SEO strategies for academics. Or, when others search for you, what do they find?

In their paper “Intentional Web Presence: 10 SEO Strategies Every Academic Needs to Know” Patrick Lowenthal and Joanna Dunlap offer excellent advice to academics mindful of their web presence and cognizant of the potential impact that the Internet may have on their scholarship. I’ve come to use most of these strategies over the years, but I am excited to see these collected at one location.

I’ll add an 11th strategy: Use an RSS aggregator to (e.g., Google Reader) to gather resources of interest effortlessly and consistently. For example, I receive alerts of the latest journal issues at my aggregator (you can also have these emailed to you). I also follow a number of colleagues’ blogs through there, so I don’t have to visit individual sites. My RSS aggregator also serves as an archiving mechanism.

As academics and scholars engage in the emerging practice of using “participatory technologies and online social networks to share, reflect upon, critique, improve, validate, and further their scholarship” (which is an argument that we made in this paper), these strategies are important to keep in mind.

What other strategies do you use?

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2 Comments

  1. Hi George. I’m glad you mentioned RSS readers / aggregators. In my social media workshops, I discuss the importance of reading and commenting on other blogs when developing a participatory blogging practice. Invariably, there are always genuine concerns over the time-intensive nature of adopting social media and any tips for using them efficiently are welcomed. I usually surprise a few of the people who attend when I tell them I follow well over a hundred blogs. But by using an RSS Reader I generally spend no more than a couple of hours a week in total accessing them – not a bad investment for a significant and sustainable resource of current information, opinion and debate in my field.

  2. I hoard feeds in Google Reader for another reason – they are searchable. Even if I can’t possibly follow the hundreds of feeds I have in GReader (I use folders to divide the feeds into what I read regularly and ones I don’t read as often), the content is still in GReader. If I need to do research on a specific topic, I can enter the search terms in the search engine in Google Reader and get a list of posts from sources I trust. Much better than going to Google.

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