Implementation: SEO for the Discovery Module
As with all new websites, the appearance of a Discovery Module URL at the top of a Google search results page will become a key milestone for your Discovery Module project.
Unfortunately, Symplectic is not able to predict or guarantee when or if your Discovery Module URLs will be crawled or indexed by Google or any other search engine, but there are some simple steps that you can take to improve your search ranking both in the short and longer term.
A great place to start is to improve your Discovery Module’s Authority
Your Discovery Module’s authority will be highly affected by:
the number of inbound links that point toward your Discovery Module URL(s)
the authority of such inbound links (e.g. your organisational website will have more authority than that of a Research Group or Lab)
the amount of website traffic your Discovery Module generates (i.e. outbound links)
In practical terms, linking from your main organisational website to the Discovery Module pages is a good place to start as it is likely to already be “trusted” by Search Engines.
You can also create more generic inbound links on your main site which point to the Discovery Module landing page.
How to get my Discovery Module URLs Indexed by Google Faster?
There is a lot on the internet about SEO and opinions vary widely. Unfortunately indexing and ranking higher in Google isn’t an exact science, but we are aware of a client that was able to successfully improve the rankings of their Discovery Module Profile pages through proactive sharing of its Discovery Module URLs and as a result by driving traffic to their Discovery Module from other sites.
The following table provides a summary of recommended activities to be undertaken as part of an organisation’s rollout of the Discovery Module:
Who can complete this? | ||||
Webmaster | Researcher | Marketing / Comms Team | ||
Submit your Sitemap to Google Search Console (see the section below this table.) |
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Submit your link directly to search engines (see “Inspect a URL” in the section below this table.) |
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Link to the page from older, already ranked pages |
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Get other sites and influencers to link to your page |
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Guest blog on influential sites, and provide the Researcher URL (of the Author) to link back to the Discovery Module |
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Distribute your content on industry forums or communities |
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Write a press release with links towards Discovery Module profiles |
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Connect the Discovery Module to your Google Analytics account. (Symplectic can configure this for you) |
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Encourage researchers to share their profile URL on social media. |
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Submit your Sitemap to Google Search Console
Note: This information is only relevant when you choose to use a custom URL for your Discovery Module and only needs to be completed for the production instance that has been made “Public.” |
Contact your webmaster in good time before your site is made “Public”
Configuration:
You will be asked to supply the following during the configuration stage:
A "meta description" for your Discovery Module.
A Google Analytics 4 Measurement ID or Google Tag Manager code
A new TXT Record will be required to tell Google that the site has changed in structure or content.
Ask your webmaster to check the following:
You will need your webmaster to create a TXT Record for your custom domain name.
Your webmaster can use Google Search Console to create the TXT record which will need to be added to the DNS Configuration for your domain.
Google Search Console also provides a way to inspect a URL.
If you are new to Google Search Console there are some useful guides to get you started.
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