The most neglected part of a paper, which most of the time you make in a jiffy is the abstract but you got to believe that the abstract is the backbone of the paper and it is something that is going to attract your audience towards reading your paper. When you are creating your abstract, you must ensure that it gets reflected for the right kind of audience on search engines. Few things to keep in mind:
Include relevant keywords: When you have to choose keywords, try that they should match up with procedures and techniques, outcomes, titles of books and articles and sometimes even important definitions. See that you select your keywords from these areas
Have a complete and descriptive title: when you talk of search engines, the title is the most interesting element. This so because the search engines work on this assumption that the title is all complete and includes all the important words that define the topic. Hence, it becomes very crucial that authors create the title very carefully. You may take help from other papers from your genre of study. Gradually you will pick up the knack to distinguish one title from another.
Repeat the keywords in the abstract: When you sit down to write the text of your abstract make sure that you repeat those keywords that you have used in the title in the abstract also. It really helps to use the key phrases repeatedly in the abstract for this is the pattern usually on which search engines function to rank the sites.
Apart from this, when you are writing your abstract, you must remember these few points that are linked to the perspective to the reader or who is searching online.
- When people search on any of the search engines, they search for specifics and not just single word searches
- The title must imperatively have the important words that can be identified with the topic
- The key phrases must make sense and should flow well with the abstract
- Don’t try to have many keywords in an abstract. That would create a crowd. Try to focus on maximum 4 keywords that you can emphasise upon in the abstract
- Recheck the abstract for grammar, language, flow and the perspective of another researcher who would be the prospective reader.