Not on Google?

This morning I attended the session: Not on Google? It Doesn’t Exist: Findability and Search Engine Optimization for Archives.

Jeanne Kramer- Smyth kicked off the session with a very coherent presentation that included 4 key components to make sure that users when searching through Google or another search engine can find you archival materials:

When creating the text of your web pages make sure that you consider key words or topics that users will search for

Each page should have a unique title less than 65 characters- the length that Google starts to cut off results of a search

Be sure that any image you include also has text, Google can’t crawl images

Finally, utilize analytics to better understand how users find your site, what they look at while they’re there, how long they stay and why do they leave…

To follow Kramer- Smyth check out her blog.

Matt Herbison spoke next about web crawling and emphasized the importance of linking to other sites because the number of connections increases the crawability and therefore, the findability of your site. Click here for the full presentation.

Finally, Mark Matienzo concluded the session with a presentation that highlighted several useful maxims:

Go where the users are e.g. have a presence on Flickr. Are their articles about your institution on Wikipedia?

URLS are the currency of the web

Consider how you link to other resources

This session offered concrete tips for archivists to begin thinking about bringing higher volumes of traffic to our sites. You didn’t have to be a techi to understand the details included in the presentation… which as a novice techi I appreciated!