We've just completed an upgrade to our site. But we did not take search engine optimization into account when we did this.

Now we wonder if we need to make some changes to help searchers find our site.

We're engineering recruiters. We place several types of engineers including, civil, structural, geotechnical, traffic, environmental and so forth.

Question:

Must/should we actually list the full word combination of each type of engineer we place... as in: structural engineer, civil engineer, geotechnical engineer... etc?

Must/should we show these word combinations on the home page and in meta tags? How about sub-pages?

b.t.w. We do list all our job postings on one sub-page with job titles listed.

thanks

jeff

p.s. Must/should we register our site with the various search engines?

Keyword phrases would cut down on the number of competing sites. As for your content, make it as descriptive as possible without seemingly dropping keywords here and there. For meta data, vary each sub page so that they don't compete against each other. Overall, keep your content relative.

MTweed...

Thank you for your comment... I don't understand your first sentence... and I now realize my original post could have been clearer.

We have a choice of saying:

We "recruit engineers - civil, structural, geotechnical, transportation..." or

We "recruit civil engineers, structural engineers, geotechnical engineers, transportation engineers..."

The reason I ask -- when an engineer or a potential client searches for recruiters... they will undoubtedly search for the combination - "structural engineer" or "civil engineer".

To clarify, lets say you are the only site with the keyword phrase "structural engineer" and some one types in "engineer" in one of many search engines. You'd be listed in the results, but so would alot of other sites. Consequently, your ranking would be quite low. If they typed in "structural engineer", of course you'd be listed number one. Keyword phrases just allows you to differentiate yourself from other sites. Plus, "civil" by itself can refer to civil law, civil manners etc. Search engines work as well as the content is clear. Well defined content will get you better results. :)

keyword prominence and proximity are important, so you do likely want to have each phrase on the page somewhere at least once if you can, but you also want the writing to read well so it converts, and when people write naturally not all occurances of a term are together. so you sorta mix and match.

if the terms are competitive and different people in different markets might appeal to different sales copy then you might want to make a page for each industry.