As established in previous posts, my goal for this semester is the distribution of the class's collective work to the masses. Not knowing much about WWI before embarking on this course (and of coarse the trip associated with that), I remember distinctly the feeling of awe as I came to comprehend the tremendous scope of the sheer vastness of World War One. As I have taken webmaster responsibilities for this effort, and much of the work to be distributed is forthcoming, my responsibility for the past week has been structuring the website and optimizing such that it can be found by search engines, the primary tool for those seeking knowledge in this day and age.
Search Engine Land has a quality Youtube video (embedded below) which explains the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and some context explaining how it works and how to make a website find-able by internet webizens at large.
Methods:
SEO is accomplished a number of ways. One way is to create links to your site from other sources. This can be done by hiring out third party sources to link your webpage, thus "'gaming" the search engine's ranking system, however methods like this require fewer scruples than members of this course are interested in dealing with. More scrupulous would be to insert links in relevant locations around the web that might be interested in your content, which can be anything from facebook pages to (in our case) websites that handle geographic data services or world war one history. Also important are quality links out of the site, althought this is less of a factor in SEO.
Another important concept is keyword density. Ensuring that a webpage is roughly 3-5% sometimes even 10% major keywords which relate to the information that relevant researchers should be finding raises the page's rank in search engine results, making that page easier to find. Of course, this is tricky and requires good writing skills that don't overload the audience with blocky text that reads like third grade. Also, large engines such as Google and Yahoo don't particularly care for keyword stuffing, and employing this technique risks being delisting from their search results.
A Final Note:
Search Engine Optimization is a changing field. In an article for Forbes Magazine, Ken Krogue describes a lunch that he had with Adam Torkildson, who is a top SEO consultant. "He said something to me that blew me away. 'Google is in the process of making the SEO industry obsolete, SEO will be dead in 2 years.' I posted his statement on my blog and immediately received a flurry of comments; many from his colleagues in the SEO industry who wanted to: 1) Weigh in on my statement that Adam is great (or crazy) 2)Promote themselves 3)Accuse me of writing a title for “link bait” 4)Declare how absurd Adam’s assertion was 5)Agree and prophecize (sic) their vision for the future." The effects of Social Media and search engine analysis which weakens the ability of web developers to use SEO is changing the way in which marketers are preparing their projects. And researchers like us who want to make their content reachable to the masses will have to adapt too in the quickly changing world of technology.
Sources:
Krogue, Ken. :The Death of SEO." Forbes. August 20, 2012. ret. 11/4/2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/07/20/the-death-of-seo-the-rise-of-social-pr-and-real-content/
Nunna, Raju. "Weebly SEO Tips" ret 11/2/13. http://weeblyforums.com/seo-tips/
"What is Search Engine Optimization?" Search Engine Land, Sept 12 2011. Ret. 11/1/13 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF515-0Tduk
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