Website Usability Evaluation and Search Engine Optimization for Eighty Arab University Websites

Usability and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are important issues studied by many researchers. In this paper we evaluated automatically eighty Websites for universities in the Arabic region. The major goal for this study and evaluation is to discover whether there is a relevancy between usability and search engine optimization. According to usability evaluation criteria, three internal attributes are selected: HTML errors checking, load time, and browser compatibility problems. Three tools (HTML ToolBox, PageRank Checker, and SEO PageRank) were used to conduct the evaluation. Results showed that those three Website internal attributes do not usually correlate well with each other, since some universities ranked at the top according to one of these attributes, and ranked at the bottom according to the others. Many techniques are used to improve SEO. While usability is very important to Websites in many aspects, however, it does not necessary improve SEO. Finally a set of recommendations are presented to increase the usability for Websites while at the same time taking SEO PageRank into consideration.