WWW/Internet - Portal do Software Público Brasileiro

IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010Table 3. Link popularity of the tested websites by GoogleFebruary/March AprilFSTS 40 41Deutschinstitut 56 66SALT Pro 1 -In the preliminary questionnaire the website operators were asked about their websites PageRank. It canbe regarded as common criteria for an overall improvement of a particular page, and has to be considered asone factor which is widely accepted. Gaining on 1 unit of 10 available can be regarded as a positive trend.The differences after optimization were:FSTS: from 5 to 6Deutschinstitut: from 5 to 5SALT Pro: stayed at 36. CONCLUSIONThe results of the research indicated that there is a great potential of facilitating search engine optimizationsof website by non-IT professionals. Working together with 3 selected enterprises shed some light on theproblems which exist. In a perfect world a website owner or manager would search the Internet for allavailable information about SEO, and tell their web master to implement it. But we live in a world whereonly a very small fraction of website operators know what SEO stands for, and how it is implemented in theweb design and editing process. It should be the duty of every IT professional involved in web design andprogramming to educate the sponsors. But even the professionals often ‘forget’ the most important part of thedesign, making the website visible for search engines and users. This responsibly is left to the enterpriserunning the website. How to address all of them is a question which can not be easily answered.In the beginning of the project it was important to motivate the website owners, and not to give tasks thatwould overwhelm the persons involved in the process. The preliminary questionnaire had questions that weredifficult to answer. It was too early to ask the participants to find out the SERP of a certain keywordcombination. Making the introduction to SEO as easy as possible would increase the quality of the feedback,and facilitate the access for the participants. The use of website analyzing programs like Web CEO gives thetester a variety of testing and benchmarking options. For the average website owner installing andconfiguring such a tool seemed difficult. To further test and benchmark websites, the use of online toolswithout sophisticated configuration would be preferable.The time available for implementing the recommend procedures was very short. To be able to quantify adistinct improvement in website performance it would be necessary to monitor the website performancebeyond the scheduled period allowed by this research. In the results section above, while there were gains insome areas, others lost ground. Thus, overall performance of the tested websites did not significantly change.The positive aspects of the project were that the basic SEO procedures were very well implemented, and thewebsite operators indicated that they will continue the application of the model. This in itself is a positiveresult.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTThis research project was undertaken as part of a Master of Science degree with University of Liverpool andLaureate Online Education.199