OER SEO

Search Engine Optimization for Open Educational Resources
Visibility to search engines is a crucial consideration for any collection of resources.

General advice about Search Engine Optimisation in the context of digital libraries

 * Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009
 * Search Engine Optimisation for People with a Conscience
 * SEO with Dublin Core
 * Optimising metadata to make high-value content more accessible to Google users Dawson, A. and Hamilton, Val (2006) Optimising metadata to make high-value content more accessible to Google users. Journal of Documentation, 62 (3). pp. 307-327.

Projects and SEO for OERs
Some UKOER projects have explicitly considered SEO


 * 6-Search Engine Optimisation-Good title pages
 * 7-Search Engine Optimisation-Ad words
 * Making it easier to find video from Google
 * Scooter poster and slidecast

Presentation about SEO at CETIS 09


 * Discoverability
 * OCWC wiki notes on discoverability

Additional Notes
Snippet of text from JISC OERRI Funding Call


 * Effective SEO is key to open educational resources providing benefits of marketing, reach and reputation. Guidance on “improving your online presence” needs applying to the wide range of platforms and content types used for OER, as described in JISC CETIS’ UKOER technical synthesis . Projects have explored SEO in several ways, for example, the SCOOTER project has produced guidance on its chosen approach to search engine optimisation and the MMTV project experimented with Google Adwords to improve SEO . The variations in format types and platforms mean that it is exposed to web search in a variety of ways. A particular key issue is how “repositories” compare to “web 2.0 services” in terms of search engine optimisation. To answer that, we need to go beyond theory into running a structured experiment.