Information-Seeking Case Study: Global Health
-Veena S. Katikineni
Over half-a-century ago, American engineer and scientist Vannevar Bush called on society to create a better system to transmit knowledge and information from one individual to another. In his article “As We May Think,” which ran in the July 1945 issue of The Atlantic, Bush proposed the memex, a complex machine that would increase every individual’s productivity while making his findings visible and understandable to the next person (Bush). Today we do not have a commonly used memex, but we do have many strategies to find information on the Internet.
With many information sources, including blogs, web sites, and online forums, it is increasingly important to build a strategy to publicize a personal contribution to this field on the Internet. In the health field, it is very important for researchers and health workers to be up to date on the latest research findings and innovations pertinent to patient care or health systems. When looking across national boundaries, this need is even more crucial. A finding in one country may inform activities in another country. Global health uses the resources, knowledge, and experience of diverse societies to address health challenges throughout the world (Koplan).
Today many students are interested in pursuing the global health field. They often engage in short-term research projects in developing countries, where they work with public or private non-profit organizations and NGO’s. While students are able to immerse themselves in the research setting, they are often unable to share their experience in a structured way. Journal articles by early global health students are rare due to the short time span of data collection and variable level of involvement from mentors. Since information-sharing is a critical element of research, students must find a way to practice this skill before becoming professionals. Blogging through web sites such as WordPress or Google’s Blogger is the perfect way for students to share their global health research experience.
In this post, I hope to communicate a good strategy to make a student global health WordPress blog visible to the Internet community. If more global health students start blogging, they will not only practice disseminating research findings to a wide audience, but also contribute to a growing body of knowledge.
Identifying Your Audience
Like any rhetorical piece, a global health blog must address an audience. An example of how to narrow a blog’s audience is by identifying people who are interested in a specific global health topic. This topic could be as general as non-communicable disease in a certain country, like India. In order to further narrow the audience, one could identify a particular disease like cardiovascular disease. In the university setting, another way to narrow the audience is to address a particular college or program, like the School of Public Health. Keeping an audience in mind helps the blogger identify useful keywords and back-links that will later be discussed.
Understanding Search Engines
RSS readers have emerged as an easy way to aggregate information from different places on the Internet. An RSS reader is defined as “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format” (Libby). Still today the average person relies on search engines and social media sites like Twitter instead of RSS readers (Kennedy).
A search engine sorts through information according to a set of rules, an algorithm, and displays what it believes to be the most relevant search hits. In order to optimize the visibility of a student global health blog, it is therefore important to identify these basic rules behind how search engines determine the relevance of information.
There are two major types of search engines, crawler-based and human-powered. A crawler-based search engine, such as Google, is one that creates listings automatically and “crawl” the web, searching and listing results based on content (“Search Engine Optimization for WordpPess”). Human-powered search engines, like The Open Directory, rely on site descriptions submitted to editors of the directory, who then rely on these descriptions to generate search listings (“DMOZ: Open Directory Project”). They do not change with the content of the web site, so in order to optimize a blog’s visibility, it is more effective to focus on crawler-based search engines.
In crawler-based search engines, changes to page titles, body text, and other elements are detected by the search engine’s “spider.” The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes which affect the site’s rank in search listings. The spider records what it finds in the index, which contains a copy of every web page found. This index is updated with new information.
Search engine software then sifts through the pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes to be most relevant. Each search engine, Google, MSN, Yahoo, does this slightly differently, which is why search hits often differ among search engines. There are a few accepted factors, however, that affect the rank a search engine assigns to a site (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Clean Code and Internal Links
The basic correctness of the code is critical for the search engines to be able to find out which portions of your web page to index (Nallawalla). The major features of a WordPress blog, however, such as adding pages, tags, and categories, do not necessarily require code. Instructions on how to add features that require HTML are included in several tutorials offered through WordPress (“Writing Code in Your Posts”).
Furthermore a clean organization system within the blog is critical for the search engine to increase the blog’s ranking on a search hit list. Whenever embedding photographs, videos, or links to external sites, it is important to add textual content. When you write a post and add relevant tags, WordPress automatically adds them to a tag surfer, driving new traffic to your blog (“Conditional Tags”).
Navigational links such as categories, archives, and pages, also help the search engine “crawl” through the site, visiting the site’s entire content (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Keywords
In order to gather useful keywords for a global health topic, it is important to visit common global health web sites like The Global Health Council (“Global Health Council”). Words classifying the health issue you are examining or associated institutions are often effective keywords. Examples include “chronic disease, healthy living, Centre for Chronic Disease Control” can help search engines identify content.
Search engines will also check the location of the key words. They generally search near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. Most WordPress themes arrange content to accommodate this (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Frequency of keywords is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine analyzes how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page; the higher the frequency, the more relevant. It is important not to try any tricks, like repeating keywords hundreds of times on a page, because this is considered a spamming method that may be punished by bans from search engines.
Submitting to Search Engines
There are a few important criteria a global health blog must meet for best consideration to be accepted by search engines. There should be sufficient material, about 10 posts, on the site in order to give the search engine something to examine. It typically takes a week or so to get a URL added to a search engine. An XML site map is also necessary to provide an overview of the site. There are many free site map generators available online (“Sitemap Generator”). Once added, it is important to keep track of how you are included in search results, and add relevant keywords to improve your listing.
Spreading the Word
The most basic step to publicizing a blog is to increase the number of back-links, or incoming links to the site. Blogrolls, pingbacks and trackbacks are all built into WordPress and help the blog link to others.
A blogroll is a list of links to various blogs or news sites. Two WordPress features, Trackback and Pingback, help you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog. In order to check the number of incoming links to your site that have been recognized by Google, simply type the blog’s URL into Google (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Another way to increase incoming links is to ask web sites or blogs outside of WordPress to include your blog URL in a section of the web site. A few well-reputed student global health blogs are:
Universities also always have departmental web sites or blogs that may be related to your global health topic. At the University of Maryland, for example, the School of Public Health has a blog called The Healthy Turtle (“The Healthy Turtle”). This blog connects the students, faculty, alumni of the University of Maryland and is open to the general public.
If you receive a grant to support your global health project, the funder’s web site is another space to add a link. The Center for Undergraduate Research Maryland Summer Scholars Program and the Study Abroad Office both fund short-term research projects abroad and have supporting blogs. There are clearly many sites within a university network that are useful to back-link a blog.
Last, it is important to allow readers to spread the word about articles or content posted on your blog. In order to do this, there are plug-ins available to enable the audience to easily email a post to a friend; post it on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn; or add it to social news websites such as Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon (Aarts).
A Dynamic Strategy
While I have mentioned a basic strategy to publicize a global health blog, this strategy can be applied to other subjects as well. Since search engines and online communities are continuing to change, however, it is critical to maintain a flexible strategy to communicate through your blog. In order to revise your strategy, there are several tools available. Google Analytics, a plug-in for WordPress blogs, shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Below is a video demonstrating Google Analytics in WordPress. The Dashboard offers many useful statistics, including the number of page visits and average time on site, and visually represents the audience by showing viewership on a world map. In order to access Google Analytics, the blog’s URL must be registered to Google’s search engine.
Blogging for Global Health
Blogging can be a very effective mode to disseminate information, but it is important for the blog to be recognized in the Internet community. Furthermore, blogging is instrumental for the global health student to acquire the skills that will allow them to make a major impact in the field. A strategy informed by the identification of a target audience, an understanding of search engines, and a knowledge of networking with campus resources will strengthen the visibility of any student global health blog. There are more advanced strategies not mentioned in this post, but these can all be found in the WordPress tutorials. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how search engines accommodate the increasing volume of content in the blogosphere. It will also be interesting to see how the increasing use of RSS feeds will influence strategies for search engine optimization.
Bibliography
AARTS, DEBORAH. “HOW TO BE HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS.” Profit 30.1 (2011): 41-42.Business Source Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic July 1945: 1-8. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. Web. 8 Mar. 2011.
“Conditional Tags.” WordPress. Web. 03 Mar 2011. <http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags>
“DMOZ: Open Directory Project.” The Open Directory Project. Web. 25 Feb 2011. <http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/add.html>
“Global Health Council.” The Global Health Council. Web. 26 Feb 2011. <http://www.globalhealth.org/>
“Global Pulse Blog: Updates from AMSA’s Global Pulse Journal.” Global Pulse. Web. 07 Mar 2011. <http://www.globalpulsejournal.com/blog/>
Greenfield, Heather. “Information Wars.” National Journal 39.8 (2007): 48-49.Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
Kennedy, Dennis. “RSS, Not R.I.P.: Tool That Brings the News to You Is Still Useful.” ABA Journal 97.2 (2011): 19. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
Koplan, Jeffrey P; Bond, Christopher T; Merson, Michael H; Reddy, K. Srinath; Rodriguez, Mario Henry; Sweankambo, Nelson K.; and Judith N. Wasserhelt. “Towards a Common Definition of Global Health.” The Lancet 373 (2009): 1919. Web. 16 Mar 2011.
Libby, Dan. “RSS 0.91 Spec, revision 3.” 10 July 1999. Web. 10 Mar 2011. <http://web.archive.org/web/20001204093600/my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html>
NALLAWALLA, ASH. “Inside-Out SEO.” APC 31.2 (2011): 98-100. Computers & Applied Sciences Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress.” WordPress. Web. 20 Feb 2011. <http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress>
“Sitemap Generator.” WordPress. Web. 05 Mar 2011. <http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/>
“The Healthy Turtle.” The Healthy Turtle- School of Public Health. Web. 08 Mar 2011. <http://sphumd.blogspot.com/>
“The Lancet Student.” The Lancet Student. Web. 06 Mar 2011. <http://www.thelancetstudent.com/>
“UM Newsdesk.” Newsdesk. Web. 08 Mar 2011. <http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/>
“Writing Code in Your Posts.” WordPress. Web. 20 Feb 2011.
With many information sources, including blogs, web sites, and online forums, it is increasingly important to build a strategy to publicize a personal contribution to this field on the Internet. In the health field, it is very important for researchers and health workers to be up to date on the latest research findings and innovations pertinent to patient care or health systems. When looking across national boundaries, this need is even more crucial. A finding in one country may inform activities in another country. Global health uses the resources, knowledge, and experience of diverse societies to address health challenges throughout the world (Koplan).
Today many students are interested in pursuing the global health field. They often engage in short-term research projects in developing countries, where they work with public or private non-profit organizations and NGO’s. While students are able to immerse themselves in the research setting, they are often unable to share their experience in a structured way. Journal articles by early global health students are rare due to the short time span of data collection and variable level of involvement from mentors. Since information-sharing is a critical element of research, students must find a way to practice this skill before becoming professionals. Blogging through web sites such as WordPress or Google’s Blogger is the perfect way for students to share their global health research experience.
In this post, I hope to communicate a good strategy to make a student global health WordPress blog visible to the Internet community. If more global health students start blogging, they will not only practice disseminating research findings to a wide audience, but also contribute to a growing body of knowledge.
Identifying Your Audience
Like any rhetorical piece, a global health blog must address an audience. An example of how to narrow a blog’s audience is by identifying people who are interested in a specific global health topic. This topic could be as general as non-communicable disease in a certain country, like India. In order to further narrow the audience, one could identify a particular disease like cardiovascular disease. In the university setting, another way to narrow the audience is to address a particular college or program, like the School of Public Health. Keeping an audience in mind helps the blogger identify useful keywords and back-links that will later be discussed.
Understanding Search Engines
RSS readers have emerged as an easy way to aggregate information from different places on the Internet. An RSS reader is defined as “a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format” (Libby). Still today the average person relies on search engines and social media sites like Twitter instead of RSS readers (Kennedy).
A search engine sorts through information according to a set of rules, an algorithm, and displays what it believes to be the most relevant search hits. In order to optimize the visibility of a student global health blog, it is therefore important to identify these basic rules behind how search engines determine the relevance of information.
There are two major types of search engines, crawler-based and human-powered. A crawler-based search engine, such as Google, is one that creates listings automatically and “crawl” the web, searching and listing results based on content (“Search Engine Optimization for WordpPess”). Human-powered search engines, like The Open Directory, rely on site descriptions submitted to editors of the directory, who then rely on these descriptions to generate search listings (“DMOZ: Open Directory Project”). They do not change with the content of the web site, so in order to optimize a blog’s visibility, it is more effective to focus on crawler-based search engines.
In crawler-based search engines, changes to page titles, body text, and other elements are detected by the search engine’s “spider.” The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes which affect the site’s rank in search listings. The spider records what it finds in the index, which contains a copy of every web page found. This index is updated with new information.
Search engine software then sifts through the pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes to be most relevant. Each search engine, Google, MSN, Yahoo, does this slightly differently, which is why search hits often differ among search engines. There are a few accepted factors, however, that affect the rank a search engine assigns to a site (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Clean Code and Internal Links
The basic correctness of the code is critical for the search engines to be able to find out which portions of your web page to index (Nallawalla). The major features of a WordPress blog, however, such as adding pages, tags, and categories, do not necessarily require code. Instructions on how to add features that require HTML are included in several tutorials offered through WordPress (“Writing Code in Your Posts”).
Furthermore a clean organization system within the blog is critical for the search engine to increase the blog’s ranking on a search hit list. Whenever embedding photographs, videos, or links to external sites, it is important to add textual content. When you write a post and add relevant tags, WordPress automatically adds them to a tag surfer, driving new traffic to your blog (“Conditional Tags”).
Navigational links such as categories, archives, and pages, also help the search engine “crawl” through the site, visiting the site’s entire content (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Keywords
In order to gather useful keywords for a global health topic, it is important to visit common global health web sites like The Global Health Council (“Global Health Council”). Words classifying the health issue you are examining or associated institutions are often effective keywords. Examples include “chronic disease, healthy living, Centre for Chronic Disease Control” can help search engines identify content.
Search engines will also check the location of the key words. They generally search near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. Most WordPress themes arrange content to accommodate this (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Frequency of keywords is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine analyzes how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page; the higher the frequency, the more relevant. It is important not to try any tricks, like repeating keywords hundreds of times on a page, because this is considered a spamming method that may be punished by bans from search engines.
Submitting to Search Engines
There are a few important criteria a global health blog must meet for best consideration to be accepted by search engines. There should be sufficient material, about 10 posts, on the site in order to give the search engine something to examine. It typically takes a week or so to get a URL added to a search engine. An XML site map is also necessary to provide an overview of the site. There are many free site map generators available online (“Sitemap Generator”). Once added, it is important to keep track of how you are included in search results, and add relevant keywords to improve your listing.
Spreading the Word
The most basic step to publicizing a blog is to increase the number of back-links, or incoming links to the site. Blogrolls, pingbacks and trackbacks are all built into WordPress and help the blog link to others.
A blogroll is a list of links to various blogs or news sites. Two WordPress features, Trackback and Pingback, help you to notify another author that you wrote something related to what he had written on his blog. In order to check the number of incoming links to your site that have been recognized by Google, simply type the blog’s URL into Google (“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress”).
Another way to increase incoming links is to ask web sites or blogs outside of WordPress to include your blog URL in a section of the web site. A few well-reputed student global health blogs are:
- The Lancet Student Blog
- The American Medical Students Association Global Pulse Blog
Universities also always have departmental web sites or blogs that may be related to your global health topic. At the University of Maryland, for example, the School of Public Health has a blog called The Healthy Turtle (“The Healthy Turtle”). This blog connects the students, faculty, alumni of the University of Maryland and is open to the general public.
If you receive a grant to support your global health project, the funder’s web site is another space to add a link. The Center for Undergraduate Research Maryland Summer Scholars Program and the Study Abroad Office both fund short-term research projects abroad and have supporting blogs. There are clearly many sites within a university network that are useful to back-link a blog.
Last, it is important to allow readers to spread the word about articles or content posted on your blog. In order to do this, there are plug-ins available to enable the audience to easily email a post to a friend; post it on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn; or add it to social news websites such as Digg, Reddit and Stumble Upon (Aarts).
A Dynamic Strategy
While I have mentioned a basic strategy to publicize a global health blog, this strategy can be applied to other subjects as well. Since search engines and online communities are continuing to change, however, it is critical to maintain a flexible strategy to communicate through your blog. In order to revise your strategy, there are several tools available. Google Analytics, a plug-in for WordPress blogs, shows you how people found your site, how they explored it, and how you can enhance their visitor experience. Below is a video demonstrating Google Analytics in WordPress. The Dashboard offers many useful statistics, including the number of page visits and average time on site, and visually represents the audience by showing viewership on a world map. In order to access Google Analytics, the blog’s URL must be registered to Google’s search engine.
Blogging for Global Health
Blogging can be a very effective mode to disseminate information, but it is important for the blog to be recognized in the Internet community. Furthermore, blogging is instrumental for the global health student to acquire the skills that will allow them to make a major impact in the field. A strategy informed by the identification of a target audience, an understanding of search engines, and a knowledge of networking with campus resources will strengthen the visibility of any student global health blog. There are more advanced strategies not mentioned in this post, but these can all be found in the WordPress tutorials. Moving forward, it will be interesting to see how search engines accommodate the increasing volume of content in the blogosphere. It will also be interesting to see how the increasing use of RSS feeds will influence strategies for search engine optimization.
Bibliography
AARTS, DEBORAH. “HOW TO BE HIGHLY CONTAGIOUS.” Profit 30.1 (2011): 41-42.Business Source Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic July 1945: 1-8. The Atlantic. The Atlantic. Web. 8 Mar. 2011.
“Conditional Tags.” WordPress. Web. 03 Mar 2011. <http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags>
“DMOZ: Open Directory Project.” The Open Directory Project. Web. 25 Feb 2011. <http://www.dmoz.org/docs/en/add.html>
“Global Health Council.” The Global Health Council. Web. 26 Feb 2011. <http://www.globalhealth.org/>
“Global Pulse Blog: Updates from AMSA’s Global Pulse Journal.” Global Pulse. Web. 07 Mar 2011. <http://www.globalpulsejournal.com/blog/>
Greenfield, Heather. “Information Wars.” National Journal 39.8 (2007): 48-49.Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
Kennedy, Dennis. “RSS, Not R.I.P.: Tool That Brings the News to You Is Still Useful.” ABA Journal 97.2 (2011): 19. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
Koplan, Jeffrey P; Bond, Christopher T; Merson, Michael H; Reddy, K. Srinath; Rodriguez, Mario Henry; Sweankambo, Nelson K.; and Judith N. Wasserhelt. “Towards a Common Definition of Global Health.” The Lancet 373 (2009): 1919. Web. 16 Mar 2011.
Libby, Dan. “RSS 0.91 Spec, revision 3.” 10 July 1999. Web. 10 Mar 2011. <http://web.archive.org/web/20001204093600/my.netscape.com/publish/formats/rss-spec-0.91.html>
NALLAWALLA, ASH. “Inside-Out SEO.” APC 31.2 (2011): 98-100. Computers & Applied Sciences Complete. EBSCO. Web. 12 Mar. 2011.
“Search Engine Optimization for WordPress.” WordPress. Web. 20 Feb 2011. <http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress>
“Sitemap Generator.” WordPress. Web. 05 Mar 2011. <http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/>
“The Healthy Turtle.” The Healthy Turtle- School of Public Health. Web. 08 Mar 2011. <http://sphumd.blogspot.com/>
“The Lancet Student.” The Lancet Student. Web. 06 Mar 2011. <http://www.thelancetstudent.com/>
“UM Newsdesk.” Newsdesk. Web. 08 Mar 2011. <http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/>
“Writing Code in Your Posts.” WordPress. Web. 20 Feb 2011.