Title
Academic Excellence, Website Quality, SEO Performance: Is there a Correlation?
Abstract
The academic excellence of universities around the globe has always been a matter of extended study and so has the quality of an institution's presence in the World Wide Web. The purpose of this research is to study the extent to which a university's academic excellence is related to the quality of its web presence. In order to achieve this, a method was devised that quantified the website quality and search engine optimization (SEO) performance of the university websites of the top 100 universities in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) Shanghai list. A variety of tools was employed to measure and test each website and produced a Web quality ranking, an SEO performance ranking, as well as a combined overall web ranking for each one. Comparing these rankings with the ARWU shows that academic excellence is moderately correlated with website quality, but SEO performance is not. Moreover, the overall web ranking also shows a moderate correlation with ARWU which seems to be positively influenced by website quality and negatively by SEO performance. Conclusively, the results of the research indicate that universities place particular emphasis on issues concerning website quality, while the utilization of SEO does not appear to be of equal importance, indicating possible room for improvement in this area.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.3390/fi11110242
FUTURE INTERNET
Keywords
Field
DocType
website quality,search engine optimization,web presence,academic rankings,accessibility
Globe,Web presence,Web quality,Ranking,Computer science,Search engine optimization,Knowledge management,Web ranking,Website quality,Excellence
Journal
Volume
Issue
Citations 
11
11
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5