SEO for libraries
Get yourself indexable online: do proper OCR, extract from PDF and have descriptive metas for books.
The problem
Libraries hold collections nobody can find. The catalogue is behind a search box that no crawler can enter, the digitized archive is served as image tiles with no text, and the opening hours are a graphic. Meanwhile a commercial aggregator has indexed a worse copy of the same material and takes the traffic that should have proved the library’s public value.
The catalogue is the crawl problem
A discovery layer that only renders results after a form submission is invisible. Exposing stable, crawlable records for holdings — even a subset, even the most-requested ones — changes the entire visibility picture.
Digitized collections need text
Scanned material without a transcript or reliable OCR output is an image to a search engine. The scholarship value is high and the discoverability is zero.
- Stable, indexable pages for holdings and special collections
- Transcripts or OCR text alongside digitized images
- Opening hours, branches and services as structured local data
- Event and exhibition listings that outlive the event
Local search still matters
For a public library, the most-searched thing is still whether it is open right now and where to park. Fixing that is unglamorous and it is usually the largest single traffic gain available.