Maximising the Exposure of Your ResearchSearch Engine Optimisation and why it matters@charlierapple

2

What we’ll cover• What is SEO?• Why do you need to bother?• How does it work?– Language– Links

• What you can do• Practical activities

What is SEO?

Why should you bother?

58%of Wiley traffic comes from search engines

Traffic = readers

Why should you bother?

from “publish or perish” to

“discoverability or (career) death” ?

So how does SEO work?

Mysterious

Ever-changing

Secretive

Battle between good and evil

How does SEO work?

Language

Links

Language

Well-pitched keywordsMeaningful titleBalanced abstractConsistent full text

Language

cares most about title and keywords

Search engine UK market share

Google 88.38%Bing 6.7%Yahoo 3.54%Others 1.38%

Source: Statcounter, 2015

we care about Google most because

Start with keywords

Give people searching online the key to finding your work

Top down: 2-4 words your potential readers might be

searching forBottom up: words you have frequently

included in your textMap these together and consider the right breadth and depth at which to pitch

Keywords – hints and tips

✔ think about the range of audiences that might find your work useful or interesting – from early career researchers to Nobelists; from fellow specialists to those in other fields

✔ use synonyms and abbreviations if you think these will be commonly used by people searching

✔ experiment with keyword tools (like the CAB Thesaurus) to help think about breadth vs depth, and even different languages

✔ try searching for the keyword options you are considering and see which return the right types of results

Titles

Titles carry most weight with search engines

Short titles attract most citations

Include the most important keywords early in the title phrase

Avoid special characters? : -

Title hints and tipsUsually, I have a quick look at the title. If interested, then I go to the abstract.

If it’s not an interesting title, I just forget it.

Professor Weiya Ma, McGill Universityhttp://pubs.acs.org/bio/ACS-Guide-Writing-Manuscripts-for-the-Digital-Age.pdf

Witold Kieńć, http://openscience.com/optimize-academic-articles-search-engines/

The title is not the best place to express your artistic soul.

“Therapy X decreased mortality in Y disease in a group of forty males” is a much better title than

“Victory on an invisible enemy: success in fighting disease Y with therapy X”.

Abstracts

A clear and concise summary of the key points in your text

Structure helps readers follow your thinking – introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusions

Include your keywords 3-4 times – bearing in mind the Goldilocks rule (too many = spammy, too few = less discoverable)

Abstract examples

http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/seo.asp

Abstract examples

http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/seo.asp

Bringing it all together

http://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileyblackwell/pdf/SEOforAuthorsLINKSrev.pdf

Full text

Ensure linguistic consistency with your title, keywords, abstract – but bring in synonyms too

Not all image types can be read by search engines – use “vector” options (svg, ai, eps, pdf)

Most subscription publishers’ content can still be read by search engines

Publication titles are factored into search results

Links

More links means better visibility

=

Linking tips

Cite your own work, where appropriate

Link to your work from your institutional website

Describe your work in plain language to broaden its findability, then link back to it

Share your work with people you know!

Don’t put your work at a disadvantage

24

Think about your audience choose well-pitched keywords for them

Keep titles short and simpleinclude key words near the beginning

Use your keywords judiciously in your abstract – not too many, not too few

Share your work and link to it from other websites, blogs, social media

Add plain language descriptions to broaden the search terms that will find your work

Choose image types that can be “read”

SUMMARYwhat you can do

25

Resources• Wiley Exchanges: 

http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2013/07/23/search-engine-optimization-and-your-journal-article-do-you-want-the-bad-news-first/

• Open Science: http://openscience.com/optimize-academic-articles-search-engines /

• Joeran Beel, Bela Gipp, and Erik Wilde. Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar and Co. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 41 (2): 176–190, January 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jsp.41.2.176

• ACS: http://pubs.acs.org/bio/ACS-Guide-Writing-Manuscripts-for-the-Digital-Age.pdf

• Wouter Gerritsmahttp://wowter.net/2014/02/01/academic-search-engine-optimization-publishers/