Aim: Centralizing information and being visible by being found on the internet.
In addition to creating an online persona, you want to make sure that people find YOU when searching on the internet. One way to increase this chance is by making sure all information about you is linked together using for example a website. The more you can drive the internet traffic, the better.
Websites can be about you as individual, your lab, or integrated with your employer webpages. Websites can be simple, only providing your contact information or elaborate with detailed information on you and your work. Similar to these decisions on content, how a website is created can be very simple or complex, e.g. What You See Is What You Get “wysiwyg” (eg. Wix) to content management systems (CMS) with a backend/frontend (eg. Joomla). Depending on your needs and knowledge you can either create a website yourself or pay an expert to do it for you. Spending time on what you want to achieve with your website is crucial to make the above decisions.
About.me is a website which allows you to write a short biography about yourself and integrate links to other platforms for free.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technique to increase your website's presence in search results on search engines such as Google. The different aspects of SEO can be classified into three: (a) on-site, (b) technical, and (c) off-site.
on-site: This is about the content (+ quality) and keywords used on your website.
technical: Various technical aspects fall into this class. Most importantly, whether search engines find your website (i.e. crawlability and indexing), but also things such as mobile-friendliness, site speed, architecture, data, and security.
off-site: Is mainly concerned with page reputation and authority (i.e. backlinking).
While SEO previously was heavily depending on key-words only, this has changed now with algorithms considering the quality of your work (e.g. typos, duration people spend reading) and you can actually get penalized for cramming your work with key-words. Thus, use key-words in the text, but don't overdo it.
Basic Website Definitions
Backend “Is the technology that allows a webpage to be formed, including servers, data, and applications”
Backlinking “Are links that connect websites to each other”
Bounce rate “Percentage of visitors which visit and leave your website”
Content management system (CMS) “Application to manage content creation, editing and publishing, based on databases”
Crawlability “Whether links to and within your website can be discovered by bots”
Frontend “Is the interface for user interaction by converting data via JavaScript, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), or Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)”
Indexing “Making your website findable by search engines”
SEO “Search engine optimization allows search engines to find your website more easily”
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