10 Tips to Enhance Your Web Presence as Scientist (Trainee)

In this week's professional development workshop with the Frohlich Lab, we spoke about the importance of a professional online presence as graduate student / postdoc / faculty. I pitched the idea that marketing matters (also in science!) and that a robust online presence is a potential career catalyst. Here are my ten essential tips how to build an online presence. Here, we focus on the creation of a website, we will discuss social media in a later post.

1. If you can, get your own URL (around $10 per year). I like the .org extension since .com signals a commercial intent. If you are lucky enough to have an unusual first-last-name combo, I recommend you use that.
2. Have a portrait picture on the main (home) page to make it personal and start building a connection with your audience from the moment they land on your site.
3. Include a research statement, a short bio, and list your publications (ideally with links to download them).
4. Connect your website to your other online platforms (Twitter etc).
5. Use the powerful and free tools provided by google to market and track the success of your website. Use google web tools to register your site and use google analytics to track the sources of the traffic to your site.
6. Add a blog if you have the time and interest to share your thoughts.
7. Make sure to fill in the form fields for "search engine optimization (SEO)", the keywords and summary your provide are used by the search engines which results in better results for when people search the web for your site.
8. Make sure that (1) you have links that point to your site (for example from the lab's website), (2) there are links that connect the different pages of your website, (3) you have outgoing links to relevant pages.
9. Regularly update your page, there is nothing less helpful than an outdated page on which the "latest paper" is few years old.
10. Think carefully about what you want to share about yourself and what you would like to keep private. 

I hope these tips help you to create and optimize your "personal profession" web site/presence. Please drop a link to your site below in case you would like to showcase your site or ask for feedback. I am more than happy to help. You cannot underestimate how important such a website is when you are looking for a job such as a postdoc position. Good luck and enjoy!

Take care,

Flavio