Web Visibility

One way to make your work more visible is to create a web page about your dissertation and make sure it is found by search engines. Very often, you can rank highly for an important keyword phrase in your dissertation. For example, I built a page based on the keyword phrase "conceptions of inquiry" and am now ranked in the top three results in Google. It's likely you initially found this site through a search engine.

I used this technique for an article I recently published based on my dissertation. The page briefly discusses what my article is about and provides links to a preprint and the full article. The result is increased visibility for my work.

Tips on Building a Web Beacon to Your Work

It's a bit more of a process because you need to identify the keywords people are searching on, structure your page to highlight those keywords, and possibly get a few links to the page. There's a bit of a learning curve but the technique can be applied to future publications or projects.

I'd recommend setting up a way to count visitors with Google Analytics (free), researching relevant and specific keyword phrases, making sure you have a well structured web page, and then getting a few links. Since your content will be fairly specific you should be able to rank fairly well, especially if your webpage/site is on a university web server (pages on established and trusted websites tend to do better in the search engines).

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