Use visualization to improve your website

Any person seriously involved in analyzing the current position of his or her project cannot neglect to take a proper look at the own project's and the competition's standing in different search engines (we provide special services in regard to monitoring search engine performance, with more info at our page about optimization).

Quite often, the problem with properly analyzing your (and your competition's) projects is, that the analysis takes loads of time, energy, (quite often) money and some profound knowledge of how to interpret comprehensive statistical information -- at least if you expect to be able to draw really meaningful conclusions.

Therefore, different approaches to visualize statistics have been developed for many years. All of you who are familiar with Facebook (and most readers probably are) might also be familiar with applications such as the "Friend wheel", which draws a diagram of all your friends, complete with lines connecting those friends' relationships to each other.

If you want to get more serious about visualization, you could enter the world of TouchGraph, a company and Java-based software, specializing on data visualization. One of their free services is an application, similar to the aformentioned "Friend wheel", called FacebookBrowser on their website. This FacebookBrowser not only displays all of your friends (the screenshot displays my network of friends), but additional shows their "importance" within your network (based on friends' count) and groups them visually into friends' groups, entirely based on their respective relationships to each other. (As you can see in the screenshot, my networks are pretty isolated on not too much interconnected, which partially is due to my network being multinational).

Having this easy-to-relate-to Facebook-example in mind, we can head over to another of their free services, the Google Browser, which reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites. If you head over to the Google Browser, you can simply input any URL (or search term, for that part) and have your own dynamic network being calculated.

What's in it for me, except for some eye-candy, you might ask. -- The interesting part is, that you can easily visually compare two (or more) different websites and find their strengths and weaknesses (according to Google, that is).

Let us take a look at the graphs generated for one of our customers (StuFF, with more than 8.000 members the largest student union at Linköping university), to the left, when compared to another "competing" student union, to the right:

What are the visual differences between the left graph (our customer) and the right graph (the bad, bad, filthy competition ;-) )?

1. The left graph shows a more dense "central" part, while the right graph indicates that some of the related sites are real satellites, not really connected to the main site. -- This implies that the organization to the left (our customer) has used more proactive strategies to get important links from relevant sites.
2. In the left graph (our customer), there are more "big circles", indicating that our customer succeeded in creating meaningful link- and content-relationships with more important (according to Google) websites.
3. The total number of grey lines, connecting the different websites, is significantly higher in the left graph, indicating that sites that do correlate to our customer even actively connect with other related sites on the Internet.

When taking a closer look at the different graphs (either in the still images presented in this article or the more useful dynamic display in the Google Browser), it becomes rather easy to identify important websites that should be approached in order to arrange for partnerships and cooperation.

My recommendation for today: brew yourself a good cup of Java, head over to the Google Browser (even that one is in Java) and take a look at your organization's (and your competition's) website(s). Do not only look at the websites' URL but even at important search words and search terms, related to your website.

I can almost guarantee that you will find extremely useful information.

Any questions when looking at your Google Browser? -- Just write a comment and let us start the discussion.