EVALUATION OF SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - Experiments for a Business Site and a New Evaluation Measure

: This paper reports experiments on search engine optimization (SEO) for a business site. Several search terms have been optimized for three web search engines. From the business site, 300 pages have been selected for optimization. In three phases several onand off-page modifications have been carried out and the results have been monitored. The results show that search engines do react to modifications and that the target pages are ranked higher on average. The variance of the improvements is extremely large which means that there is no guarantee that SEO activities are beneficial for one single page. We suggest a new evaluation measure for the success of SEO which takes typical Web user behavior into account.