Driving Traffic to Institutional Repositories: How Search Engine Optimization can Increase the Number of Downloads from IR

The success of institutional repositories (IR) is measured in large part by the number of file downloads they sustain. Most traffic to IR is referred by Internet search engines, but referrals are hindered when IR are not properly optimized for search engine harvesting and indexing, leading to low visitation and downloads. This presentation will discuss search engine optimization techniques, especially for Google Scholar, which can be responsible for the majority of referrals that result in IR file downloads. The presentation will also introduce a new web service called RAMP (Repository Analytics & Metrics Portal) that accurately counts file downloads from IR and requires no installation or training.