Getting citations is becoming increasingly important to the academic career of a researcher or professor, so worrying about them is logical.
SEO is a marketing methodology that improves network positioning on search engines like Google, and if applied to your papers makes them more easily found, and thus most frequently cited.
If you get published in indexed journals, you're doing almost everything right with your article, when writing and rounding it. You just have to review the SEO recommendations to display your articles in search engines in a more relevant way.
http://howtopublishinjournals.com/2013/12/08/academic-seo-for-your-research-papers/
Hi Rafael, Another good question! I liked the idea of being your own SEO, for those who don't know it is Search Engine Optimisation or I suppose to be correct, Optimiser. The article's advice is a good of course, publish in a good journal which is well indexed and it will probably promote itself. I just think that a few actions that might have been missed here.
The first is to create, or a better word, curate your online profile. It's not quite SEO territory, but you do need to be found. You could imagine a reader asking the question who is Rafael or Matt? I will look them up on Google, see if they have written anything else, where they work and so on.
Second is to play the odds on social media. Blog about your article and tweet about it. It will get picked up quicker than the prehistoric process of Indexing in major databases and place a copy - accepting copyright restrictions - on your Institutional repository or personal webpage.
Third is to be prepared to engage in discussion with others on social media, create an audience, it might not shake the world but these discussions I find can be interesting and useful at the time of publication. BW Matt.
There are other important things, such as meta data and high availability and indexing.
Including meta data into the electronic document (your publication) is important because this meta data can provide better classification, indexing and later on search engine's.
Secondly, it is important to have it mentioned (if possible published) elsewhere (if the agreement with the journal where published allows it). With this I mean sites like Google Scholar, Research gate, Academia, Scribus, public article libraries etc.
Also, writing or having unofficial review's about your paper written and posted on social media is important, just like Matt mentioned above.
You could also have your abstract or introduction translated into major languages (English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, German, Japanese) and if you write an article about something from South Eastern Europe, then in some targeted languages (Serbian, Romanian, Hungarian, etc.) and have those translations of your abstract and introduction posted on blogs, Scribus, added as additional material to Research gate and associate it to your main article. This increased availability and heightened chance of better indexing will help make your paper more frequent in search results and more probable of being viewed, read, cited, reviewed etc.
Being a Senior SEO Consultant and a Researcher in Archaeology, I hope that most of the tecniques and practices used to reach the best position in Google, for example, through SEO never will be used in ASEO.
As pointed above, it is not the same if you have your own website to promote your papers or if you are using a external platform (Social Network) like this one (ResearchGate, Acaemia.edu,...). Neither is the same to optimize your papers for a given group of scholars with a given interest or if your target is all the scholars or the public in general. You have to use either different SEO techniques taking in mind where you want to be found.
Generally speaking, if you write your paper scientifically centered on a subjetc in which the title is a description of its content and the abstract is its summary, the SEO work is done inside the paper. That way you don´t need to count your keywords or measure the keyword density: if you write an article on "fish gorges" that keyword will appear enough times in the body if your article is consistent; moreover taking into account the new algorithm of Google where you can use synonims, plurals, singulars, masculine femenine genders being the same to Google. If you have your own website to promote it, take care with metadata, use structured data (this is a must: http://schema.org/Article and http://schema.org/ScholarlyArticle) and headers (h1, h2 etc); if not, take care with tags and description. Use Academic Social Networkings, etc, etc. Optimization is not the same now when your target are mobile devices or a desktop platform. And so on...
This is a complex matter with a lot of variables to take into consideration before giving a non exist magical recipe. And please, never forget why you write an article, what are you writing for and who are you writing for. The aim of research is not to be at the first position in the first page of Google Scholar.
This article must be useful for you, although I do not share some of its statements and it is a little bit outdated (2010): http://www.sciplore.org/publications/2010-ASEO--preprint.pdf
Best,
Of course there is on page SEO that both Google and Google scholar no doubt uses in its results. You can emphasize your set of keywords by the way you write your paper.
But there is also Off Page SEO: LINKS, profiles and more...
Find people in your niche, share your article with them on social sites like this one. Create groups, threads, questions etc...
Link directly to your paper, don't just post your paper in full on a ton of sites; you need some links to the paper. Relevant links from credible webpages. Quality over quantity!
The most important one... From your academic .EDU webpage link to your social profiles like this one.
Academia, Mendely, BiomedExperts, Forums, Blogs, Social, LinkedIn, Fbook.
Meet your peers, answer questions... ask questions prior to finishing your paper then reply with the link.
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