Erin Zimmerman

Plant biologist turned science writer and illustrator with a BSc in plant biology and physics from the University of Guelph and an MSc and PhD in fungal genetics and molecular systematics, respectively, from the Université de Montréal.

Top of the pile: An author’s guide to SEO for scientific articles

May 26, 2020 | 6 minute read

For a lot of researchers in the sciences, SEO—short for search engine optimization—seems like little more than an internet marketing buzzword. But as published research enters an increasingly busy scientific marketplace, knowledge about what SEO is and how to use it matters.

SEO refers to the way search engines such as Google prioritize or rank web pages when they come up in someone’s search results. A good ranking will make your paper show up earlier in search results, thereby making it more likely that interested readers will find it and, ideally, cite it.

The major academic publisher Wiley notes that more than half of all traffic to their online library “comes directly from Google, Google Scholar, and other search engines”, which should give an indication of the kind of weight search rankings carry in who finds your research.

So, what gets ranked higher? Search engine algorithms favour content identified as being high quality (containing good spelling and grammar, which all scientific publications should have covered), original (that is, not a copy of another page), and relevant to the user’s search (the page’s content includes the words a user searches).

The more a page fits these requirements, the higher it gets ranked. Fastidious researchers aside, one is only going to go so far in their scrolling to get answers, so the first page is where you want to be.

Keywords, keywords, keywords

The term that comes immediately to people’s minds when you mention SEO is keywords, and with good reason. Keywords are like topic headings for your content. They can be single words or short phrases that appear in your article.

There are also long-tail keywords, which are slightly longer combinations of words that are less-often searched for. Long-tail keywords define a very specific niche, which can make them perfect for the narrow focus of scientific research.

For example, the keywords “grapevine” or “grapevine canopy” might garner a lot of hits in your research field, but “dynamic modelling of grapevine canopy” stands a better chance of leading someone right to your paper if they search that phrase.

I should make a quick distinction here between SEO keywords, the ones you choose to improve your ranking, and abstract keywords, the ones you use in your paper’s designated keyword section. These should largely be the same words, with a few possible exceptions (e.g., you don’t typically use long-tail keywords as your abstract keywords).

Matching keywords in a text to terms users search for is how pages show up in search results in the first place. The importance of both choosing the right SEO keywords and using them correctly cannot be overstated.

But which keywords?

Of course, the question is how do we choose the right keywords? Part of this is knowing the trends and standard vocabulary within your field. As a first step, check out the abstract keywords used in papers that are closest in topic to your own as well as some of the major papers in your field.

There’s a fine line you must walk with the specificity of your SEO keywords. Too specific, and no one will think to search for that term. Too broad, and your article will get lost in a huge number of other papers using the term. Aim for something in the middle that will be searched for but not return an avalanche of results.

For example, using the word “ocean” as a keyword is very broad, while something like “salt panne zonation” may be too specific, even for a long-tail keyword. In this instance, something like “coastal habitat” falls in the sweet spot in the middle—not too broad, not too niche.

If you’re having trouble calling to mind all the possible terms that go with your paper, one useful exercise can be to create a word cloud with your manuscript. There are free online tools that allow you to enter a large text, which the tool then outputs as a cloud based on the number of times individual words are used in your article.

Though intended for marketing campaigns, you can use Google’s Keyword Planner to investigate how often various SEO keywords are searched for and how those trends change over time. These data give you a forecast for how a keyword might perform, other keywords that are more popular, and related keywords you might want to include in your paper.

You’ve identified your SEO keywords, how can you best use them?

First, titles. We all love clever titles, but the most discoverable titles are short and based around keywords. Try to include one or two keywords in the title, and if possible, place them within the first 65 characters to prevent them being cut off when preview text is generated in the search results.

Imagine what a reader might search for if they were looking for your exact article and build the title around that—the idea is to make it as easy as possible to find your work. If you can be clever and do all these things, more power to you.

Next, there’s your abstract. Typically, only the first sentence or two of the abstract appears in search results, so try to get a keyword or two, or even your major finding, into the first couple of sentences. Without creating awkward sentences, try to include at least two or three of your keywords in the abstract, and repeat them between three and six times each.

Don’t go nuts with SEO keyword repetition, though, because repeating them too many times—what’s known as keyword stuffing—will get flagged and could ultimately lead to your article being made harder to find. Try to use them naturally.

Finally, consider the rest of the article. Obviously, you’ll want to think carefully about what keywords to include with the article’s abstract, choosing those that are most commonly used and searched for in your discipline. But also consider how you can use them in your paper’s section headings, which search engines will use as an indicator of the structure and substance of your publication. Using your keywords in the labelling of your figures is a good idea too, wherever relevant.

Names: yours and others’

One bit of SEO best practice you might not have considered is author names and initials. For your entire body of work to be linked to the same person, and to draw readers from one of your articles to the others, you need to use your name the same way from one publication to the next. If you’re credited as Jennifer Wong in one paper, J. Wong in the next, and J.D. Wong in a third, it may be difficult for search algorithms to link all those papers to the same person.

Citations can also affect your paper’s SEO. Within reason, a certain amount of self-citation is good because it draws readers to your other publications. But citing the major papers in your field is helpful too as it links your paper to high-impact research. Readers can then find your paper in lists of articles citing the major work. If there’s some discretionary room for whether the keystone article for your field gets cited, be sure to add it in.

Building connections

A page’s search ranking is affected by the number of external, or inbound, links that bring others to that page. This means posting about and linking to your article from social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn will improve its discoverability. So too will links to your paper on your personal, institutional, and scientific society websites. If you blog, write a blog post about your article and include a link to the paper. Encourage colleagues to share or link to your article and do the same for them when they have a new publication out.

With ever-increasing numbers of scientific papers being published year over year, getting your work seen can be a bit like making your voice heard anywhere else on the internet—you feel like you’re yelling into a void. Though it may seem out of place and overly commercial to pair scientific research with the tools of internet marketing, if a few minor tweaks can get more eyes on the research you spent years ushering into the world, it’s worth the effort.

Erin Zimmerman

Plant biologist turned science writer and illustrator with a BSc in plant biology and physics from the University of Guelph and an MSc and PhD in fungal genetics and molecular systematics, respectively, from the Université de Montréal.