Correlation between Content and Traffic of the Universities Website

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to analyse the correlation between content and traffic of 21,485 academic websites (universities and research institutes). The achieved result is used as an indicator which shows the performance of the websites for attracting more visitors. This inspires a best practice for developing new websites or promoting the traffic of the existing websites. At the first step, content of the site is divided into three major items which are: Size, Papers and Rich Files. Then, the Spearman correlation between traffic of the websites and these items are calculated for each country and for the world, respectively. At the next step, countries are ranked based on their correlations, also a new indicator is proposed from combining these three correlations of the countries. Results show that in most countries, correlation between traffic of the websites and Papers is less than correlations between traffic of the websites and Rich Files and Size.