Improving the Visibility and Use of Digital Repositories through SEO

Recent OCLC surveys show that less than 2 percent of library users start their search on a library website. Another survey of faculty researchers at four major universities showed that most consider Google and Google Scholar amazingly effective for their research. Low Google Scholar indexing ratios for library institutional repositories is widespread because it ignores common library metadata, and high-value content through libraries is consequently invisible to researchers. Authors Arlitsch and O Brien share their expertise in digital libraries and corporate marketing to offer practical steps for search engine optimisation, such as:

• Recommended dashboards to increase participation by sharing data
• Avoiding the four most common crawler errors that lead to low rankings
• How to effectively utilise the Google Keyword Tool
• How to use domain settings to generate unit-specific reports for special collections, institutional repositories, and university presses