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Researchers August 4, 2021
Some Helpful Tips to Keep in Mind When Trying to Improve the Web Performance of Your Academic Blog or Website

In today’s Digital Age, being a researcher looks a lot different than it did even just a decade ago. For a substantial portion of the job, things are much easier because of the innovative technology that puts so much data at your fingertips and gives you the instruments and tools you need to do jobs that would have otherwise been cumbersome or even insurmountable. But things like getting your work seen, although easier in some ways, are also a lot more complex.

The importance of promoting your work as a researcher, for one thing, is so different today. If you want to use your work to enhance your scholarly reputation, you have to focus on getting it optimized to be seen on search engines, and you have to prove digitally that you’re an expert in your field. One way that a lot of scholars do this is by using an academic blog or their institution’s website to publish their informal work in between projects so that when they do have manuscripts ready for submission, they already have a wide following. But if you go this route, keep in mind that you need to ensure the performance of your blog or website is optimal, or you’re going to lose more followers than you gain!

Why Academic Blogs are Popular

Academic blogs are utilized in different ways by researchers in almost every scope and subject around the world. Some of them focus on academic culture, such as funding and policies or academic life in general. Others discuss research, communicating about their own work or discussing others’ findings. Still others run the gamut between academic practice and self-help advice to information about teaching pedagogies and giving advice to new people in the field.

These blogs are almost always informally written. They don’t sound like research papers, so they attract a wider audience. They’re clearcut and to the point, and they don’t have to be written conventionally, so this more personal style lets researchers be a slightly different person than they are when they’re writing a manuscript but still give out the same information. Some blogs do use a more formal style, but even those writers don’t have to stress the conventions of referencing, so it is still preferable to them than the cumbersome and complex academic writing requirements.

Blogs are often used in order to gain an audience of professional peers, building that following that will be necessary when the author publishes their own research manuscript. But this impressive goal, although smart and forward-thinking, won’t work if the site’s performance is slow and lags.

Improving Your Blog Performance

Unless you plan on individually choosing every follower you have, your site has to be optimized to run well and show up on the search engines when someone queries expert information that’s in your field. Although the algorithms used by search engines change frequently, there are a few ways to ensure you’re optimizing your work that will always help push you to the front rankings, such as:

●      Making sure your content is updated regularly. Get rid of anything that is no longer relevant or pertains to your current beliefs; otherwise, you’ll be attracting an audience that you don’t want to follow you. For instance, you could have recommended a company or an app that is out of date or no longer the best choice.

●      Use media but make sure your site isn’t bogged down by large images with unnecessarily detailed resolution.

●      Keep up with your keywords. SEO is huge about keywords, and every industry’s hot buzzwords are always changing. Always stay abreast with the keywords and phrases in your field that attract readers and make an article “high performing” instead of “readable.”

●      Regularly click on all of your links yourself to make sure they’re not broken or dead. This doesn’t change the results of your algorithms, but it can upset your reader and reduce your “expert” status in their eyes.

●      Use keywords in your title and headings. The web crawlers look for titles and headings that have those relevant keywords that denote you as an expert, so when you utilize them well, you’ll get more targeted visitors.

●      Make your online presence known widely by linking your website to your social media accounts. When you have more professional links that are used by expert academics, like Impactio, your site is also more likely to show up on a search engine result. Impactio also showcases your work history and your published works’ citation metrics, which attracts users to your manuscripts and shows you in a professional light as someone who knows what they’re talking about.

With these strategies, you’ll optimize your site’s web performance and show up closer to the coveted first page when a user queries your field of expertise.

Tags Academic BlogResearchers
About the author
Jason Collins- Writer
Jason is a writer for many niche brands with experience “bringing stories to life” for both startups and corporate partners.
Jason Collins
Writer
Jason is a writer for many niche brands with experience “bringing stories to life” for both startups and corporate partners.
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