Is it useful to have an academic website?
This question is frequently asked on Twitter. I wanted to hear from Owlstown users how your academic website has been useful to your research and/or career?
Hi,
One advantage to having one’s own site is that you can include or do things that are not possible on, say, an institution’s web site. My former college, for example, did not allow any links on our web page! (Forget about embeds!)
One advantage to using Owlstown is that it’s designed for academics–so many of the other services are designed for businesses.
And one reason to have one’s own site is that interested people, say, journalists or other academics, can easily see what you do without navigating a giant university site (trying to find faculty on some of them is challenging!). That’s useful! Now, I just have to figure out SEO!
Best,
Cynthia
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These are great insights on the usefulness of academic websites, Cynthia. Thank you!
As for SEO, Owlstown has a few features to help you with this:
- Your web pages have meta tags that help search engines identify their contents.
- Your website ranks better when lots of webpages link to you. For example, 1) your website is listed in the Academic Gallery and 2) you link to your website on your Twitter profile.
- Your website has a sitemap.xml that inform search engines which pages to crawl.
Currently, your website appears first for the search term “ProfCynthiaMeyers”
If you want to improve your ranking for the search term “Cynthia B. Meyers” (currently #15). One thing you can try is changing the Meta title for your website to “Cynthia B. Meyers” instead of “ProfCynthiaMeyers”. You can find the Meta title field in the SEO section from the Editor.
