Release Notes: January 2017

Release Notes is our monthly update as to what is going on with Volcanic product development. This is an easy way to stay up to date with all the great work we are doing!

Each month we highlight new features, improvements and fixes we are making to the platform. We are also working hard on lots of other items that may not always be visible: like our security, infrastructure, API and job search functionality. Some months we release more work than others, which is the nature of product development. 

Alt Tag Improvements

To keep in line with best practice for users and SEO, we wanted to introduce the ability to add Alt tags to every image on our client's websites. 

What are we doing?

When you click on an image to edit, you will now see a blue 'settings' box in the top right corner. You can add your image Alt text in here. We have also added additional information to this area, which shows you the best size for the image which you are trying to place.

What it means for you

Alt tags are used for accessibility standards within websites, so it's important to have them. There are also SEO benefits linked to Alt tags. 

SEO Admin Area Improvements

We want to make managing your performance as easy as possible. To do this we wanted a central area for all of your SEO information to be held so that you aren't looking in multiple places at once.

What are we doing?

We have merged some of the existing SEO tools into one area. We have also added a few more tools (covered in this update) into this area to make it the most comprehensive SEO management feature available to recruiters.

What it means for you

The SEO area will make the management of your website's performance more effective and easier than ever. If used correctly (we have notes explaining how to do it), this area will generate more traffic and ultimately revenue for your website.

Global and Custom Location Changes

Location settings are one of the most difficult areas to configure on a recruitment website. We improve the locations settings continually, however, wanted to bring in a larger change than usual to accelerate our performance. 

What are we doing?

We have improved the way that local locations and in particular local colloquial terms are returned when candidates search for jobs. The changes which we are making allow a better relationship between different locations, especially in a hierarchy.  

What it means for you

More accurate locations for jobs means a better experience for candidates. This update is aimed at improving the speed and accuracy of serving the right job to your candidate.

AMP Support for blogs

Accelerated Mobile Page (or AMP, for short) is a project from Google and Twitter designed to make really fast mobile pages. AMP is a way of stripping down or streamlining the amount of HTML and CSS it takes to render a page, thus making files smaller and decreasing load times of pages. This results in faster and more optimised experience for mobile device users.

From a Google and search engine point of view, we’ve already seen that AMP ready pages are being listed higher on a mobile device than non-optimised results. From a recruiter's viewpoint, rolling out AMP pages means that blogs are listed higher. Note: we’ve seen a significant increase in users searching via a mobile device (figures over 50% of traffic) in the past 12 months

What are we doing?

We have built in technology that automatically turns a blog into an AMP page for you.

What it means for you

This means that your blogs will be optimised to the latest Google standards and will lead to more mobile traffic being delivered to you.