Museum and cultural sites would all benefit from this heightened esteem effect from Google. It’s one thing to benefit from vast amounts of unique content that fits into a niche or two, but at the same time, to appeal to a wider audience, the mainstream content that competes heavily with other sites and retail sites should be well optimized for sure.

I like your point about getting outsiders in for a fresh perspective. I suppose this is why the IT and marketing dept are sent to respective conferences, but as you say its one thing to pay lip service, it is another thing to do.

To my mind, collections need to be inviting and portrayed in a mouth watering way and many sites I have seen just don’t do that =(

Best, Vincent =

Yes, the general point about where the expertise lies is one which I’ve come across as an issue on many, many occasions. Curatorial staff are often wonderful people but they often badly need help when it comes to imagining and realising a web presence which is going to be strong from an SEO and visitor perspective while also delivering what they want to deliver. Often, also, curators are ideas people – and ideas people (I know, I’m one..) are quite often the most pig-headed about letting their ideas out into the wild.

Interesting point about .edu sites – wasn’t aware that that was the case: have you got any sources for this, would be interested to follow up.

An interesting post and one that has many strands to it, and too many for me to reply to now having read both the post and subsequent replies.

It’s an very valid point you make. The problem is that as you suggest curators are just that and the process of building a web site really requires many minds and real experts.

From a purely SEO perspective, as you suggest the search doesn’t start with a users arrival at the web site, it begins with Google etc. This reflects my and others’ opinion that every page is your home page.

In addition, museums sit in a very enviable position. They are respected by sources such as Google, by virtue of their being a seat of learning. The most highly ranked sites in the Google index are .edu sites. Moreover, they will because of wider interest in their activities produce a tone of backlinks, which again improves their ranking.

This doesn’t mean life is easy for them, but if they take full advantage of the fact, the benefits can be hugely successful.

That being said, as you suggest there are any facets to the sites, from people looking for basic info to those looking for content within the collection, but at the same time within the site you also need to sell the content in to the casual visitors and cross-sell.

Strong pre-planning and understanding how your site, aspects of the site and external sources sit within your overall internet strategy is important and will help define what you do and how you execute the design and delivery of your museum’s web site and wider WWW presence.

This is an interesting discussion in light of my and others’ reviews of the new Whitney.org web site. A real lost opportunity in my view.

- er, that was kind of the point of the post…

Why was your link of his name not to a museum resource?

No. I think I’ll Google it.

Really? Like your link, I’d just go to wikipedia. Why bother searching when you know you can almost certainly get what you want there?

Individual records usually benefit from the usual SEO tricks – field, big text with description high up the page, etc. From what I remember, the new beta V&A collections online do this quite well.

The point about stakeholder desires is always a painful (but horribly true) one. It is indeed often true that what is best for exposing access to a collection (say spending budget on widespread population of Wikipedia) isn’t always the same as the “perception” of success (a spangly, beautiful new website with a sponsor logo on it). In fact, I’ve got another post in the wings all about what and how museums measure project success. But that is for another day..