April 10, 2024 | by Amy O'Brien, VP of Customer Success

The Impact of High Google Ranking on Your Research

April 10, 2024 | by Amy O'Brien

Having your website appear on the first page of search results is the goal of every website owner.

Imagine standing on a digital podium, your research in the spotlight, seen by scholars around the world. That's the power of having an OpenScholar site that achieves high rankings in Google and other search engines.

Now imagine your work found not just through Google, but through a custom, unified search page specific to your institution. 

Having your website appear on the first page of search results is the goal of every website owner. This is also the goal of OpenScholar. For marketing and web design specialists, this means a focus on SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which is essentially taking steps to influence how well a site ranks. 

SEO is a combination of a platform’s functionality, the content you add to your site, and activities that drive traffic to it. The good news is that you don’t have to be a marketing or web design specialist to achieve this.

In this article, I’ll review some things within your control that increase the chances of your website being found through a Google search, and I’ll conclude with an exciting way OpenScholar is increasing the odds of your work being found through a new Research Dashboard.

How to appear in Google search results

SEO is a dynamic process, changing frequently based on how Google indexes sites and the criteria they use to push sites higher in results. Here are the things within your control that will influence rank:

• Keywords incorporated in your site content in a natural way– keyword stuffing is viewed as spam.
• Making sure you update links to your site, such as from your LinkedIn profile or your institution’s main page, and ensuring any content copied from an old site doesn’t contain internal links still pointing to old pages on an old site. 
• Using headings to structure your content in sections and making the topics easily scannable.
• An intuitive site navigation, such as an effective menu, and filter widgets on pages that contain a lot of information. You can add filters in OpenScholar by categorizing content and adding taxonomy widgets.
• Descriptive anchor links such as to a person’s profile or blog post. “Read more about the research dashboard” is a descriptive anchor link, as opposed to “click here to read more about the research dashboard.”
• Backlinks, which are links posted on other sites or on social media that drive traffic back to your site. This is why it’s important to share anything new on social media, where someone else may view and share your post.
• A good site description on your home page and in the meta description area of your site. 
• New information, whether it’s recent publications, news and announcements, or blog posts. Outdated sites lose rank.

Increasing the odds of being found: The Research Dashboard

At OpenScholar, our motto is findable is fundable, therefore our goal is to continuously improve our product and services to help ensure your site can be found. A unified dashboard for your organization automatically narrows a person’s search.

The Research Dashboard increases the odds of the right person finding you at the right time. Because every site on OpenScholar is networked, key information such as recent publications and team members focused on specific research topics filter up to this page.

You may discover scholars in another department doing similar research to collaborate with. Members of the press, students, and funders can more easily find you, because the dashboard automatically narrows their search from millions of websites indexed by Google to only the OpenScholar sites at your organization. 

Many of our customers tell us that they resort to Google to find out what research is happening at their own university, because they lack a streamlined way to find research. The dashboard is a solution to this problem. 

A well-optimized website isn't just beneficial, it's an absolute game-changer. By having an OpenScholar site that provides detailed information about your work, practicing good SEO, and having a research dashboard, your work can be found and the fruits of your labor can gain the recognition they deserve.