How to get search engines put your stuff near the top

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Posted on 19th October 2008 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression and SEO

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If you are an expert in an academic subject, the process the advertising world calls search engine optimization (SEO) is a way you can get what you know into online study and conversation. With SEO you can get your webpages to the top of the SERPS (search engine result pages).

The bare bones SEO are these two steps:

First, be sure meaningful keywords for your webpage appear in its URL, title, first few words of text, and the anchor text (which is made up of the words you highlight in your text to hyperlink to another page.)

The second aspect is to lure respected people in the subject your webpage is about to link to your page. Anyone who links to your webpage gives it what SEO folks call juice, and the more respected the linker is, the more juice is received by your webpage.

At GoldenSwamp.com’s sister blog Learnodes.com, I am experimenting with creating small landing pages that are SEOed for academic subjects. The following is an example of how SEO and giving juice are actually quite effective and powerful.

Last week I created a Learnode.com blog post (a blog post is a webpage) titled Learn Node: How Fish Muscles Work. If you will click to this fish muscle learn node, you will see that the URL, title, first words of the text, and anchor text all repeat words that describe the subject of the landing page (this blog post). If someone lands on this page, they will find three excellent links highlighted to lead them to fish muscle knowledge.

Within 2 days after I published this blog post, search engine spiders had found it, it was evaluated at Google, and it showed up as #2 on Google when I searched for “how fish muscles work”.

Something else very interesting happened. One of the links I had featured in my learn node about fish muscles is a webpage from Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. The webpage is excellent science about Opsanus tau, a very ugly fish whose swim bladder muscles are the fastest twitching muscles in the vertebrate world. The Woods Hole page had no SEO. The title of the webpage (sounds like a cosmetics ad!) is “It’s Not Going to Win Any Beauty Contests But . . . “; the URL identifies it only as “labnotes/6.3/beauty”, there are few hints in the first paragraphs of the muscle information in the webpage, and there are no outgoing links with anchor text.

Nonetheless, when I included the Woods Hole webpage in my “How Fish Muscles Work” learn node that I SEOed — lo, the Woods Hole webpage appeared on Google’s first page of SERPS as #3 link! The image above shows that both the learnode I made and the Woods Hole page I linked to had enough SEO juice to jump to the top of the SERPS.

Silly as this language may seem, it is of fundamental importance for delivering knowledge to students and colleagues in our new connected age.

Experts teach by copywriting for search engines

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Posted on 5th October 2008 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge and SEO

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A session in the “boot camp” for beginners at next week’s SMX Search Marketing Expo in New York City is titled Copywriting For Search Success. Because search engine optimization (SEO — the theme of the Expo) and the education establishment have barely engaged each other, experts who want to teach what they know have a powerful tool waiting for them to pick up and use. The promotional copy for the boot camp copywriting session puts it this way:

- It’s pretty simple. Want to be found for certain words? It helps to actually use those words in your web pages! This session covers the importance of textual content to search engines and how with some forethought, you can create HTML title tags and body copy that works to generate search traffic yet which also pleases your human visitors.

So if you are an expert in science, history, literature, or another “academic” area, how does this apply to you? You may have already created some webpages that present what you know. A powerful tool for getting your webpages into the global learning conversations online is to optimize them for search engines by using words the search engine spiders will pick up, and using them in the right places on your webpages. As the copy says above: It’s pretty simple.

Findability is moving education to the Net

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Posted on 9th April 2008 by Judy Breck in Networks and SEO

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Educational findability is the next big thing for learning. A white paper released today by GoldenSwamp describes the sequence from searching to search optimization to findability that is the logical course of our learning relationship with the online ecology. Although education is not far along in any of the steps, the paper points out that the progression is both necessary and inevitable as learning moves into the connective age.

The image with this post was captured from a tiny moment of Internet activity by the School of Engineering, University of Tokyo. The concept educators have had of teaching teachers and students to search for quality learning materials in the enormity and complexity of the Net is obsolete. As we move even beyond the Web 2.0 interlude, network laws are exerting functions and powers we are only beginning to understand. None of these is more exciting and hopeful that findability. Peter Morville writes in his groundbreaking book Ambient Findability (O’Reilly, 2005, pp. 4-6):

Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. We’re not there yet, but we’re headed in the right direction. Information is in the air, literally. And it changes our minds, physically. Most importantly, findability invests freedom in the individual. As the Web challenges mass media with the media of the masses, we will enjoy an unprecedented ability to select our sources and choose our news. In my opinion, findability is going ambient, just in time.

Educators should help make this happen, and as teachers have the fascinating new endeavor before them of using what they know to help related cognitive materials find each other.

SEO/OER after OPEN comes OPTIMIZE for education resources

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Posted on 17th March 2008 by Judy Breck in SEO

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Today I have added a new posting category in GoldenSwamp because I have realized that a new phase is underway in the emergence of open resources (OER) for learning: once educational resources are online they must be optimized for search engine. The reason this is necessary is simple: nobody is going to use the open resources to learn if they can’t find them.

For the past decade, as the Internet has emerged and various sectors such as commerce, media, arts, and government have shaped the connecting world to their purposes. The education sector has essentially failed to do that. Educators have complained that the Internet is bad for learning because it is hard to find the best stuff. But education has not focused on making its best stuff findable!

This week I am attending Search Engine Strategies 2008 Conference & Expo in New York City. On Friday, after the close of program, I am taking a full day of search engine optimization (SEO) training, led by some of the conference speakers. I will be posting about SEO for OER in coming weeks and months. These are some of the SES2008 session topics. As you read them, I think you will realized that educators can use what these sessions describe to optimize education resources so they are found and used:

Tips for Delivering Great Results with Live Search
Landing Page Testing & Tuning
Successful Tactics for Social Media Optimization (SMO)
Searcher Behavior Research Update
Beyond Linkbait: Getting Authoritative Online Mentions

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