Librarians rock! Why– because though you might try to confine our skills to dusty shelves and OPACS, we have skills that transcend libraries and advance organizations’ presence before their clients.
Yes– you heard me. SEO AND librarians. I came across a job description for an Online Marketing position which sought out skills that I already possess or nearly possess. As I read through the job description, I was completely surprised to discover that librarians are in a position to lead SEO campaigns.
Having studied taxonomies, indexing, web design, natural language searching and metadata standards, I have a great understanding of the principles that maximize a website’s intended ranking and subjects.
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Taxonomies: Understanding how to create functional and multi-faceted taxonomies allows creators to cluster or classify topics according to themes, discipline, subject, or functional utility. Essentially, taxonomies help group information pools, giving an entity’s information structure and architecture. On a website, this means knowing how to leverage information architecture principles to improve navigability and sectionalize information in ways that group topics so that they can be retrieved without the excess of “information noise.”
- Indexing: Knowing how to summarize or best convey the subject of a topic in a few words. Librarians are experts at describing the core of a text to publicize its value and purpose.
- Web Design: A helpful skill in the SEO field. To understand how to improve a site’s retrievability, SEO professionals must understand how information is structured in a web page, both in terms of content (information architecture) and structure (xhtml coding standards)
- Natural language searching: Searching that does not rely on subject headings or predefined themes. Most internet searches are conducted through natural language queries, which require information professionals to understand (and often intuit) how users and information clients interpret and articulate a topic. A lot of people do not know what SEO is, so if I wanted to maximize the interest that this post received among general readers, I should use an expression that conveys the same idea in laymen terms throughout this post.
- Metadata: Information about information. Using metadata for SEO helps describe the content of a page in its structure as opposed to its content, giving search engines an additional space in which to rank and glean the topics that your intended audience might be searching for. That’s right, Dublin Core can help your website shoot up in search result rankings.
Furthermore, after drawing these conclusions from the job description alone, I came across “Determining Web Page Keywords,” a site written by Eric Holter, which provides explanations as to what SEO is, and how to get it done.
More importantly, it also explains which librarian skills are pertinent to this specialization, highlighting some of the ones I had recognized in my own skills set, and bring a few others to the table. It even provides tips as to where keywords can be used within an html page to optimize your site’s recall.
I knew librarianship could open several doors to me, but I had no idea I could one day become an Online Marketing specialist thanks to my MLIS.
