UKOLN
Raising Awareness

"The IWMW event provides an opportunity for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services to hear about institutional case studies, national initiatives and emerging technologies and to actively participate in a number of parallel sessions."

IWMW 2011 is the fifteenth workshop.
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Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011:
Responding to Change

Talks P5: UK University Website Visibility - responding to the quirks of the crawler

Title:
P5: UK University Website Visibility - responding to the quirks of the crawler
Session Tag:
#P5
Time:
Wednesday 27th July 2011 09:00-09:45
Speaker:
Melius Weideman, Cape Peninsula University of Technology (CPUT).
Abstract:

Universities in general are large organizations, sometimes slow to respond to changing needs. The current student generation require instant answers, and might base their decision of further studies on Internet search results.

It is generally accepted that mission-critical and other large websites need to be found by search engine crawlers to ensure that users can get to them. Much information is published on numerous fora, on the Internet and elsewhere, about attaining a high degree of website visibility. However, very little of this is based on research.

In this keynote, empirical research results will be used to highlight the important website visibility issues. A comparative study on some UK university websites will indicate where improvements can be made to increase their visibility to crawlers.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of the session, participants will be able to:

  • Identify and rank both positive and negative website visibility elements.
  • Carry out a brief evaluation of a university website's visibility.
  • Suggest improvements to a website in terms of increasing its visibility.

Materials

Slides
[MS PowerPoint format] - [PDF format]
Recording of Talk
[In Adobe Connect]

Unfortunately there were some technical difficulties at the start of this talk so the first 10 minutes are missing. We hope to offer the full video footage soon.

IWMW Plenary P5: Melius Weideman from UKOLN on Vimeo.

View this video on Vimeo.

Note that additional information about this talk is available on the IWMW 2011 Lanyrd page.