Academic Excellence, Website Quality, SEO Performance: Is there a Correlation?

Andreas Giannakoulopoulos, Nikos Konstantinou, Dimitris Koutsompolis, Minas Pergantis and Iraklis Varlamis
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Andreas Giannakoulopoulos: Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University, 7 Tsirigoti Square, 49100 Corfu, Greece
Nikos Konstantinou: Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University, 7 Tsirigoti Square, 49100 Corfu, Greece
Dimitris Koutsompolis: Faculty of Communication and Media Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 5 Stadiou Str., 10562 Athens, Greece
Minas Pergantis: Laboratory of Interactive Arts, Ionian University, 7 Tsirigoti Square, 49100 Corfu, Greece
Iraklis Varlamis: Department of Informatics and Telematics, Harokopio University of Athens, 70 Eleftheriou Venizelou Str., 17676 Athens, Greece

Future Internet, 2019, vol. 11, issue 11, 1-25

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.

Keywords: website quality; search engine optimization; web presence; academic rankings; accessibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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