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Website Visibility: The theory and practice of improving rankings

Melius Weideman, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa

 - written by a well-respected academic and practitioner in the field of search engines
 - provides practical and real-world guidance for real-world situations
 - based on actual research in the field, which is often used to confirm or refute beliefs in the industry
 - not highly technical and assumes no in-depth programming background

The quest to achieve high website rankings in search engine results is a prominent subject for both academics and website owners/coders. Website Visibility marries academic research results to the world of the information practitioner and contains a focused look at the elements which contribute to website visibility, providing support for the application of each element with relevant research. A series of real-world case studies with tested examples of research on website visibility elements and their effect on rankings are reviewed.

ISBN 1 84334 473 4
ISBN-13: 978 1 84334 473 5
September 2009
244 pages  234 x 156mm  paperback  
£49.50 / US$85.00 / €60.00

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About the author

Professor Weideman is Head of Research Development at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in Cape Town. During the past two and a half decades he has lectured, researched and published extensively, both locally and internationally, in a variety of fields. These include website visibility, search engines, information retrieval, computer viruses and other technological areas. He has also consulted to the City of Cape Town and a number of companies from industry on website strategy, visibility and other issues. He is a member of: the CSSA, SAICSIT, IRMA, IADIS and ISI.

Titles which may also be of interest:
Google and the Digital Divide
Understanding the Internet
Effective Information Retrieval from the Internet
A Librarian's Guide to the Internet
News Search, Blogs and Feeds

Contents

The trilogy: users, webpages and search engines
 - Introduction
 - Relationships
 - Users
 - Webpages
 - Search engines
 - Conclusion – recommendations on the use of SEO

Elements of website visibility and research
 - Models
 - Model result comparison

The good ones
 - Introduction
 - Inlinks
 - Body keywords
 - Hypertext/anchor text
 - Metatags
 - TITLE tag
 - H1 tag
 - Outlinks
 - Age of site
 - Domain names
 - Search engine submission
 - Age of document
 - HTML naming conventions
 - Age of link
 - Other categories

The bad ones
 - Link spamdexing
 - Keyword spamdexing
 - Server accessibility to bots
 - Similar/duplicate content
 - Flash
 - External links to low-quality/spamdexing sites
 - Frames
 - Duplicate title/metatags
 - Graphics
 - Others
 - A word from the search engines

The ugly ones
 - A fight – or a partnership?
 - The hats
 - Search engine policies and penalties
 - From bad to ugly: the top two

Case studies
 - Introduction
 - SA-Cycling
 - Louw & Coetzee
 - Grapetek – Uvasys
 - XiCrypt
 - Conclusion

Recommendations and the future
 - Recommendations
 - Management vs the technical guys
 - Search engine developments
 - Future trends