Optimize your article for search engine

From the SelectedWorks of Nader Ale Ebrahim

December 2014

Optimize Your Article for Search Engine

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Preprint version of: N. Ale Ebrahim, “Optimize Your Article for Search Engine,” University of Malaya Research Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 1, 23 December, 2014.

Optimize Your Article for Search Engine Nader Ale Ebrahim Research Support Unit, Centre of Research Services, IPPP, University of Malaya Abstract This article provides guidelines on how to optimize scholarly literature for academic search engines like Google Scholar, in order to increase the article visibility and citations.

Introduction Academic search engine optimization (ASEO) is a debatable topic [1]. Some researchers believe “Designing scientific articles just for SEO would undermine the credibility and definitively the quality of the articles and the research presented” [2]. On the other hand, the inclusion of the articles in the index improves the ability to make their articles available to the academic community [3]. “If you want your paper be "accepted" by a search engine you have to accept the search engines style guidelines” [2]. The literature indicates a significant and positive relationship between both citation in Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science with the number of versions [4]. Increasing the visibility means rises the number of versions of an article and vice versa [5]. The number of “versions” will be shown in a Google Scholar search result. Figure 1 shows 33 different versions of an article entitled “Virtual Teams: a Literature Review [6]” and number of citations.

Figure 1 The number of “versions” in the Google Scholar search result Discussion There are several techniques that you can optimize your article for search engines: 1. Usage of strong keywords and synonyms; Once the keywords are chosen, they need to be mentioned in the right places: in the title, and as often as possible in the abstract and the body of the text (but, of course, not so often as to annoy readers).[1],

Preprint version of: N. Ale Ebrahim, “Optimize Your Article for Search Engine,” University of Malaya Research Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 1, 23 December, 2014.

2. The completeness of documents metadata; When documents are converted to PDF, all metadata should be correct (especially author and title). Some search engines use PDF metadata to identify the file or to display information about the article on the search results page. It may also be beneficial to give a meaningful file name to each article [1].

3. Write a good and short title [7]; 4. Consistent spelling of authors’ first and last names; 5. Refer to reliable resources with high citations; 6. Select a proper journal; and 7. Deposit your paper in different repository; are some examples [8].

Google Scholar as one of the academic search engine indexes scholarly material from proprietary sources such as subscription and open access journals, conference proceedings and white papers.

Google Scholar weighted heavily the title, the Journal name and author names also multiple versions of an article, (e.g. on your home page and in UM Research Repository) [1] (please refer to http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/seo.asp [7] for more detail).

Beel, Gipp and Wilde [1] believe that academic search engine optimization (ASEO) should be a common procedure for researchers, similar to, selecting an appropriate journal for publication.

ASEO should not be seen as a guide on how to cheat academic search engines. Rather, it is about helping academic search engines to understand the content of research papers and, thus, about how making this content more widely and easily available.

References [1]

J. Beel, B. Gipp, and E. Wilde, “Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO),” Journal of Scholarly Publishing, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 176-190, 01/01/, 2010.

[2]

http://blog.webometrics.org.uk. "Academic Search Engine Optimization: An inevitable evil?," 19 September, 2014; http://blog.webometrics.org.uk/2010/03/academic-searchengine-optimization-an-inevitable-evil/.

[3]

J. Beel, and B. Gipp, “On the robustness of google scholar against spam,” in Proceedings of the 21st ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia (HT’10), Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 2010, pp. 297-298.

[4]

N. Ale Ebrahim, H. Salehi, M. A. Embi, M. Danaee, M. Mohammadjafari, A. Zavvari, M. Shakiba, and M. Shahbazi-Moghadam, “Equality of Google Scholar with Web of Science Citations: Case of Malaysian Engineering Highly Cited Papers,” Modern Applied Science, vol. 8, no. 5, pp. 63-69, August 6, 2014.

[5]

N. Ale Ebrahim, H. Salehi, M. A. Embi, F. Habibi Tanha, H. Gholizadeh, and S. M. Motahar, “Visibility and Citation Impact,” International Education Studies, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 120-125, March 30, 2014.

Preprint version of: N. Ale Ebrahim, “Optimize Your Article for Search Engine,” University of Malaya Research Bulletin, vol. 2, no. 1, 23 December, 2014.

[6]

N. Ale Ebrahim, S. Ahmed, and Z. Taha, “Virtual Teams: a Literature Review,” Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 2653-2669, 2009.

[7]

"Optimizing Your Article for Search http://authorservices.wiley.com/bauthor/seo.asp.

[8]

N. Ale Ebrahim, H. Salehi, M. A. Embi, F. Habibi Tanha, H. Gholizadeh, S. M. Motahar, and A. Ordi, “Effective Strategies for Increasing Citation Frequency,” International Education Studies, vol. 6, no. 11, pp. 93-99, October 23, 2013.

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