# Academic Excellence, Website Quality, SEO Performance: Is there a Correlation?
## 4 Results  
Table 8 depicts our data formation. The first column shows the top ten universities according to their ranking on a 100-degree scale, the second column presents institution ranking according to ARWU. Columns 3, 4, and 5 show the corresponding ratings of our measurements on a 100-degree scale, website quality rating, SEO performance rating, and overall web rating. Columns 6, 7, and 8 show the corresponding rankings namely website quality ranking (WQR), SEO performance ranking (SEOPR) and overall web ranking (OWR). The whole table with 100 universities can be found in the dataset provided in Supplementary Materials. To analyze the interrelation between ARWU rankings and our WQR, SEOPR, and OWR, Spearman rho coefficients have been applied due to the ordinal scale of data [65]. The results are shown in Table 9 where there appears to be a correlation between Shanghai's ranking and WQR (0.355) and OWR (0.32), which leads us to reject the null hypothesis (that there might be no correlation between ARWU and our rankings). The significance level is 0.000 and 0.001 respectively confirming the statistically significant correlation. However, there is no correlation between ARWU and SEOPR, which leads us to conclude that the SEO may not be particularly taken into account by major academic institutions. Further analysis may verify the first results of the survey. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Institution** & \begin{tabular}{c} **ARWU** \\ **Rating** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **ARWU** \\ **Ranking** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Website Quality** \\ **Rating** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **SEO Performance** \\ **Rating** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **Overall Web** \\ **Rating** \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} **WQR** \\ **Rating** \\ \end{tabular} & \
\begin{tabular}{c} **SEOPR** \\ \end{tabular} &
\begin{tabular}{c} **OWR** \\ **Rating** \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline Harvard U. & 100.00 & 1 & 80.67 & 88.46 & 84.56 & 21 & 14 & 10 \\ Stanford U. & 75.10 & 2 & 78.92 & 87.71 & 83.32 & 35 & 18 & 17 \\ U. Cambridge & 72.30 & 3 & 79.51 & 86.49 & 83.00 & 30 & 26 & 20 \\ MIT & 69.00 & 4 & 79.39 & 81.96 & 80.67 & 31 & 63 & 36 \\ UC Berkeley & 67.90 & 5 & 80.23 & 83.17 & 81.70 & 24 & 57 & 34 \\ Princeton U. & 60.00 & 6 & 79.59 & 84.05 & 81.82 & 28 & 45 & 32 \\ U. Oxford & 59.70 & 7 & 80.53 & 84.79 & 82.66 & 23 & 36 & 21 \\ Columbia U. & 59.10 & 8 & 68.12 & 80.24 & 74.18 & 71 & 75 & 72 \\ California Tech & 58.60 & 9 & 48.26 & 79.40 & 63.83 & 97 & 78 & 95 \\ U. Chicago & 55.10 & 10 & 79.18 & 89.38 & 84.28 & 33 & 8 & 13 \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 8: Data formation. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \hline  & **WQR** & **SEOPR** & **OWR** \\ \hline
**Shanghai Ranking** & \begin{tabular}{c} Rho (100) = 0.35 (Sig. 2 \\ sided 0.000) \\ \end{tabular} & \begin{tabular}{c} Rho (100) = 0.35 (Sig. 2 \\ sided 0.000) \\ \end{tabular} & \
\begin{tabular}{c} Rho (100) = 0.32 (Sig. \\ 2-sided 0.333) \\ \end{tabular} &
\begin{tabular}{c} Rho (100) = 0.32 (Sig. \\ 2-sided 0.001) \\ \end{tabular} \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 9: Spearman correlation coefficient between the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU)’s 100 highest universities ranking and our website quality ranking (WQR), SEO performance ranking (SEOPR), and overall web ranking (OWR). The 100-degree scale on both the ARWU ratings and our ratings allows us to go a step further in the statistical criterion of regression analysis in order to measure to what extend there is a correlation between our variables [66; 67]. Since there is no correlation between ARWU and SEOPR, and variable OWR is derived from the mean of WQR and SEOPR, there is no reason to use multiple regression analysis but simple regression between ARWU rating and website quality rating. In our case the independent variable is ARWU rating and the dependent variable is website quality rating.