In an increasingly digitised world, writing an informative position paper is only half the battle. The other half is making sure that people are able to find and read what you created. That’s where Search Engine Optimisation comes in – in short, SEO is important when publishing because it increases the likelihood that your text will appear higher in search results, ensuring you reach your audience (and, hopefully, beyond it!), increasing the impact and influence of your paper. Without SEO, you’re running the risk of your position paper getting buried on page 10 of the search results, where very few people will see it. Hence, here are our SEO tips for publishing a position paper like a pro:

1. Optimise your meta tags: Meta tags are the title and description that appear in search engine results. Make sure your title accurately reflects the content of your article and includes relevant keywords. Your meta description should be compelling and encourage people to click through to your article. Depending on the platform you use to host your website, you will have different ways of editing your meta tags.
2. Don’t forget about images: The names of the images you upload to your website can impact your SEO results. Use alt tags to describe your images and include relevant keywords that you want people to search. This helps search engines understand what your images are about and can improve your ranking in image search results.
3. Use internal linking: Link to other relevant content on your website to help search engines understand the structure of your website and the relationship between your content. For example, you can add a ‘You might also be interested in…’ section under your publications, linking to your other relevant texts.
4. Build backlinks: Backlinks are links from other websites to your website. They can improve your website’s authority and increase your ranking in search results. Media relations can be really helpful when establishing your backlinks. Whenever another website mentions your paper, make sure they link to the relevant page. Other ways to build backlinks include promoting your content on social media, or guest posting on other relevant websites and profiles.
5. Consider mobile optimization: More and more people are accessing content on their mobile devices. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly and loads quickly on mobile devices. A great tool to check how well your website is performing is PageSpeed Insights. Their analysis will provide you insights and direct recommendations on what to change to make your page load faster and be accessible to a wider digital audience.

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