# Academic Excellence, Website Quality, SEO Performance: Is there a Correlation?
## 3 Methodology
### Consolidating Website Structure Ratings
#### Evaluation of Website Accessibility  
The accessibility of each university's website was evaluated based on the following aspects:  
* WCAG 2.0 compatibility problems as indicated by aChecker;
* WCAG 2.0 compatibility problems as indicated by the WAVE accessibility tool; and
* Google Lighthouse accessibility audit. Evaluation of a Website's WCAG 2.0 Compatibility  
Accessibility is an issue of extreme importance in all aspects of human activity and the World Wide Web is no exception [41]. It is a website's primary objective to be inclusive of the maximum number of individuals and that is especially true for websites of academic nature. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) \"are developed through the W3C process in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world, with a goal of providing a single shared standard for web content accessibility that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally\" [42]. A website's adherence to these guidelines is a good indicator of the care given to make the website accessible and usable. Because the nature of these guidelines is not as strict or well-defined as the syntax of HTML or CSS, in order to get a more accurate measurement, two distinct WCAG validators were used. The first was aChecker [43], \"a Web accessibility evaluation tool designed to help Web content developers and Web application developers ensure their Web content is accessible to everyone regardless of the technology they may be using, or their abilities or disabilities\" [43]. The second was WAVE [44], a tool provided by WebAim, \"an organization dedicated to bringing more accessibility to the Web\" [45]. Both of these tools are mentioned and linked in W3C's official Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List [46]. For the purpose of the test, the frontpage of every university's website was processed through both tools and four individual metrics were established. One metric for aChecker's known problems, one for aChecker's potential problems, one for WAVE's Errors and one for WAVE's alerts. In a manner equivalent to our process during the website structure evaluation one point was subtracted for every aChecker known problem, WAVE error or WAVE alert from a 100-degree scale and one for every ten aChecker potential problems. The reason potential problems are measured by tens is because they were much more numerous on average. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**Metric** & **Weight** \\ \hline HTML errors & 22 \\ HTML warnings & 5.5 \\ CSS errors & 22 \\ CSS warnings & 5.5 \\ Mobile friendliness & 27 \\ Lighthouse best practices & 18 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 2: Weights for the calculation of the website structure evaluation metric. Evaluation of a Website's Accessibility with Google Lighthouse  
Google's Lighthouse was used to get a complimentary Accessibility metric. Lighthouse measures multiple accessibility aspects and returns a weighted average in a 100-degree scale. The tests run to determine accessibility check for the following: \"Buttons Have An Accessible Name, Document Doesn't Have A Title Element, Every Form Element Has A Label, Every Image Has An alt Attribute, No Element Has A tabindex Attribute Greater Than 0\" [39]. Consolidating Website Accessibility Ratings  
The different aspects that were discussed above were consolidated in a single Website Accessibility Evaluation metric. This single metric was calculated as a weighted average of all individual metrics. aChecker known problems and WAVE errors were deemed more important than potential problems and Alerts so they received a higher weight. Potential problems and alerts received a lower weight. This is also in accordance with the rate of appearance of each, similarly to the HTML/CSS errors and warnings that were measured in the structure section. The Google Lighthouse accessibility audit's rating was given an overall lower weight than the major metrics since its scope is limited and tends to provide a more generalized estimate of accessibility.