What is SEO? Most bloggers and internet marketers must already know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is and is a term that is very familiar to them.
SEO is a configuration that is carried out by site managers that aims to increase the visibility of a website page to be better in search engines, especially Google.
Website pages that are ranked well on Google search pages will certainly have the opportunity to get more potential visitors continuously.
When we type in a keyword on the Google search page, we will see a list of websites related to that keyword.
A website / blog that is well optimized and in the top order (positions 1 – 4) will usually get more visitors compared to websites that are in the bottom of the search results.
Perlu kita perhatikan, yang saya maksud dengan website/blog yang teroptimasi dengan baik dari sisi SEO adalah website yang berada pada urutan teratas hasil pencarian organik (Organic Search). Bukan website yang beriklan di Google (Google Ads).
Apa pentingnya SEO untuk OJS atau ejournal Anda?
Statistically, did you know that Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
This figure shows that the majority of internet users are more familiar with Google search engines than special search sites like Google Scholar, Index-Journal sites, and so on.
Table of Contents
Benefits of SEO for OJS Journal
1. Improved the impact of the article
With good optimization of your site, of course, more and more parties or readers understand what you want to convey on your OJS site.
Isn’t one of the greatest happiness of researchers is the spread of the benefits of their research.
When the journal improve its visibility by implementing the SEO technique, search engine such as Google, Google Scholar, Bing or others will be easier recommend the article to the potential reader or author. This will lead the wide reach of the article usefulness.
Many of the publisher underestimate the automatic indexing such as Google Scholar, BASE indexing, DialNet and other automatic indexing as they assumed that it has very low impact. However, if you article indexing in many of the indexing although it is not as high as Scopus or WorldCat, your journal is signaling that your journal / article have many of the back link that may have increased you journal credibility.
The back link for your journal is very important factor since the general search engine such as Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo will prefer to rank a page that have many back-link rather than limited backlink as they count that the page have bigger credibility.
2. Increased citations to articles
With the increasing number of visitors including visitors from academic circles, then of course your research will spread to anyone. this will increase the citations of your articles from across authors.
why is this possible? Because of the ease of search of your article.
We believe that not all the scholar use the common journal indexing services to find any of scientific article. Google is the largest search engine ecosystem. It is available on smartphone, Iot Devices, Chrome browser (the most used browser), map and others search engine parties. By optimizing the SEO you article would get more chance to get found by any users.
3. Increasing Journal Credibility
A large number of visitors will be recorded in the statistics installed on your OJS.
This will have a positive impact that you can show to the public that with valid data scientific articles that have been published through your journal have been widely read by visitors from various backgrounds and across countries.
Of course this will have an effect on increasing the accreditation points of your journal seen from the public enthusiasm for your article.
4. Increased credibility of the author
Who does not want to increase public credibility.
This includes researchers, with the better OJS that you manage,it will make it easier for all search engines to index in their databases, whether it’s Google, Bing, Duckduckgo or other types of search engines.
For example, someone who has an interest in the researcher writes his name on the search engine, then you can easily see the writing history of the author.
5. As a media to promote your journal
By using SEO tactics people will find your online journal easily, just by type some keyword that your journal already indexed it would optimize rank your journal on the first page of the search engine result.
It means that you don’t have to pay more cost to optimize or promote your journal to others media since google already promote it for free by accomplishing some SEO tactics.
How to Implement SEO on your OJS
One of strategy to implement SEO for your website in this case OJS is to config some meta tag for any page of your OJS sites. Here are the some meta tag needed for SEO :
Add Title Tag, Meta Content
Make sure you add the unique title for any of the page of your journal page such as an article needs some different title tag. The image below is example of using the html tag in term of SEO. You must implement this on your theme which your OJS currently is using.
Think as search engine and consumer search term when you decide any title on your article
Because google is using meta data from your article and the major source is your title (because it is marked as h1 on your article page), you need to rethink to write any of your article title that would increase on how the potential reader find your article.
Let me give you example (please note that this is only example) :
Bad Title (in term of SEO) :
1. A lineage-resolved molecular atlas of C. elegans embryogenesis at single-cell resolution
Better Title (in term of SEO)
1. Effect of C.elegans in the Reverse of Aging Process.
The first bad ones is talk to much on very specific on sciences term, let make some assumption that how many people that search that very rare keyword rather than using the more marketable keyword as we have seen on the better title ones.
Include the journal on other Indexing
Some indexing services such as RePEc, DialNet, and others will be included in your article from your journal with some easy rules to follow based on their technical requirement. Other indexing such as Microsoft Academia, Base, Google Scholar, PKP PN, WebArchive, and others even allow index any journal with automatic inclusion.
It is better to increase your effort so they will be able to add your journal to their database so your article will increase its ranking on google recommendation when user try to find article related to your journal.
Present your journal that is compatible with many device display (Responsive)
As Google will prioritize the responsiveness of the presentation of the design since many of the visitor is using various devices size, you should be follow what is recommended by Google to implement a site that is no error, compatible with responsive display.
A site that developed with well designed site will increase the dwelling time for the visitor on the site that will be counted by Google with better page experience and will lead to better ranking for your OJS / article ranking.
See about this topic here : Mobile Responsiveness is a important ranking factor
Any search engine surely will prioritize a page that is follow their requirement. The search engine will want to delight the user of that tool so if your journal is responsive it will positively impact the rank on the list that query by the user.
Our theme optimize SEO of your OJS site
As we are web developer who very skilled in this technical stuff, we improve all our theme with the SEO aspects. Optimizing SEO is a must for any web media such as OJS. This optimization will gain visitor to your journal and will lead the attraction of any potential participant for your journal.
A journal that is using an OJS platform surely different with the general website. On which the general website only focus on the traffic while the journal should be dedicated not just for traffic but also should be follow the requirement for many indexing standard.
the consequences of not following some of the requirements of this indexing such as from Google Scholar, DialNet, DOAJ, WebCat, EBSCO or Scopus can result in your journal losing time to re-submit.
For example, from DOAJ, if they decide that your journal is not worthy of being included in their indexing then you have to wait 3 months, then another 1 year if the first opportunity fails. Whereas from EBSCO the opportunity to fail your application can result in the opportunity to reapply in more than 1 year.
So we put a lot of emphasis on these requirements in the theme and plugin products that we release with a careful process and pay attention to the requirements of indexing so that this becomes an important factor that does not only pay attention to the beauty of the appearance
See : How we develop our product with careful research based on indexing requirement ?
We consider this because in our observations from various themes that are provided free publicly do not see the importance of this aspect of SEO in designing the themes they release. Although SEO now is a must for any online media.
By adding this feature, our hope is that your online journal can have a maximum positive impact and can provide great benefits. We understand that the research process requires a lot of money, time, effort, and effort, unfortunately, some of the research is buried in the archive storage or if it is published online it would rank on the last page on google.
Who will click on page 2 or the next page on the Google search results?
Let’s you, the researcher around the world make this world a better place and leave the optimization of your online journal to us
Bonus : Optimize by using SEM method
As a bonus you can also integrate and implement strategy of Search Engine Marketing by using some of the method, such as :
- Integrating Mail Marketing and Subscriber to your sites
- Promote your OJS site to Social Media.
- Make available share feature of your article on your journal system so it would make any of your visitors to share of your article to social media.
- Register your journal in Google Search Console to watch any issue with the site
