SEO in the library, or the new portal of the University of Veterinary Science Library and search optimization

Abstract

Striving to meet user needs and requirements, most libraries are present on the World Wide Web. However, it is often not enough simply “to be present” if libraries want to capture the attention of people surfing on the internet. The Hungarian Veterinary Science Library, Archives and Museum wants to increase the number of visits to its new homepage, and uses Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as the most obvious tool to achieve this goal. The case study does not offer a general algorithm to SEO; its aim is rather to illustrate how SEO can be used in building a portal, and to call attention to the importance of SEO. The article analyses the present homepage of the library, and identifies the most interesting problems which arose during the development of the new portal, from the point of SEO. Some free tools used in SEO are also described. The major issues are the following ones: examining the sources of usage, keywords in search engines and in the homepage, trends of searching, keyword density, important tags, ranking of hit lists, using JavaScript, internal and external links, etc.