promote academic research

Academic website SEO rules I’ve learned

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

 

Clovia Hamilton academic website home page

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!

Promote your Academic Research

Introduction

In this video, I give you some ideas about how promote your academic research. The motivation for this presentation is I attended the Academy of Management conference in Chicago. I attended a faculty development workshop and paper development workshop for hosted by the Social Issues and Management Division. And some international scholars shared that their universities give credit to scholars for the impact of promoting their research, do social media marketing. Now, that was pretty neat!! When measuring performance with respect to scholarly impact, leaders don’t just go by your citations. When scholars are citing your work, they go by total impact of your marketing and promotion effort in getting the word out about your research. So, I thought that was pretty cool!! And I started researching ideas for promoting my own research. And I just want to share some of that with you.

 

About Dr. Clovia Hamilton – got started in AI

So, here’s a little bit about my background. Research promotion has a lot to do with search engine optimization. I am by no means an expert SEO. But I have been in this space a very long time- – since way back in the 1980s. I was a research assistant for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Champaign IL. I worked on the development of expert system knowledge management tools. The idea was, we would capture the information that our experts knew about the construction army barracks and other military facilities before they retired. This would help more junior engineers learned from the experienced engineers.

This is why social media marketing and search optimization interests me. And since 2005, I’ve been very active in social media marketing. I’m a patent attorney. And I went on to work for the US Patent and Trademark Office and learn how to you know what to do about reviewing patents for patentability. Then I went on to the US EPA’s National vehicle and emissions lab in Ann Arbor Michigan.

Had fun joining the Academy way back in 1999 in research administration as a technology commercialization specialist. And I started publishing law articles back then. I was not a faculty member. I was on an administrative side. Did a short stint as an assistant professor at East Carolina University and then started consulting. Unfortunately, I abandoned my research but used social media marketing when I was consulting to attract clients. So, I’m a fan of search engine optimization.

Importance of social media marketing

I also want to share a quick story about that experience, because my colleagues at Georgia Tech were naysayers about social media marketing. They didn’t want to have anything to do with being active online, to promote our work in our activities. For the work that I was doing at Georgia Tech, I was in a government contracting space. And but I’ll share a quick story with you. We had an event in Albany, Georgia, at the Civic Center, we call this speed partnering, where we hit small businesses.

We’re trying to partner them with government agencies for government contracts. I was real active in social media. And through Twitter, and networking on Twitter, I was able to get Fox News, interested in the event and they sent camera crew down. And we got a lot of news press and coverage and interviews and all kinds of wonderful things, all because of dialogue on Twitter. So, I’m a huge fan, because it’s just really fast and quick, you’re not picking up the phone, trying to figure out who to talk to and play some phone call or send out emails and not get a response. Social Media Marketing is the way to go.

Getting cited

When I re-entered the Academy as an Assistant Professor at Winthrop University, I didn’t have very many citations. I only had 25 cites. Now, Google recognizes 70 and I have found about 100. When you get cited by other authors, that’s evidence of making an impact and joining scholarly conversations. So, I’m kind of proud of my little numbers and I want to share some of the ideas that I’ve come across and some of the things that seem to be working.

 

Brand Identity

The first step is, I would say you need a brand identity to promote your academic research. The very first step is “know thyself”. Start by answering: Can you define research agenda? What do you stand for? How about the purpose of your research? Why are you conducting research? My research is focused on how to improve technology commercialization operations. This is related to inventions and marketing and promoting and licensing inventions, which is my background and patenting. Also research how to increase diversity and technology commercialization by addressing some social issues and Technology Management. And some of the social issues

The next step is that you need to start curating content that’s related to your brand identity. This is content that you would share with people in your network online. So, I get a lot of news feeds that come to my email address, my personal email address. And I’m signed up with a lot of listservs to trade organizations. I read these for an hour each morning. If I come across some interesting articles, I’ll share them with friends in Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. That’s the name of the game!  Share!!

Don’t just use how promote your research. You’re also being a part of the conversation about what’s going on in your research area. For example, I get from the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). They’ve been covering Chinese intellectual property piracy quite a bit which is an area that I’m interested in.  I collect these. I can use them in my research papers and share with others that are interested.

The third step is, of course, you want to write research papers. But you want to write your papers with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. Be very careful about keywords that you select. Use tools like Google Trends.

Learn much more by watching the video!