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.
Highlights
The present research investigates the relevance of universities’ performance in international rankings based on academic criteria and their ranking according to the quality of their online presence, their ability to properly promote their content in search engines and in combination, their overall web presence
The first column shows the top ten universities according to their ranking on a 100-degree scale, the second column presents institution ranking according to Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)
The present study documented the most important international academic university rankings and selected the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU— known as Shanghai list) as a base of reference, since it has been proven quite reliable for many years and consists of fully measurable and verifiable ratings
Summary
The idea of a university ranking was not introduced in 2003 with the celebrated Shanghai list or with the TIMES ranking in 2004 [1] It can be traced as far back as 1900, when there were studies concerning the most successful men in England, linking their professional and broader social achievements with their studies and the universities they had attended. In essence, this was an attempt to correlate the academic quality of universities with indicators less academic and more applicable to everyday life.
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