This article is about academic website SEO rules that I have recently learned. If you work in higher education as a professor or desire to, you need an academic website.

Reasons to have an academic website

Every faculty member needs an academic website to promote their research

There are two primary reasons. First, publications is our currency. The goal is to widely disseminate our research. Citations are evidence of this. To get cited, you need to help your journal get your published article found. One way is with an academic website. You can blog about your research findings or interests and link each blog to your research papers.

Second, in the higher education job market, job applications include requests for academic website. You will be asked for the website URL. Some scholars use the website provided by their universities. Some find that they have more control over the content if they create their own website. I use WordPress. There is a free version that includes ads. To eliminate the ads, I use the Business version. It costs about $300 per year.

I find it hard to make time for posting to my blog. You can feed blog content with services such as Feedzy. But, to promote my research, I began by posting the abstract to an article and then stated “read more…” and link that to my full article. However, I found that this quick and dirty strategy does not do your search engine optimization (SEO). You should put much more time into it in order to get your research found. You can do it or hire someone to do it.

Blog post SEO and Readability Rules

I find that the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is quite helpful. Plugins are simply software packages you can add on to the WordPress website platform. Here are 20 SEO and readability rules I have recently learned and applied to my existing blog posts:

20 rules

1. Each full blog post should be at least 300 words. Categorize your blog posts and think of key words. Add key word tags. Also, select or add a category.
2. Shorten paragraphs to less than 150 words
3. Shorten sentences to 20 words
4. Enter a key phrase of no more than 4 words. For this blog post, I used the key phrase: academic website seo rules
5. Put key phrases in the beginning of the blog post title and in your introduction at the beginning of your blog. You can see my key phrase is part of this blog post’s title and in the first sentence of the blog post.
6. Shorten titles to a viewable limit for your blog page
7. Put the key phrase in the slug for the blog post’s URL.  The slug is simply the part of your blog’s URL which identifies its particular page on your website. It provides an easy to read format with all words in lowercase separated by a hyphen. Look at the URL for this blog post. It contains a slug: academic-website-seo-rules-ive-learned
8. If your blog post text is long, your key phrase needs to appear more than once
9. Add a meta description of 120-155 characters by editing your snippet and include the key phrase in the meta description. This is what will appear in a Google search about your blog post to describe it to a user of the search engine. For this blog post, I wrote: This article is about academic websites seo rules and readability for faculty researchers to use when writing blogs to promote research.
10. Use the active voice.
11. Add transition words. Click here for a list of transition-word-list.
12. Don’t start sentences with the same word or phrase. Use sentence variety.
13. Use subheadings coded in html if the blog post text is long. Here is an example of the html code for the size h6 subheading: <h6><strong>Blog post SEO and Readability Rules</strong></h6>
14. Provide outbound links (i.e. link to web pages other than your own). In this article, I provided you with a link to the Yoast SEO web page. You can learn more about the plugin there.
15. Next, be sure to include internal links (e.g. link the blog post to your full paper). See rule 11 above regarding transition words. I provided an internal link to a pdf that lists transition words that you can use.
16. Add pictures relevant to your research topic
17. Enter alt text in the picture’s attributes
18. Add a caption to describe the picture
19. Include an image title attribute
20. Lastly, share your blog post widely in social media channels such as Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest

Finally, you can use this as a checklist for each blog post. You should have one blog post for each of your research journal articles and book chapters. Overall, I enjoy the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress because it provides SEO and readability analyses. It starts with a red frowning face if your blog post needs edits. Next, it moves to orange if it is ok. Ultimately, you will get a green light when everything is in great shape. I am proud of myself. I learned all of this in just few days. Yoast SEO takes a little time. But it’s easy to use!

Also check out Promote Your Academic Research!