Maximizing the Exposure of your Research

Editor's Notes

1. - making it easy for search engines to find your website, index its content and “understand” it enough to be able to determine when it is relevant to a user’s search, and how highly in search results it should be presented - technical aspects - outwith your control - but you can control what you write, and that is a huge factor http://www.dreamstime.com/stock-photos-robot-newspaper-image26151313 Or https://abitofcs4fn.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/robot-reading-istock_000012448512large.jpg
2. - academics use regular search engines to look for related works - Inger / Gardner and other sources on this (58% of Wiley traffic comes from search engines - Anne-Marie Green, http://exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2013/07/23/search-engine-optimization-and-your-journal-article-do-you-want-the-bad-news-first/)
3. - there is a LOT of content in search engines, and people don’t look beyond the first 10 results (source?) getting onto that first page is therefore hugely competitive, and people practise weapons-grade SEO to achieve that - of course academic content should ultimately be judged on its own merits but you have to make it findable if that is going to happen- so you have to do a least a bit of hobby-level SEO (and trust your publishers to be doing some too, as Wiley do) - this has led to the concept of “ASEO” - academic search engine optimisation
4. Publish or Perish? Discoverability or Death!
5. Mystical and evolving art - secret algorithms, constant battle to stay ahead of the bad guys (“black hat”)
6. Why this order?
7. Keywords really are the key! If you can get these right, everything else starts to fall into place Consider keywords to be search terms. Think about the people you’d like to read your paper - what 2-4 words are they likely to use in searching for it? Have you included those words? Look at the words you have actually included - which are most frequent? You may want to “normalise” - if there is a particular word you really want your paper to be associated with, make sure you have not used too many synonyms for it - the more you use that word, the more highly a search engine will rank your paper when people search for that word,, so consistency is important.
8. That said, do include synonyms and abbreviations if you think people will also look for those. There ARE tools to help you determine keywords (*You’ll all be familiar with the CAB Thesaurus http://www.cabi.org/cabthesaurus/ for finding synonyms from the broad to the narrow, and in different languages) but I think your own brain is likely to be the best tool for the job! Just remind it to think outside the box 😃  *Tip - try searching for the keyword options you are considering and see which return the right types of results. Some will be broad - that might help to ensure you aren’t narrowing your audience - but risk of losing your work in a slew of results. Some will be too narrow. *Experiment today? - with different keywords e.g. “degeneration” vs “neurodegeneration"
9. Titles: these are given the most “weight” by search engines because it is assumed they will contain all the most relevant words in terms of describing the entire page (or paper). Short titles (up to 140 characters) attract most citations - this is likely because search engines like Google actively favour shorter page titles; that said, in Kudos’ experience, 50 character is a minimum. Try to include the most relevant keywords in the first half. The title is what shows up in search results and most readers will scan these and not necessarily click further. Is it sufficiently descriptive - and sufficiently simple? Avoid special characters, subclauses, and unnecessary narrowing (try to avoid making it too region-specific, for example).
10. Avoid “clever” or “characterful” phrases - these worked in the print world where people only came across content in context, but they don’t really help people (or search engines) understand what your work is about and often push back the keywords to a subclause!  Sagi and Yechiam, found that “articles with highly amusing titles […] received fewer citations” - Sagi, I. & Yechiam, E. (2008) Amusing titles in scientific journals and article citation. Journal of Information Science, Vol. 34, No. 5, pp. 680–687.
11. Abstract: clear, structured (in the sense of a linear flow through the key points - introduction, method, results, discussion, conclusions), include your keywords 3-4 times - Goldilocks - not too much, not too little (search engines are sensitive to efforts to “trick” them)
12. Overall text: again, aim for consistent language and regular use of your keywords (though here is where you can also use relevant synonyms to broaden fundability).  *Did you know: different image types have an impact on the findability of your work - the text in “vector” images (svg, ai, eps, pdf (not scans)) can be searched by search engines; the text in “raster” images (gifs, jpg, png) cannot. Even though the full text may often be “paywalled”, most publishers work with search engines to enable it to be “crawled” for their indexes so the language of the full text also has a role to play in SEO although not nearly as vital - prevalence of search terms in the full text doesn’t seem to have as much of an impact on the ranking as prevalence in e.g. abstract. Publication titles are also used by Google - it will often return results from journals that contain the keyword in their titles even if their articles do not. That *may* influence your choice of where to submit ...
13. Search engine rankings are also based on “Google juice” - how many other sites link to you, the text on the pages that link to you and the prestige of the other sites that link to you (the extent to which those sites are themselves linked to)  Publisher work with partners such as A&Is and this helps - content being linked to from popular and relevant sites such as PubMed
14. You can also help here - citing your own work - where appropriate - linking to your work from your institutional website - and thinking about the text you use on your institutional pages - using sites like Kudos to describe your work in plain language and link back to it (the plain language helps broaden the “findability” of your work in search engines, the links help increase the “google juice” - you can also update the plain language descriptions over time which helps re-optimise your article for search engines as the field evolves) (plain language also helps readers - and search engines - of different languages) - sharing your work on other platforms (LinkIn, Twitter, Facebook, Mendeley, ResearchGate) *Did you know - you can also use Kudos as a platform from which to manage sharing to all these places - it generates a trackable link for your sharing so that you can map the effects of sharing against publication metrics such as views, downloads, citations and altmetrics
15. Summary: - don’t put yourself at a disadvantage - others are playing this game, so give your work a fighting chance by playing along - Google is like another reader for your content - consider it the dumbest! - it needs to know what your work is about - like any other non-specialist it helps to explain it in plain language