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The importance of SEO

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The title, abstract and keywords list are generally the first thing that you see of an article. It may seem counterintuitive, but they should generally be the last parts that you write. Your manuscript aims and focus may morph and change during the writing process. It’s good to know where your paper is going to end up before working on these sections.

Waiting until after you’ve selected a journal to write these pieces is also a good idea. You can the tailor all three to the publication that you’re submitting to. These are the first things that Editors and Reviewers will see, so if you’ve written them with the specific journal in mind, it will help them to see why your manuscript is a good fit for them.

Not only are these three sections the first things that readers see, they’re what search engines look at to see which searches your article should appear in. Writing them with search engine optimization in mind can help to maximize the number of readers who find your article.

Jump straight to:

What is SEO?

To start, it’s a good idea to have an idea of what search engine optimization, or SEO, actually is. SEO is a set of best practices that help search engines to figure out what your article (or blog post, website, etc.) is about. This information is used by the search engine to index and rank your article in their search results. Good SEO practices help you to put the right information in the places that search engines look. In turn, this helps to make it more likely that your article will rank high on the list of search results within your chosen search terms, i.e. keywords (more on that below).

As people are more and more likely to access content at the article level online, rather than the journal level (by table of contents alerts or in physical form in a library), SEO is an integral part of academic publishing. If you want people to find your content easily, following SEO best practice is essential. Hard to find content is less likely to be downloaded, read or cited.

Keywords: the building blocks of SEO

Again, it may seem a little counterintuitive, but you should choose your keywords before writing your title or abstract. The most important keywords will appear in your title, your abstract and throughout your manuscript. Search engines will use these words to figure out what your paper is about and where to rank it in searches. Picking the right ones can be the difference between being at the top of a Google Scholar search list and being in the middle of page 42.

Some journals won't require you to provide keywords on submission others will ask you to choose keywords from a list (or the keywords may even be selected by the Editors after acceptance). Going through the process of choosing keywords is still worthwhile though, because consistency and repetition of important phrases is central to SEO.

What makes a good keyword?

The keywords need to highlight the most important themes and topics in your manuscript. They should give both readers and search engines a clear idea of what they’ll find in the main body of your paper. It can be tough to narrow a paper which is thousands of words long and the product of months of hard work to 5-10 words, but these tips will help:

  1. ‘Goldilocks’ keywords: Really broad keywords won’t help your article very much. They don’t tell readers a lot about what they’re going to find in your article. Also, searching for these terms will give millions of results. On the other hand, very narrow keywords don’t help much either. People either won’t think to search for them or won’t know them in the first place. All of your keywords should fall between these two extremes.
  2. Avoid jargon: When you’ve been researching a topic for months, years, decades, you can start to think of the associated jargon as normal. But not everyone will understand it. It’s fine to have some of this in your manuscript, but it’s not a good idea to have it in your keywords where you have no room to add context or explanation. Acronyms and abbreviations should be avoided in your keyword list for the same reason.
  3. Clarity: Your keywords need to clearly and obviously communicate to readers what they will find in your manuscript. Ask yourself: if someone googled this term and my paper came up, would they be surprised or disappointed by the content? If the answer is yes, scratch that keyword.
  4. Phrases: The term keyword is a little bit misleading. It’s generally fine to use short phrases if they fit better with your manuscript. Don’t go overboard with this – you can’t have full sentences as keywords – but a three or four word phrase will usually be fine. Using a phrase instead of a single word can help to improve the clarity of your keyword list as well. If you do use a phrase in your keywords, make sure that you use it consistently and in full throughout your manuscript and (if you decide it’s one of the most important keywords) in your title with no words between it.
  5. Appeal to everyone: This is very important for interdisciplinary manuscripts. Make sure that your keywords appeal to as many different groups as possible. You may have a paper that will appeal to a historian for one reason, a philosopher for another reason and a literature scholar for another. Try to have at least one keyword that will directly appeal to each group of readers.

How to pick the ideal keywords

Now that you know what you’re looking for in a good keyword, it’s time to think about how to select the actual terms. There are two basic ways to find the keywords that best fit your article. We’d generally recommend using a combination of the two. They are:

Top-down keywords: What terms do you think readers might try searching when looking for your paper? It’s useful to try searching these terms to see if the articles that come up are similar to yours.

Bottom-up keywords: What words and terms have you used most frequently in your manuscript? Other than words like ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘and’ etc. of course! If they show up a lot in your paper, they’ll probably work well as keywords.

To come up with a full list, try following these steps:

  1. List out all of the keywords you can think of using both the top-down and bottom-up methods.
  2. Delete any that are too broad, narrow, obscure or misleading.
    1. Make sure to keep the list that you have at this point somewhere. Different keywords might be better for different journals or may become more appropriate after revisions.
  3. From your remaining list, cut down to the number required by the journal by:
    1. Searching for the terms online – would you want your article to appear amongst those that come up in the results?
    2. Searching in your manuscript – have you used all of the terms? Which ones show up the most?
    3. Talking with colleagues. What does your supervisor think are the best fits for your paper? How about other members of your department?

You may ask, if I’m going to cut down the list so quickly, what’s the point in spending time coming up with so many keywords? Making as long a list as possible forces you to think outside of the box. You’ll have to consider what other people might look for and avoid picking only the terms that you personally would look for. Doing this with your co-authors, other collaborators, supervisors, post-doc students etc. can make the activity even more valuable.

Optimising your title

Search engines give your title more weight than any other part of your article. It’s also the first thing that a Reader or an Editor will see of your paper. These two factors mean that it’s incredibly important for your title to be ‘optimised’.

To make sure that your article’s title is optimised:

  1. Stay relevant: It can be tempting to put a pun or a cultural reference into you title. This can make it stand out in a table of contents or give a reader a bit of a chuckle. Unfortunately, it also makes your article harder to find online. Just as an example, try searching ‘Winter is Coming’ in Google Scholar. You’ll find articles from across HSS and STEM fields – the last thing you want as an Author is to make readers wade through that list to find your article.

    Including something like this in your title also takes away valuable real estate that you could use to let a search engine know what your article is about. This means that it will be less likely to appear in the results of searches that are actually relevant to your topic.

    Top tip: If you have a great pun that you really want to use, save it for social media – eye-catching or amusing tweets are a great way to promote your article!

  2. Use your keywords: In the previous section, we talked about working to make sure that you had the best keywords for your article. They should be in your title. Choose the top two or three and craft your title around them. Make sure to use your top keyword as early in the title as possible – if it’s at the end or in a subtitle, it could get cut off in search results lists and potential readers might scroll past your article. Having your keywords in your title means that search engines will focus on them. The repetition in the keywords list confirms and reinforces the importance of the terms, helping to make sure that your article appear in the right searches.

    Some journals will tell you to avoid repeating your keywords in your title. This is a holdover from the days of print only publication, when repeating keywords in the title was redundant (as it was all on the same page and readers could only find it by opening the physical journal). This practice is becoming less common, but it’s worth keeping an eye out for.

  3. Describe your article: This one follows on from the previous point. Make sure that your title describes what your article is about. Readers should know what to expect when they go into the paper – nobody reads academic articles for the surprise twists! Try to be as clear and accurate as possible.
  4. Be succinct: The ideal title is between 50 and 140 characters. This range should allow you to give a clear description of your article that includes a couple of your keywords. It will also make sure that the majority of the title appears in the search results page.

As with the keywords, it’s sometimes helpful to come up with more options than you need. Asking your supervisor, co-authors and/or colleagues for their advice on your draft titles can really help to come up with the best possible option. Your title is a very important part of the manuscript that you’ve put a lot of effort into, so it’s worth taking the time to optimise it.

What goes into an optimised abstract?

We’ve already discussed what you should include in your abstract from a content point-of-view. The key to optimising your abstract is repetition. Search engines won’t pay as much attention to your abstract as your title or keywords, but it can help to bolster the work you did in those two sections. Make sure that your repetition is natural though. Search engines are surprisingly good at picking out repetition for the sake of repetition. And constant repetition after repetition is frustrating for readers (as we’ve hopefully just demonstrated).

Before you start writing your abstract, pick out your 3 most important keywords. These should all appear multiple times in your abstract. For a 300 word abstract, the most important keyword should be used 3-4 times. The other two should appear 2-3 times. Don’t worry if you go over these ranges (as long as your abstract still reads naturally), but try to avoid dropping below them.

You should include the other keywords on your list if possible, too. Try to avoid using synonyms and keep your phrasing uniform throughout. This goes for the body of your text as well, although to a lesser extent.

Where to now?

The importance of SEO | Edinburgh University Press