Indeed.com is the #1 jobsite in the world. Providing your users easy access to jobs listed on Indeed can not only add value to your website, but also become a source of income for you. Indeed pays "publishers" anywhere from a few cents to several dollars depending on if a user clicks on a link or applies for a job. We'll show you how to add Indeed jobs to one of your pages to start earning some of that affiliate money. 

The first thing you'll want to do is sign up for a publisher account. Once your account has been created, you will have a few options for displaying jobs on your site. The easiest option is to use this WordPress Plugin: Indeed API. If all you want is to give users an Indeed search box that will populate jobs on a page or post, this is the way to go. If you need to manipulate the data or want to populate jobs without the user having to search, you'll need to use one of the next two options.

Both options will work on WordPress or on a custom website. The easiest of these is to "Create a Jobroll". If you click on this tab in your Indeed publisher account, you'll see a page similar to this:

Option 1: Jobroll

Simply fill out the jobroll form and click "Get Jobroll Code" at the bottom of the page. This will give you the code you need to paste in your WordPress page to display the job widget. Make sure you're in text mode on the WordPress Text Editor when you paste this code. If done correctly, the output should look similar to this: 

You can edit the code to change the display and variables to fit your needs. In the example above, we used the 300 x 250 sized widget. We decided to change the length of the widget to make room for more jobs than the default '4'. To do this, edit this line in the code you pasted earlier:

#indeed_widget_wrapper{ width: 300px; height: 250px; background: #FFFFFF;}

Change the height in the line above from 250px to 100%. Otherwise the results will cut off. You can increase the number of results by editing the ind_n variable found shortly after the line above in the code you pasted from Indeed. You can also edit other variables in the code to fine-tune the results or even use PHP to insert dynamic values. Indeed provides a variable page with a list and description of variables you can change.

The jobroll method is the easiest method to use and requires very little knowledge and skill to implement. Fill out the form, get the code, paste it in the post or page on your site using the WordPress text editor, not visual editor. Done. The next method is a bit more complicated but gives you more control of how the results are displayed. This is the XML Feed method.

Option 2: XML Feed

Click on the "XML Feed" tab from within your Indeed publisher account. You'll see a short blurb about Attribution followed by the code. We'll come back to this later but Indeed requires you add this near your results to give them credit.

Next you'll see more code for Click Tracking. This is very useful if you have different job pages or widgets throughout your site and you want to find out which ones your users are clicking on. We'll come back to this and the next section, Channels, later.

Now to the good stuff. The section Sample Request shows you an example of the URL you need to create followed by an example of the variables you can edit. If you were to go to this URL, you would see a list of jobs based on the variables included in the URL and displayed in XML format. We'll show you how to change the variables to meet your needs and how to display the results in a useful format. First the variables.

The first variable is publisher. This is followed by a string of numbers which represent your publisher ID. Everything after that is editable. The q variable represents the search term query and the l represents the location. All of the variables are listed and described on the XML Feed page so I won't go into all of them. I will give you a tip that if you go to Indeed's website and search for a job, you can look at the URL in the top of your browser to see the variables for the search you just entered.

Copy the example URL from the XML Feed page into a text editor and replace or add any variables to meed your needs. Now let's display the results. The following code needs to be placed inside of a WordPress template since WordPress does not allow you to use PHP in the built-in WYSIWYG editor. We'll show you how to get around this by using a plugin after explaining the code.

<ol><?php
$xml = simplexml_load_file('http://api.indeed.com/ads/apisearch?publisher=123456&q=java&l=austin%2C+tx&sort=&radius=&st=&jt=&start=&limit=&fromage=&filter=&latlong=1&co=us&chnl=&userip=1.2.3.4&useragent=Mozilla/%2F4.0%28Firefox%29&v=2');

foreach($xml->results->result as $result) { ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo $result->url;?>"><?php echo $result->jobtitle;?></a><br />
<?php echo $result->company;?>(<?php echo $result->formattedRelativeTime;?>)<?php echo $result->city;?>, <?php echo $result->state;?><br /></li>
<?php } ?>
<ol>

Everything is first wrapped in a <ol> ordered list tag. Now we need to display the results of our Indeed job search into the list. The second line stores the XML results of our URL into the variable $xml. Now we can retrieve the results in smaller sections using a foreach loop. In the example above, the loop displays the job title ($result->jobtitle) on the first line linked to the job URL ($result->url) . The next line displays the company name ($result->company), relative time ($result->formattedRelativeTime), and city ($result->city) and state ($result->state). This is what it looks like:

If you want to be able to add content before or after the jobs list using the WordPress WYSIWYG editor, place the code before or after this line of code in your template:

<?php the_content(); ?>

If you go back to the XML Feed page on the Indeed website, you'll see a sample XML Feed below the variables section. This is where you'll find all of the display options. Anything between the <result> and </result> tags can be displayed. If you know PHP you could easily edit the code above to meet your needs. Even if you don't, you should still be able to pick up on the pattern. All PHP variables need to begin with <?php echo before and ;?> after. Use the Indeed XML Feed example if you want any variables we don't have in the code.

Don't forget to add the Attribution code at the end of your <ol> tag. This adds the text "Jobs by Indeed" at the bottom of your jobs list with links to Indeed's website. This is required by Indeed and here's the code:

<span id=indeed_at><a href="http://www.indeed.com/">jobs</a> by <a
href="http://www.indeed.com/" title="Job Search"><img
src="http://www.indeed.com/p/jobsearch.gif" style="border: 0;
vertical-align: middle;" alt="Indeed job search"></a></span>

Let's also quickly go back over the Click Tracking and Channels section before explaining how to use a plugin to add the XML Feed. If you are only going to have one ad on one page or if you have multiple ads but don't care which ones your users are clicking on, skip to the "Insert PHP Plugin" section below. If you do want to track this, you'll need to add the following code to the header of the page your jobs are displayed.

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://gdc.indeed.com/ads/apiresults.js"></script>

If you're using Elegant Themes, this is as simple as adding the code using the Integration tab of the epanel. Paste it in the white box directly below: "Add code to the <head> of your blog". If you don't use Elegant Themes, your theme might provide a similar option. If not you'll have to edit your header.php template file and add the code there.

Next you'll want to add a channel to your account and append this channel to your URL. You can add a channel from the XML Feed page on Indeed. Give it a name that will explain which page or section it is referencing like "home" or "small widget". To add the channel to the URL, place it anywhere in the variable section of the URL:

&chnl=home

Change "home" to the name of your channel. Make sure you add a & after the channel name if another variable is following it.

Insert PHP Plugin

If you would like to avoid editing your theme's template files directly, you can use a plugin that will let you insert PHP to any WordPress page or post. Oddly enough it's called Insert PHP. Once you install and activate the plugin, we need to change our code. For reasons beyond the scope of this tutorial, we need to use a PHP concatenation technique for this plugin to work properly. So the code from earlier will look like this:

<ol>
[insert_php]
$xml = simplexml_load_file('http://api.indeed.com/ads/apisearch?publisher=123456&q=java&l=austin%2C+tx&sort=&radius=&st=&jt=&start=&limit=&fromage=&filter=&latlong=1&co=us&chnl=&userip=1.2.3.4&useragent=Mozilla/%2F4.0%28Firefox%29&v=2');
foreach($xml->results->result as $result) {
echo '<li><a href="' . $result->url . '">' . $result->jobtitle . '</a><br />'
. $result->company . '(' . $result->formattedRelativeTime . ')' . $result->city . ',' . $result->state .
'<br /></li>';
} [/insert_php]
<ol>

This will be inserted into any page or post using the Text view of the WordPress text editor. We still have one problem left. For whatever reason, WordPress has a tendency to really jack things up when going back and forth between text and visual editors with PHP code. It usually works upon first saving but if you go back to edit the page, things go wrong very quickly. To avoid this issue, we recommend another plugin: HTML Mode Locker. Once installed and activated, this plugin gives you an option on every page and post to lock the Text (HTML) view. Just go to the page you want to add the PHP code to and check "Lock HTML View" just above the "Publish" box. Now you can add the code to the text editor without any worries.

That wraps up this tutorial. As you can see, the Jobroll option is much easier to implement over the XML Feed option. It's really a matter of having control of the content displayed. Even with the Jobroll widget, you could probably use CSS to properly align the widget and control how it is displayed. But if you need more control, the XML Feed option will give you just that. Both options can become very useful if you use PHP to pull in dynamic variables like city and state.