Kenning Arlitsch and Patrick OBrien, who have presented and published widely on search engine optmisation (SEO), have authored a new book titled Improving the Visibility and Use of Digital Repositories through SEO: A LITA Guide, published by ALA TechSource. The authors describe ways to ensure that high-value content is visible to researchers. Drawing on their expertise in digital libraries and corporate marketing, they show how to mount a successful SEO strategy, including recommended dashboards for increasing participation by sharing data; avoiding the four most common crawler errors that lead to low rankings; how to effectively utilise the Google Keyword Tool and the use of domain settings to generate unit-specific reports for special collections, institutional repositories and university presses.
Arlitsch is the dean of the library at Montana State University and OBrien is the Semantic Web research director at the Montana State University Library.
According to recent OCLC surveys, less than 2 percent of library users begin their search on a library website, which is why SEO is said to be crucial. Though a survey of faculty researchers at four major universities showed that most consider Google and Google Scholar highly effective for their research, low Google Scholar indexing ratios for library institutional repositories is widespread because it ignores common library metadata.
The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of ALA, educates, serves and reaches out to its members, other ALA members and divisions, and the entire library and information community through its publications, programmes and other activities designed to promote, develop, and aid in the implementation of library and information technology.
