Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Typically, the earlier a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.
#29141
Women and Feminism in Technical Communication--An Update 
The purposes of this study are to determine the current status of scholarship published in five major technical communication journals about women and feminism and to identify changes in focus that may have occurred over the last five years. We begin with a discussion of the frequency of publication for articles whose titles have keywords relating to women and feminism. After identifying 21 articles, we consider the thematic patterns in the narrowed corpus. We conclude that scholarly publication about women and feminism in technical communication has moved from a moderate or radical concern for inclusion to a postmodern concern for critique of visual, verbal, and mechanical "technologies," which previously were not considered political.
Thompson, Isabelle and Elizabeth Overman Smith. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2006). Articles>Research>Publishing>Gender
#26493
One of the most fundamental steps when optimizing a website is writing a robots.txt file. It helps tell spiders what is useful and public for sharing in the search engine indexes and what is not. It should also be noted that not all search spiders will follow your instructions left in the robots.txt file. In addition, a poorly done robots.txt file can stop the search spiders from crawling and indexing your website properly. In this article I will show you how to be sure everything will work correctly.
Dixon, Clint. SEOchat (2005). Articles>Web Design>Search
#25133
Writing articles is one of the best way to improve the link popularity of your website - find out why.
Dixon, Nicholas. Webcredible (2005). Design>Web Design>Search>Search Engine Optimization
#25579
Writing Research Theory and Practice
This course has two related goals. First, the course is an introduction to some of the theoretical and practical approaches to research taken by scholars in composition and rhetoric. Second, the course is designed to help prepare students to write a project proposal which will in turn help them as they begin work on their MA thesis or writing project.
Krause, Steven D. Eastern Michigan University (2005). Academic>Courses>Research
#24845
Your Customer is a Search Engine
While consumer confidence in advertising is at an all-time low their confidence in search engines is growing. Why? Search engines offer consumers what advertising does not: relevance.
Janisch, Troy. Icon Interactive (2004). Articles>Internet>Marketing>Search
#26721
There is a raging debate over the relative importance of on-page search engine optimization and off-page optimization. This case study that offers presents some intriguing findings.
Leonhardt, David. Klariti (2005). Articles>Web Design>Search
#26904
Google 的真实情况是怎样的呢？回答是：它并不简洁。 瞧，我喜欢 Google。它是个很棒的搜索引擎，但是我比较反感听到有人表扬它的外观优雅而简洁。见鬼，所有的搜索引擎都有一部分是优雅而又简洁的：在输入框中输入要查询的词语，然后按“回车”键。 “不”，有人会马上反对说：“Google的搜索页面是那样的简洁、优雅，没有和其它的功能挤在一起”。
Norman, Donald A. uiGarden (2006). (Chinese) Articles>Web Design>Usability>Search
#31574
编者：本书最后部分，作者比较了由机器开发的设计原则和由人总结的设计原则。下文中是机器对于如何与人交流的想法。
Norman, Donald A. uiGarden (2008). (Chinese) Articles>Human Computer Interaction>Research
#32139
Applying Turing's Ideas to Search
Users hold search to a human standard of understanding that computers cannot as yet achieve. This is more than just a curiosity: The Turing test has something to tell us about how we can better design our website search interfaces today.
Ferrara, John. Boxes and Arrows (2008). Articles>Web Design>Search
#32147
Introduction to Professional Writing Research
English 203 serves as an introduction to research approaches and methods useful for professional writers. The course will focus on developing ideas to guide research; collecting print and online information; interviewing, surveying, and conducting observations; and evaluating, summarizing, analyzing, and reporting research. Perhaps most important, the course will focus on developing your writing skills so that you might not only engage in but also produce quality professional research.
Bay, Jennifer. Purdue University (2008). Academic>Courses>Research>Business Communication
#32165
Qualitative Sampling Methods: A Primer for Technical Communicators
Qualitative sampling methods have been largely ignored in technical communication texts, making this concept difficult to teach in graduate courses on research methods. Using concepts from qualitative health research, this article provides a primer on qualitative methods as an initial effort to fill this gap in the technical communication literature. Specifically, the authors attempt to clarify some of the current confusion over qualitative sampling terminology, explain what qualitative sampling methods are and why they need to be implemented, and offer examples of how to apply commonly used qualitative sampling methods.
Koerber, Amy and Lonie McMichael. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2008). Articles>Research>Methods
#32235
Research in Technical Communication: Perspectives and Thoughts on the Process
Technical communication can be viewed as both a discipline and a profession. As a discipline, it concerns itself with the pursuit of knowledge and the development of theory. As a profession, it attempts to meet the needs of the individuals it serves through the application of knowledge and theory. Research links the discipline and the profession and sustains both by providing the bases from which to develop new areas of inquiry and to find solutions to problems.
Barclay, Rebecca O. Technical Communication Online (1992). Articles>TC>Research>Body of Knowledge
#32236
The State of Research in Technical Communication
There have been many attempts to assess the state of research in our field. This article is our attempt to both (1) synthesize recent analyses, opinions, and conclusions concerning the status of technical communication research and (2) propose an action plan aimed at redirecting our field's agenda for its research. We explore these questions: What are the recent research trends in our field? What is and is not promising about our recent approaches to research? Where do we need to go next? What are the critical components for a new agenda for our research?
Blakeslee, Ann M. and Rachel Spilka. Technical Communication Quarterly (2004). Articles>TC>Research
#32270
Site Navigation and Its Impact on the Content Viewed by the Virtual Scholar: A Deep Log Analysis
is paper presents early findings of a unique analysis that related questionnaire data to site usage as recorded in the transaction log reports of ScienceDirect, for the same people. Its focus is the differences in the online behaviour of three types of navigational users: those accessing the site via a gateway (either via a reference hyperlink or subject search facility), those using the on site search facility and those employing menus. Towards this end 16,865 sessions were analysed and grouped by navigational entry and compared over three types of online behaviour: the viewing of articles in press (AIP), the number of different journals viewed in a session and the viewing of old material. A strong association was found between form of navigation and behavioural trait. Those using menus were more likely to view AIPs, while those using the search facility were more likely to view a greater number of different journals and were more likely to view older material. This supports a hypothesis proposed by Nicholas et al. (2006) that use of the online searching facility increases the visibility of material irrespective of journal and age and results in a greater use of older material and a more diverse journal use compared to other online and off-line information retrieval methods. Although research has been undertaken on the different strategies that users employ to navigate and find their way around a collection of content (e.g. a digital library), this we believe is the first time the effect of different navigational strategies on outcomes (for example, what is viewed) has been investigated.
Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Research>Log Analysis
#32273
Web Retrieval Systems and the Greek Language: Do They Have an Understanding?
Searching the web is a common activity of web users. English and non-English speakers utilize international or local search engines so as to satisfy their information needs. Most of the attempts at evaluation of search engines focus on English queries and on English document collections. In this paper an evaluation methodology is presented and the capabilities of international and local web retrieval systems using Greek queries are evaluated based on this method. We aim at identifying difficulties and knowledge requirements when using a Greek supporting search engine. The importance of interface localization and the effects of standard information retrieval techniques such as case insensitivity, stopword removal and simple stemming are studied in international and local search engines. The evaluation methodology is applicable to other non-English natural languages as well.
Lazarinis, Fotis. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language
#32275
SHIL on the Web is the website of the Israeli Citizens' Advice Bureau. It provides information about rights, social benefits, government and public services and civil obligations. Activity on the site approaches 10,000 pages visited per day. It has interfaces in four languages: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian and English. Logfile analysis of the SHIL website revealed to our surprise that about 60.7% of the requests reaching SHIL from external sites (excluding requests from robots) are from general search engines (e.g. Google and MSN), and users reach a specific page on the site linked from the search results page. This finding seems to indicate that the site is not known well enough to the public. On the other hand the site is very active, thus it seems to serve Israeli citizens well, even without being a well known brand. In this paper we analyzed the external requests coming from search engines. The analysis is based on the 266,295 queries from search engines that reached SHIL during March—October 2005. Studying queries submitted to search engines is a novel technique for analyzing the access patterns to the site and provides a better understanding of the user needs and intentions than analyzing the distribution of the visited pages only. We are not aware of any previous study that analyzed the relation between the query submitted to the search engine and the webpage the user clicked on the search results page. Since search engines provide snippets, when the user clicks on a specific page he already has some information on what is to be found on the page and the user makes a conscious decision to click on the specific result. Thus, this type of analysis provides additional information about the users' actual information needs.
Ravid, Gilad, Judit Bar-Ilan, Shifra Baruchson-Arbib and Sheizaf Rafaeli. Journal of Information Science (2007). Articles>Web Design>Search>Language
#32277
The Quality of Evidence in Knowledge Management Research: Practitioner versus Scholarly Literature
The viability of KM partly rests on how researchers garner empirical support for their purported theories. One aspect of this would involve the evaluation of the evidence provided in KM research. This paper presents a comparative study of the evidence that is presented in scholarly and professional literature on KM. For this purpose, the paper introduces a typology of evidence to analyze the data obtained from the survey of the literature. The classification based on this typology reveals quantitative differences between the types of evidence put forth in the scholarly and practitioner literature. More interestingly, however, our analysis reveals differences in terms of the questions they ask, the perspective they adopt, and the methods they follow to convince others of the validity of their claims. We explain these differences in terms of the notions of `blackboxing' and `performance' borrowed from actor-network theory.
Ekbia, Hamid R. and Noriko Hara. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Knowledge Management>Research
#32291
Web Robot Detection in the Scholarly Information Environment
An increasing number of robots harvest information on the world wide web for a wide variety of purposes. Protocols developed at the inception of the web laid out voluntary procedures in order to identify robot behaviour, and exclude it if necessary. Few robots now follow this protocol and it is now increasingly difficult to filter for this activity in reports of on-site activity. This paper seeks to demonstrate the issues involved in identifying robots and assessing their impact on usage in regard to a project which sought to establish the relative usage patterns of open access and non-open access articles in the Oxford University Press published journal Glycobiology, which offers in a single issue articles in both forms. A number of methods for identifying robots are compared and together these methods found that 40% of the raw logs of this journal could be attributed to robots.
Huntington, Paul, David Nicholas and Hamid R. Jamali. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Web Design>Research>Online
#32292
Research Beyond Google: 119 Authoritative, Invisible, and Comprehensive Resources
Google, the largest search database on the planet, currently has around eight billion web pages indexed. That's a lot of information. But it's nothing compared to what else is out there. Google can only index the visible web, or searchable web. But the invisible web, or deep web, is estimated to be 500 times bigger than the searchable web. The invisible web comprises databases and results of specialty search engines that the popular search engines simply are not able to index.
#32293
Research Methods 'Beyond Google'
When “Google” has become a synonym for “research,” how should faculty respond? And if the answer doesn’t lie in musty books and stacks of journals, are libraries still part of the answer? The problem is near-universal for professors who discover, upon assigning research projects, that superficial searches on the Internet and facts gleaned from Wikipedia are the extent — or a significant portion — of far too many of their students’ investigations.
Guess, Andy. Inside Higher Ed (2008). Articles>Research>Online
#32296
Amusing Titles in Scientific Journals and Article Citation
The present study examines whether the use of humor in scientific article titles is associated with the number of citations an article receives. Four judges rated the degree of amusement and pleasantness of titles of articles published over 10 years (from 1985 to 1994) in two of the most prestigious journals in psychology, Psychological Bulletinand Psychological Review. We then examined the association between the levels of amusement and pleasantness and the article’s monthly citation average. The results show that, while the pleasantness rating was weakly associated with the number of citations, articles with highly amusing titles (2 standard deviations above average) received fewer citations. The negative association between amusing titles and subsequent citations cannot be attributed to differences in the title length and pleasantness, number of authors, year of publication, and article type (regular article vs comment). These findings are discussed in the context of the importance of titles for signalling an article’s content.
Sagi, Itay and Eldad Yechiam. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Publishing>Research>Scientific Communication
#32297
Qualitative analyses were used to launch a preliminary exploration of the dominant knowledge organization (KO) trends in the pre- and post-web eras. Data for this study was assembled by searching the Library, Information Science, and Technology Abstracts database for articles that have used the term `knowledge organization' or `information organization' in their titles, abstracts, or descriptors. Taken as a whole, these preliminary results suggest that the content of the KO literature has shifted since the advent of the web. Although classic KO principles remain prominent throughout both eras, the presence of new content areas, such as metadata, denotes a shift in KO trends. In the pre-web era, the literature was related in large part to indexing and abstracting. In contrast, cataloging and classification issues dominate the landscape in the post-web era. The findings from this paper will be of particular use to those interested in learning about upcoming trends in the KO literature.
Saumure, Kristie and Ali Shiri. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Knowledge Management>Research>Online
#32300
Electronic Scholarly Publishing and Open Access
A review of recent developments in electronic publishing, with a focus on Open Access (OA) is provided. It describes the two main types of OA, i.e. the `gold' OA journal route and the `green' repository route, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages of the two, and the reactions of the publishing industry to these developments. Quality, cost and copyright issues are explored, as well as some of the business models of OA. It is noted that whilst so far there is no evidence that a shift to OA will lead to libraries cancelling subscriptions to toll-access journals, this may happen in the future, and that despite the apparently compelling reasons for authors to move to OA, so far few have shown themselves willing to do so. Conclusions about the future of scholarly publications are drawn.
Oppenheim, Charles. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Publishing>Research>Open Source
#32301
The Last 50 Years of Knowledge Organization: A Journey Through My Personal Archives
At the time when the Institute of Information Scientists was launched, well established principles of classification, especially faceted classification, provided an excellent springboard for developments in knowledge organization thereafter. The principles of thesaurus construction and use were worked out during the first two decades of the Institute's existence. Up until the end of the 1980s, most practical systems to exploit any of these vocabularies were held on cards, some of them highly ingenious. The subsequent arrival of the desktop computer, soon followed by the growth of networks providing access to an almost unimaginable quantity and variety of resources, has stimulated evolution of the knowledge organization schemes to exploit the technology available. Anecdotes of events and practical applications of controlled vocabularies illustrate this account of developments over the period.
Dextre Clarke, Stella G. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Publishing>Research>History
#32302
The Evolution of Visual Information Retrieval
This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of those developments which have taken the theory and practice of image and video retrieval into the digital age. Drawing on a voluminous literature, the context in which visual information retrieval takes place is followed by a consideration of the conceptual and practical challenges posed by the representation and recovery of visual material on the basis of its semantic content. An historical account of research endeavours in content-based retrieval, directed towards the automation of these operations in digital image scenarios, provides the main thrust of the paper. Finally, a look forwards locates visual information retrieval research within the wider context of content-based multimedia retrieval.
Enser, Peter. Journal of Information Science (2008). Articles>Content Management>Visual Rhetoric>Search
