits in doing this, both to jobseekers and search engines. When a website prints out cleanly, not getting chopped up or distorted on the printed page, it’s an excellent sign that the code is well written and search engine friendly. Search engines love big blocks of text and penalize sites when text is choppy and poorly aligned.  Your printed page will give good insight into how the search engine ’sees’ your website. Print-friendliness is also an appealing attribute for job seekers who frequently print off the listings in which they’re interested. By putting a bit of one-time effort into the print-version of your website, you ...

SEO Tip #6 - Use An Applicant Tracking System 2007-10-27 23:04:02 From our SEO White Paper: Tip #6: Each listing should tie directly in to your applicant tracking system (ATS) Going back to the PageRank concept, the more pages that exist on your website, the greater visibility it will have for search engines. Unfortunately, this is about the only SEO benefit that you would gain by having an ATS tied into your jobs. However, there are tremendous benefits to the jobseeker when your jobs are all connected to a method for receiving applications. Jobseekers find career sections offering online applications to be more trustworthy. They are also more willing to take the time to complete and submit an application, perceiving the company to be more likely to list real jobs that are actively accepting applications. Without an ATS, jobseeker might wonder if the company is still looking for applicants. If you do not utilize an ATS, perhaps it is time to consider one. There are dozens of capable vendors out there, with solutions for every size company and every s ...

SEO Tip #5: Registration on your site should be optional, not mandatory 2007-10-26 11:47:07 The latest installment from our white paper on helping companies improve the search engine optimization for their career sections on the company web site: Tip #5: Registration on your site should be optional, not mandatory We all love metrics. Knowing who is looking at what on your site is an incredibly important part of understanding not only your candidates but the characteristics of your site’s traffic. That’s why a lot of websites, including both JobDig and LinkUp, offer registration options so visitors can create accounts on a website. But if you do offer registration and individual user accounts, it is critical to make sure that registration on your site is optional. Forcing people to register before they can browse job listings might, and most likely will, result in your site turning away passive jobseekers and blocking search engines from indexing your site. As well, forcing people to register prevents people from being able to easily bookmark specific jobs. We are not sayi ...

SEO Tip #4 For Corporate Career Sites 2007-10-25 10:10:38 From our recently published whitepaper on SEO for company job boards: Tip #4: Your jobs should be published in HTML HTML is the universal language of webpages. All browsers can read it and search engines are built to search it. To make your listings as accessible as possible to both jobseekers and search engines, they need to be published in HTML. They should not be delivered in a PDF or .doc (Microsft Word) file, and especially not in a format that requires something to be downloaded in order to be viewed. Despite the fact that search engines such as Google and Yahoo are increasing their support for non-HTML files, anything but HTML presents a potential headache to the jobseekers visiting your site. One might think that providing a link to download a free PDF reader like Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is a sufficient workaround for continuing to use PDF files or that everyone has a PDF plug-in installed in their browser. It’s not and they don’t. Imagine standing in the cereal aisle ...

If This Isn’t A Sign We’re In A Bubble… 2007-10-24 15:56:10 At the risk of being tarred and feathered by online militants, I’d say this report from the Wall Street Journal Technology Alert has to be exhibit A in the case for an internet bubble: Microsoft reached a deal to invest up to $250 million for a minority stake in Facebook, and will sell advertising on the site outside the U.S., beating Google in a closely watched contest. The companies have discussed a valuation for Facebook as high as $15 billion. The agreement comes after intense lobbying by Microsoft and Google for Facebook’s hand. In recent weeks, executives including Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer have courted the three-year-old social-networking company, which this year expects a profit of $30 million on revenue of $150 million, according to people familiar with the company. I’ll admit, Facebook is huge, it clearly will be a dominant online player for some period of time, maybe even for a long time (though the odds are very low), and the company warrants ...

SEO Tip #3 For Corporate Job Boards 2007-10-24 09:59:16 From our recent white paper on helping companies leverage search engine optimization (SEO) for their corporate career section within their company web site: Tip #3 – Each job opening should have its own page A common but damaging mistake often made by corporate career sections is to publish all job listings on the exact same page. For many reasons, every single job listed on a company’s web site should have its own page and be able to be bookmarked. It may be slightly more expensive to develop a site this way if your developer charges on a per page basis, but it is well worth the  added expense. From a simple perception standpoint, lumping all the jobs together on the same page gives the appearance that the listed positions are less important. Perhaps more importantly, using the entire page for each job allows more details to be included, resulting in a larger quantity of more qualified candidates. Use the page to more thoroughly describe the position, including a complete list of ...