Websites and addresses

You can request a website for a degree programme, organisational unit, project or conference from the faculty’s web editorial team via webredactie@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

Employee pages

When new employees join, a profile page is created for them on the university website. Profile pages of employees with an academic function also show publications, a profile text and, possibly, related research, news, agenda, PhD students, etc.

Input for this can be provided by filling in an online form. Updating data on a profile page can be done using the same form.

• employee page form

The data is submitted to the web editors, who enter the data on the website.

Via LUCRIS, publications are shown on the personal employee page under the tab 'publications'. For questions about LUCRIS, please contact the LUCRIS helpdesk.

It is important that you, as a university researcher, can be found efficiently. The internet plays an increasingly important role in this. By profiling yourself well through your own page, questions from the media reach you more quickly, and getting in touch with other researchers is easier. When creating or updating your employee page, it therefore helps to keep the following in mind: 

Keywords

• Think carefully about 'keywords' on your profile: these are both the search terms through which you want to be found, and the search terms that connect your profile with relevant news, research, colleagues and events (and vice versa) that have been assigned the same keywords.

Profile text

• Work these areas of expertise into your text in a natural way.
• Mention at least the most relevant areas of expertise.
• Write for people and not search machines; improve it if you can, but not at the cost of everything else.

Link building

• Refer to your profile page on other websites and vice versa. Include relevant links in the text, then place them in the text in an organic way. References to and from social media are also appreciated.

1. Formulating keywords well

First of all, it is crucial to look closely at your profile’s keywords.

• Keywords are the hub of the website 
  Keywords are assigned on the site to employee profiles, news, events, books and research projects. On this basis, these pages are shown as 'related information' on pages that have the same keywords. The keywords are also clickable and, in this way, work as a search filter.
• Use clear, simple keywords.
  Example:
  NOT: 'Political Philosophy, esp. Distributive Justice';
  RATHER: 'Political Philosophy' 'Distributive Justice'
  NOT: 'Acquisition'
  RATHER: 'Language Acquisition'
  NOT: 'Historical linguistics and philology of the other Anatolian languages (Luwian, Lycian, Carian, etc.)'
  RATHER: 'Anatolian linguistics' 'philology' 'historical linguistics'
• Use approx. 6 keywords 
  To maintain a balance between general and specialist keywords, we recommend the following subdivision:
  - 2 keywords about your field in the broad sense
  - 3 keywords about your own research area
  - 1 keyword explicitly formulated for externally interested parties (such as journalists): what keyword will help them find you?
• The profile pages and keywords are generally in English. If your research can only be described using a Dutch keyword, it is also possible to use one.

2. Match profile text with keywords

In addition, it is important to also work the same keywords into the profile text itself. This can be done by mentioning the keywords again and linking them to a more in-depth explanation as to why you are specialised in this. This means that you not only have to look critically at the order of the areas of expertise, but you also have to consider which areas of expertise you want to state.

What helps in any case is to mention the most relevant area of expertise three times in the profile text: at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. Work this into the text in an organic way. It makes little sense to simply mention an area of expertise and then say nothing more about it. Optimisation of texts for search engines should never mean that a text is no longer primarily written for human readers.

Lastly, make sure that your profile text is at least 250 words long.

3. Link building

A final option is link building. This is relatively easy to apply, but not always possible. Google places greater value on pages if a link to a profile page can also be found on other websites. The more reputable the linking website, the better.

If you have your own website, it is useful to refer to this on your profile page. These can be interwoven in the text in an organic way. Do not write 'click here to go to my webpage', but 'on my webpage you can find more on relevant areas of expertise' (the italics in both cases indicate the link).