SEO: Titles and Keywords in Scientific Publications
The way in which scientific publications appear online is going to become increasingly important. How literacy research is conducted is changing rapidly. People are turning to online resources rather than utilizing libraries. Publications that haven’t been made available on the internet may be overlooked. This could result in your paper not being referenced as often, or worse, your research may be repeated.
The number of citations a paper receives helps to determine the impact of the research within that paper. Even if your research is excellent, if no one finds the paper it won’t be cited.
The probability of your paper being read increases the closer it is to the number one search result.
So how do you become the #1 publication in search results?
SEO (search engine optimization) is a field that studies how search engines are influenced by content. The basis for this work is that it is believed that search engines are not perfectly efficient. Therefore with a little tweaking, you may be able to give your publication the boost it needs to be noticed and deemed an appropriate match by search engines. Just to be clear, papers should not be poorly written in an attempt to gain search ranking and in the end content will have a much great impact than SEO.
There are many factors a search engine considers when assembling a results page. The scientist in me cringes a bit at presenting this information since the search algorithms are kept secret making it very difficult to know exactly how search results can be influenced.
Today, we are going to focus on the two items that you can control.
1) Paper Title
2) Keyword Density
Paper Title:
The basics of SEO of titles is that your keywords (the search terms that you people may use to find your paper) should be contained within your title. Although opinions are mixed it is also thought that keywords placed near the beginning have a higher influence than those at the end.
Here’s a great example of how a title should be written for SEO from Acta D:
‘Eukaryotic expression: developments for structural proteomics’
An example of a disadvantageous title would be:
‘The 1.6 Å resolution crystal structure of a mutant plastocyanin bearing a 21-25 engineered disulfide bridge’
The problem here is the resolution of the structure is listed first in the title. More than likely, this paper is going to rank higher for the term ‘1.6 Å’ rather than, for example, ‘mutant plastocyanin’.
If you were the author of this paper and thought each word in that title was critical, it would be more beneficial to arrange the words as follows:
‘Mutant plastocyanin a 1.6 Angstrom crystal structure bearing a 21-25 engineered disulfide bridge’
This tweaked title would be ideal if you were looking to rank for ‘mutant plastocyanin’.
Keywords:
Of course, your paper should be written for humans, but it may help to keep search engines in mind. Although not as influential as in the past increasing the keyword percentage in your document should also help. For example, if you wanted to keyword for ‘protein crystallization’ think about if you can increase the number of times the term is being used.
Again, I don’t have direct proof of how much influence these changes make, but many top brands have excellent top keyword density (percent that term is used on their site) and my feeling is that it wasn’t by accident:
Zappos: shoe (8.33%), shoes (7.78%), zappos (5.00%)
Visa: visa (25.00%), card (10.61%), cards (4.55%), credit (3.03%)
JCrew: crew (6.77%), clothing (3.59%), dresses (3.19%)
Take some time and really think about the title of your paper and what keywords are important. You may find that the one thing standing between you and the first page of Google scholar……is a little tweaking.
Andrew Perry
February 24th, 2010 at 9:30 PM #
I’ve noticed that journals are thinking seriously about SEO these days – there was a section dedicated to it in the author guildelines for a review article I recently submitted.
Another important aspect is publishing in journals that make the most of the optimized titles and keywords you select, by using good SEO techniques within the HTML versions online. This includes encouraging link-love via providing free full text to everyone, not just those at universities with broad electronic subscriptions (hint: free-to-read open access).
Sean
February 25th, 2010 at 12:01 PM #
Can you say which journal is including SEO in their author guidelines? I would love to take a look at it.
I see journals missing an opportunity by having their papers listed with ‘nonsense’ urls such as xzy.com/aieifjd-853 vs. xzy.com/protein-crystallization
Maria
February 25th, 2010 at 4:54 PM #
Actually I’m surprised how little anyone thinks about titles – often they are hard for humans and for search engines. When I freelanced for an online newspaper and for a science magazine we spent ages thinking about titles and how they would work online, yet we don’t do this for journals – we rely too much on abstracts to do the work, which is a hangover from print days.
Andrew Perry
February 25th, 2010 at 7:47 PM #
Sean: In this case it was more of an online review publication than a journal that publishes original research – it was a Wiley publication called the Encyclopedia of Life Sciences ( http://www.els.net ). The author guidelines are in a Word doc linked from here: http://www.els.net/authors.asp . Paraphrasing, the summary of their SEO advice was:
Optimize the title and abstract, since this is the part that is publicly indexed. Include keyword phrases that are specific (”protein evolution” not “evolution”) since this is what people search for. Aim to include 3 to 4 of these keyword phrases in the abstract, but don’t overstuff with keywords. Link to other web pages. Reiterate the keyword phrases from the title in the abstract, but not so much as to appear spammy. Keep the abstract on topic and readable to humans (duh!).
Sean
February 26th, 2010 at 6:13 PM #
Good stuff! I would say that Wiley is making a mistake by not allowing their articles to be completely indexed and only the abstract.
As far as I can tell they don’t have a robots.txt file to direct how their site is indexed. I am sure it would possible to have their full pages indexed and still not have the articles freely available.