So you just created your academic website. Congratulations! You feel great! You're sharing your work online!

But when you go to your favorite search engine, your website doesn't show up. What's going on?!

Before your website can appear in search engines, search engines have to crawl (visit your website), index it, then rank it. This process takes about 2-4 weeks, or even longer.

If you are curious how search engines work, here's a good summary of how Google Search works (which is similar to other search engines).

Owlstown helps your website get indexed

There are multiple ways that Owlstown helps your website get indexed by search engines.

• Owlstown automatically creates a sitemap which helps search engines crawl and index your site.
• Owlstown automatically creates meta tags for each of your webpages. Meta tags are snippets of code that describe the content of your webpage to search engines, such as your site’s title and description.

Ways to Improve Ranking in Search Engines

Your website's ranking in search results is affected by 1) the quality of content in your website and 2) the number of links that point to your website.

The more content you put on your website, the more likely your website will appear in search queries. Here are some ideas for content to add to your website.

Here are some ideas to increase the number of links that point to your website.

• Put your website link on your online profiles: Twitter, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, Google Scholar
• If you have a department profile, make sure that it links to your academic website.
• Ask colleagues with websites to link to your website.