Help Readers Find Your Article

The importance of search engines

Google and Google Scholar are the principal ways in which people will find your article online today. Between them they account for 60% of referral traffic to SAGE Journals Online. The search engine is now the first port of call for researchers and it is of paramount importance your article can be found easily in search engine results.

By taking some simple steps to optimize your article for search engines it will help your work to be discovered, then read, used and cited in others’ work. This helps with support the Impact Factor of the journal (if applicable) your article is published in and will further raise the visibility of your article.

SAGE already undertakes many measures to ensure SAGE journals are indexed in the all the major search engines. There are over 100 factors that a search engine will look at before deciding how to rank your article in their search results, but the starting point is the content that you write.

What do search engines look at?

Today’s search engines use secret complex mathematical algorithms that change every month to keep their search results as accurate as possible. They take into account over 100 different factors and do not disclose the weighting or importance of each. Below are just a few of the elements considered today by search engines:

• the volume of incoming links from related websites       
• time within website
• page titles                                                             
• quality of content                                              
• relevance                                                              
• page descriptions                                              
• quantity of content                                          
• technical precision of source code             
• functional vs broken hyperlinks                  
• volume and consistency of searches
• page views
• revisits
• click-throughs
• technical user-features
• uniqueness
• keywords
• spelling 

   So what can you do to help? Click here to read more!