Purpose -The purpose of this research project was to determine how the three biggest search engines interpret keyword stuffing as a negative design element. Design/methodology/approach -This research was based on triangulation between scholar reporting, search engine claims, SEO practitioners and empirical evidence on the interpretation of keyword stuffing. Five websites with varying keyword densities were designed and submitted to Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Two phases of the experiment were done and the response of the search engines was recorded. Findings -Scholars have indicated different views in respect of spamdexing, characterised by different keyword density measurements in the body text of a webpage. During both phases, almost all the test webpages, including the one with a 97.3 per cent keyword density, were indexed. Research limitations/implications -Only the three biggest search engines were considered, and monitoring was done for a set time only. The claims that high keyword densities will lead to blacklisting have been refuted.Originality/value -Websites should be designed with high quality, well-written content. Even though keyword stuffing is unlikely to lead to search engine penalties, it could deter human visitors and reduce website value.
The primary objective of this research project was to identify and investigate the website usability attributes which are in contradiction with search engine optimisation elements. The secondary objective was to determine if these usability attributes affect conversion. Although the literature review identifies the contradictions, experts disagree about their existence.An experiment was conducted, whereby the conversion and/or traffic ratio results of an existing control website were compared to a usability-designed version of the control website,namely the experimental website. All optimisation elements were ignored, thus implementing only usability. The results clearly show that inclusion of the usability attributes positively affect conversion,indicating that usability is a prerequisite for effective website design. Search engine optimisation is also a prerequisite for the very reason that if a website does not rank on the first page of the search engine result page for a given keyword, then that website might as well not exist. According to this empirical work, usability is in contradiction to search engine optimisation best practices. Therefore the two need to be weighed up in terms of importance towards search engines and visitors
Background: It is imperative that commercial websites should rank highly in search engine result pages because these provide the main entry point to paying customers. There are two main methods to achieve high rankings: search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) systems. Both require a financial investment – SEO mainly at the beginning, and PPC spread over time in regular amounts. If marketing budgets are applied in the wrong area, this could lead to losses and possibly financial ruin.Objectives: The objective of this research was to investigate, using three real-world case studies, the actual expenditure on and income from both SEO and PPC systems. These figures were then compared, and specifically, the cost per acquisition (CPA) was used to decide which system yielded the best results.Methodology: Three diverse websites were chosen, and analytics data for all three were compared over a 3-month period. Calculations were performed to reduce the figures to single ratios, to make comparisons between them possible.Results: Some of the resultant ratios varied widely between websites. However, the CPA was shown to be on average 52.1 times lower for SEO than for PPC systems.Conclusion: It was concluded that SEO should be the marketing system of preference for e-commerce-based websites. However, there are cases where PPC would yield better results – when instant traffic is required, and when a large initial expenditure is not possible.
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