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SEO for Librarians Nicholas Schiller
LI 815 27 February 2016
How do librariestraditionally organize information?
Organized metadatatypically in tables
*from The Manga Guide to Databases
Well Organized Metadata:
it’s what libraries do.
filter on the way in
authority
Cataloging: go through every item in a set, describe it, and assign it to it’s proper place
Boolean operations are only as accurate as the sets (fields) they work with.
AND (intersection)
Organized metadata
OR (union)
NOT (relative compliment)
Enter the Weband problems of scale.
The web is a vast collection of completely
uncontrolled heterogenous documents.-Sergey Brin & Larry Page
The web is a vast collection of completely
uncontrolled heterogenous documents.-Sergey Brin & Larry Page
The web is a vast collection of completely
uncontrolled heterogenous documents.-Sergey Brin & Larry Page
The web is a vast collection of completely
uncontrolled heterogenous documents.-Sergey Brin & Larry Page
The web is a vast collection of completely
uncontrolled heterogenous documents.-Sergey Brin & Larry Page
AttributionNoncommercial Some rights reserved by niallkennedy
Does not Scale. Even with participatory web strategies a
la Wikipedia. (DMOZ)
URL <title>
<meta name=“description” content =”snippet”>
<meta name=“keywords”>
<a href=“http://slim.emporia.edu”>
anchor link text</a>
<h1> <h2> <h3>
<body>
HTML makes for a *lousy* data record
but it is the best we have
SEO exists because there is a need (opportunity) to make this work more efficiently
few standards, no authority
HTML tags stand in for metadata fields
anchor link text on external sites are counted as part of the site being linked to. So never use “click here.” (Very important)
Keywords in valuable locations are a key to SEO
By harvesting existing implicit metadata, the Google method scales.
No one has to look at every web page and describe it and put it into a category.
Google harnesses how the web describes itself. (Bots)
A note about full text keyword search:
Perfect keyword search is not very useful.
This is why Google succeeded when a lot of better funded search engines failed.
Another problem of scale.
Page Rankinstead of organizing or cataloging the web, Google just watches how people use the web
Filter on the way out
Requires massive computing power & a massive number of users. (MASSIVE)
HTML Tags as metadata
Links as votes
Traffic as reputation
<a href=“url” rel=“nofollow”>text</a>
Anchor link text as descriptive metadata
location, history, platform, browser, etc.
library discovery tools
are more like web search than they are like a siloed database search.
SEO advice from outside
expertsamzn.com/0470902590/
http://yourseoplan.com
Further Directions to Go:
Filter Bubbles (Eli Pariser)
HTML5 Microdata and schema.org
