Marshall Breeding Director for Innovative Technology and Research Vanderbilt University

 Breeding discusses how search engine optimization, or SEO, tunes a website so that its contents are easily retrieved through Google and other search engines and results in higher visibility for the library web presence. Proper use of SEO involves providing the mechanism for search engines to easily discover and index your site. Breeding highlights specific SEO techniques that have been successful for sites that he manages, including Library Technology Guides and the Vanderbilt Television Archive

 Libraries benefit from increased access to their resources  Move library collections out of the dark / hidden Web  Opportunity to provide exposure to libraries and their collections  Lost opportunities when resources remain hidden

 Most digital object management systems do not interface well with search engines  Need to follow techniques that have been established in the e-commerce arena for optimized discoverability and access

 Rules of harvesting and page ranking constantly evolving  Deliberate absence of information on how sites will be indexed and ranked  Avoid scamming the system  No search engine does 100% indexing of large repositories

 Use analytics to establish initial performance benchmarks  Develop content  Create metadata  Publish content  Optimize content delivery  Use sitemaps to facilitate search engine indexing  Benchmark and fine tune "Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com"

 Understand the use patterns of your repositories  Understand the benchmarks to document impact of SEO techniques  Web site performance: not just page views, but specific goals.

 Discoverability depends on high-quality content, clean structure, and strategic metadata  Don’t attempt to cheat the system  Penalties make your site invisible

 Unique content is best.  Focus on resources not available elsewhere

 Compact description rich with meaningful keywords, terms, and phrases  Use any appropriate database schema or metadata format

 Many different products or tools available  Commercial  CONTENTdm (OCLC)  DigiTool (Ex Libris)  Open Source

 One page for each object in the repository  Use metadata record to create full description of the item  Minimize non-descriptive content  Navigational elements  Canned text not relevant to the object described  Persistant URL  Permalink  Simple URL structure  No session keys or other unessential elements in query string

 Create unique text for each object  Create content  Used by Google to create snippet  Must be brief  Rich in unique terms that will populate search engine indexes

Beaumont Library District -- Beaumont, CA [lib-web-cats 15565]

 XML Sitemap protocol   Initially proposed by Google, now used by all major search engines  Provides a structured map of resources in repository  50,000 URLs per sitemap  Multiple sitemaps used for larger repositories  Sitemap index used to organize multiple sitemaps  Update frequency and priority  Does not impact page rank

displaylibrary.pl?RC= T07:52:32+06:00 weekly displaylibrary.pl?RC= T16:04:08+06:00 weekly …

 Add to robots.txt  Use Google Webmasters Tools

 Webmaster tools shows quantity of URLs indexed  Constantly check for errors  Track keywords that drive traffic to your resources  Make incremental improvements based on search performance  Changes take days or weeks to propagate

 Search engine optimization is a long-term strategy  Effective for repositories of unique content  Not as effective for repositories with highly redundant content  Online catalog for ILS  Subscribed electronic resources  Vital to bring library content into the global Web