Web site search engine optimization: a case study of Fragfornet

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a set of techniques used by websites in order to be better indexed by search engines. This papers aims to focus upon “white hat”, “in page” SEO: techniques to improve one's site content, hereby making it more attractive to human visitors as well as search engines, by making changes within the site's pages while focusing on chosen themes and keywords. The final goal is for the site to be better ranked by one or several targeted search engines and therefore appearing higher in their results lists for specified requests. This paper seeks to describe the steps one must take to reach such a goal, while focusing on the example of the website Fragfornet.

Fragfornet web pages have been generated through a “website factory” allowing the creation of dynamic websites on demand for the employees of Cemagref. This explains the steps to take to optimize for search engines any website using Zope Plone; even more broadly, the general recommendations described can be used by any website at all to gain more visibility on search engines. After a literature review about search engine optimization, the paper describes the methods used to optimize the website before exposing the results which were quickly obtained.

It was not long before the first effects of the SEO campaign were experienced. One week later, as soon as the Googlebots had crawled the site and stored a newer version of it within their databases, it immediately went up in the results pages for requests concerning forests fragmentation. This paper describes some of the parameters that were monitored and some of the conclusions drawn from them..

This paper's goal is to explain which steps to take for search engines to optimize any website elaborated through Cemagref website factory, or any website using Zope Plone. Even more broadly, the general recommendations described in this paper can be used by any librarian on any website to gain more visibility on search engines.