Every year in early February the Florida Program for Shark Research releases its worldwide shark attack summary for the previous year. This is always a major media event and of course we wanted them to put their best foot forward this year!

The Fishes site is the largest at the museum, encompassing the fish collection proper, the Florida Program for Shark Research, the International Shark Attack File and the International Sawfish Encounter Database. In the current system they are all together under one Fishes “site” and due to the shear number of pages (450+) it can be tough to navigate such a deep site. As a result, we’ve decided to split up these four major sections – still heavily interlinking with each other, of course – so that visitors have an easier time navigating through all of our fishy information. The ISAF site was launched now, with the others to come soon.

The FPSR staff has also been concerned about other competitor sites popping up above them in Google search results. One of the major factors in how high your site is in those results is how many other sites are linked TO you –  the idea being that better sites will have more people “voting” for them by linking to them – which is something you hope for but can’t control directly. Another factor that you can control is the types of keywords used on both the page’s content and in the URLs for the site. Google won’t show you sites about sharks if you search for the word “apple”….and so to increase their findability our sites need to use words that people will actually type into that search box. The last site was very much branded as ISAF, down to the URL.  However, the casual reader looking for shark attack information is not going to type “ISAF” into Google; they’re going to type “shark attack.” Therefore the URL for the new site has been changed to something using words that regular people would search for and that will hopefully help get us back up on top of the results. Going through the page content and making sure “visitor-friendly” terms are used on our pages will help as well.

Old URL: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/fish/isaf/home/

New URL: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/