Hi all,
At this year's conference I had a few conversations with people on how to make sure their research shows up in web searches from Google and Yahoo. As a web site designer and project manager, this is part of what I do for a living. Here is the short list of things to do, in order of importance:
1) Pick no more than three phrases per page to focus on; one or two would be better.
2) Put those phrases in the <title> tag; in a headline like <h3> of the body; as linked text; in alt tags for graphics; and in the url (e.g., system_dynamics_fisheries.html).
3) Use the phrases in the body (which should be less that 500 words) a half-dozen times (too many uses will look like spam and be discounted). This will be a kind of abstract from which you can link to the full paper page or PDF.
4) Get other people in other domains to this page, and link to it from elsewhere in your site.
5) In the <head> tag, put your key phrases in <meta keyword> and <meta
description> tags.
This works well if you're an academic and there's not much money chasing your terms. http://www.systemdynamics.org/ does all of these things, and that's why it shows up first on Google when I search for ""system dynamics"" ahead of MIT and JPL among over a million hits. [Well, it IS missing a meta description tag and is a bit on the wordy side -- I don't want Jack Pugh to think there's NO room for improvement
]If on the other hand you're using a commercially valuable term like ""air conditioners,"" then you're competing with large companies with lots of money who can have focus one page on each phrase and have thousands of links and cross-links. Your job is much tougher. In general, searchers don't go more than three pages deep into search results. The first page and especially the first three results are keenly fought over. Companies pay to have ads places on the right hand side. If there are a lot of ads in the search results for your phrase, then people are also spending a lot of time and money tuning their sites to show up for that term, and maybe you should remember that discretion is the better part of valor and think about using a different phrase.
For more information on search engine positioning, I recommend ""Search Engine Visibility"" by Shari Thurow.
Tom Lum Forest
Posted by ""Tom Forest"" <tforest@prometheal.com>
posting date Tue, 13 Sep 2005 16:03:03 -0700