How to Build Quality Links with Your Job Postings

Editor’s note: This post was contributed by Adrienne Erin, a social media marketing blogger and freelance designer.

Is your company currently hiring? Are you also trying to market your brand through quality links and referrals? Believe it or not, you can accomplish both tasks at once.

You can turn those job postings and employment ads into quality links. You could even make it a regular practice to increase your brand’s engagement and website traffic.

Why Use Job Postings to Link Build?

Lots of people are looking for employment opportunities, especially with the economy as it is. Publishing job offers means you’ll have highly engaging content and shareable links for your site. That alone should bring in new traffic, maybe even with some new business.

You don’t have to limit yourself to the same old job listing portals. There are many industry-specific job portals that are frequented by high-quality candidates and that deliver followed links from a well-rated domain. For instance, well-known design blog Smashing Magazine hosts an active job listings section which not only brings substantial traffic, but also provides followed links to the hiring parties. A job listing here is a strong signal to Google that your company is high quality and legitimate.

This engaging and shareable content can substantially improve your SEO ratings. To add to that, valuable job listings are also a great way to get links in some .edu domains. Quite a few colleges and universities provide links to employers from their career development office’s website. Most of them also have a resources page with links to useful job boards.

Here’s how to find and build great links as you search for the perfect employee for the job.

Create a Linkable Asset

If you want to start earning links with job postings, make sure you first publish company job listings on your website. These are a linkable asset for you – if someone sees that you’re hiring and wants to refer people in that direction, it’s a page they can link to instead of linking to a Monster or Craigslist ad.

Keep the page evergreen by continually updating it with the latest job availabilities, instead of making a new page for each position. In addition, make sure the content is easily shareable by including social media buttons where applicable, so visitors can share it with their friends or family.

Finding the Opportunities

After you’ve put up your own pages about job openings, look for job search sites where you can list the position and link to your page with more information. Many are free, including the Media Monitoring News Job Listings in PR and Marketing.

1. Industry Job Boards

This varies by industry but make sure you search thoroughly, as job search portals exist for every industry from physiatry to carpentry. To find them, search Google for job boards, employer lists, or recruiters in your industry. Here are a few example queries:

web design jobs
web design employers
web design recruiters
web design job board

2. Industry Publications

Be sure to check out the online versions of well-respected publications in your industry; they often host job ads.

3. Local Job Boards

You should also look for major local job boards. Your local news organizations are a good bet for these, though they often charge a hefty fee, sometimes in conjunction with a Monster or CareerBuilder listing. In addition, if you are in a larger metropolitan area, try combining your city with keywords to see if super-niche job boards exist:

New York City web design jobs
web design employers Chicago

4. College Job Pages

College job Web pages are very valuable for finding candidates and for SEO, but you will face a high barrier to entry. The college most likely will not charge you for your listing, but will probably scrutinize the listing before accepting it. The colleges you reach out to will probably need to have some kind of connection with your business; maybe they are close by, or you employ their graduates.

If you are going to post job advertisements anyway, it’s well worth your while to double up and build links at the same time.

This is where your linkable asset comes into play. When you create a job posting on another web site, link the posting to the careers/job openings page on your own site. You’ll save the job searcher time in finding the jobs page and Google will appreciate the relevancy as well. That’s what natural link building is all about.

Have you tried this link building technique? Share your experiences and advice in the comments!