298 Int. J. Services, Economics and Management, Vol. 4, No.

4, 2012

A study of impact of search engine optimisation to

internet marketing strategy

Achmad Nizar Hidayanto*,

Moch. Sidhki Adha,
Meganingrum Arista Jiwanggi
and Tisha Melia
Faculty of Computer Science,
Universitas Indonesia,
Kampus UI, Depok, West Java, 16424, Indonesia
E-mail: nizar@cs.ui.ac.id
E-mail: sidhki@gmail.com
E-mail: meganingrum.arista@gmail.com
E-mail: tisha@cs.ui.ac.id
*Corresponding author

Abstract: This research aims to explore free search engine optimisation (SEO)
and social media plug-ins and compare their performance in increasing
incoming web traffics. We create three publisher websites: the normal website
without any SEO installed on it, the customised website with basic SEO
configuration and social media plug-in, and the customised website with
advanced SEO configuration and social media plug-in. We run and trace the
website log for four and seven months. Our findings show that SEO plug-ins is
capable to increase traffic to publisher website. Social media plug-in provides
additional benefit to bring traffic, however, the traffic is less significant
compared to the one from search engine. These findings have implications to
the following:

1 the organisations need to pay attention on the way they organise

information in their website
2 the introduction of search ability aspect for measuring service quality for
web application.

Keywords: search engine optimisation; SEO; search engine marketing; SEM;

social networks; Google tools; internet marketing; service quality; service
management.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Hidayanto, A.N.,

Adha, M.S., Jiwanggi, M.A. and Melia, T. (2012) ‘A study of impact of search
engine optimisation to internet marketing strategy’, Int. J. Services, Economics
and Management, Vol. 4, No. 4, pp.298–316.

Biographical notes: Achmad Nizar Hidayanto is the Head of Information

Systems/Information Technology Department, Faculty of Computer Science,
Universitas Indonesia. He received his PhD in Computer Science from
Universitas Indonesia. His research interests are related to information systems,
information technology, e-learning, information systems security, change
management, distributed systems and information retrieval.

Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 299

Moch. Sidhki Adha obtained his Master degree in Information Technology

from Universitas Indonesia. Currently, he is working at a leading private
company. His research interests are related to search engine marketing,
information systems and information technology.

Meganingrum Arista Jiwanggi is an undergraduate student in Faculty of

Computer Science Universitas Indonesia majoring at Computer Science. She
has made some publications during her study. Her research interests are related
to information systems, data mining and information retrieval.

Tisha Melia obtained her Master degree from TU Delft. Currently, she is
working as a Lecturer at Faculty of Computer Science Universitas Indonesia.
Her research interests are related to computational intelligence and
bioinformatics.

This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Utilisation of

Google tools and social network websites to improve performance of search
engine marketing (SEM)’ presented at the Second International Research
Symposium in Service Management (IRSSM-2), Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 26–30
July 2011.

1 Introduction

The much advancement in the field of information technology has revolutionised how
human conduct their daily activities. A prime example is how information technology
plays a vital role in the banking system. The infiltrating technology has allowed us to
transfer funds between accounts, to withdraw, and to deposit funds via ATM. Other usage
of incorporating information technology is to increase efficiency in the area of
manufacturing, healthcare, government, etc.
One of the marvellous inventions in the area of technology is the internet. Internet
dissolves any space and time restriction in accessing a piece of information. Furthermore,
internet has provided a platform for various applications such as social networking,
search engine, video streaming, and so on. Statistics gathered by internetworldstats.com
(2009) in Votta (2010) show that the growth of the internet user is 338.1% from the year
of 2000 to 2008.
Owning a website that describes its products has become a necessity for companies,
which led to the development of e-commerce. Internet is seen as a platform that allows
flexibility in access and possibility in the enlargement of the consumer base compared to
the conventional commerce. Thus, the sellers must define their e-commerce marketing
strategies as marketing through the internet which is one promising option.
Internet marketing has evolved into two types; either business-to-business (B2B) or
business-to-consumer (B2C). Examples of existing internet marketing strategies are pay
per click (PPC), search engine optimisation (SEO), e-mail promotion, banner advertising,
landing pages, link building, social networking, etc. (Votta, 2010). SEO, among those
existing strategies, is dubbed to be the most popular internet marketing strategy (Machill
et al., 2008; Sortrakul and Eksathit, 2009; Berman and Katona, 2010; Chen et al., 2011)
as it allows the customer to reach the product information page via search engines.
300 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

Apart from SEO, the web technology has matured and adopted the Web 2.0 standard,
which allows intensive interaction through the internet. Social-based applications such as
Facebook, foursquare, twitter, etc have enjoyed the growth of their users. Current report
on Facebook users (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics) shows that the
users of Facebook are more than 500 million which spend over 700 billion minutes per
month. People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day. These numbers
show the potential of social network as media of promoting products as it involves many
active users. Furthermore, companies such as BMW, Dunkin Donuts, and General
Motors have utilised social media in their marketing strategies (Neti, 2011). Previous
research by Omniture (Watkins et al., 2009) shows that in the year of 2009, almost 80%
of all companies involved in the research, use social media to increase brand awareness
for their products. Similarly, nearly 70% of customers involved in the research, state that
they learn about products through social media. This number is higher than the 68% of
customers that use company’s website to get information about certain products.
Internet’s large user base has certainly opened up opportunities for profit seeking
activities. One such activity is an affiliation program. An affiliation program is the
internet-based marketing where commissions are given when user enters a website and
buys items through the affiliation website’s link. The website that joins to affiliation
program is called a publisher. Some well-known websites such as Google Adsense,
Amazon, e-Bay, and Commission Junctions are examples of sites who offer opportunity
for internet users to join their affiliation programs. Figure 1 illustrates the processes in
this affiliation program.

Figure 1 Affiliation process on internet-based marketing (see online version for colours)

A study about affiliation system has been held by Martin-Gill et al. (2009). They
analysed the affiliation system on ebay.com. The research showed that affiliation system
can increase the revenue of e-bay significantly. It describes the benefits of an affiliation
program from disposal rate, but it does not describe more about the way of online
marketing to get a significant traffic and how to introduce the selling products. Therefore,
the objectives of our study are the following:
 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 301

• To explore the use of SEO and social media and to investigate their effect in
increasing the incoming web traffic, as an indicator of how successful an internet
marketing strategy is.
• To see the impact of SEO and its consequences to web development and service
management.
In terms of technical contribution, our research is similar to the works of Green (2003),
King (2008), Machill et al. (2008), Chen et al. (2011), and Sortrakul and Eksathit (2009).
However, these researchers only reviewed and compared approaches in doing SEO,
whereas our research examined experimentally impact of SEO and social network in
improving the web traffic. Moreover, we also compare experimentally which strategy
between SEO and social network provides higher impact in improving web traffic.
Through this research, it is expected that we can examine the influence of SEO tools and
social network websites in improving performance of internet marketing and see its
impact in refining quality of application service management.

2 SEO and SEM

Internet marketing refers to the network that is used to carry out site or brand marketing
actions (Chen et al., 2011). It uses the following ways: search engine marketing (SEM),
SEO, banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies.
SEM is a form of internet marketing that seeks benefits by marketing paid-links
(Green, 2003; Machill et al., 2008). SEM is a marketing process that uses SEO technique
and PPC advertising to increase visibility of a website (King, 2008). The benefits from
SEM are the ability to market the products and to increase income from PPC advertising
on the websites. SEM uses various mechanisms to market a website in order to improve
its ranking in the search engines. SEM constitutes Ad words; which constitutes PPC,
article submissions, advertising, keywords analysis and making sure we have
implemented SEO.
SEO is a website’s customising elements mechanism in order to improve its ranking
or appearance on search engine (Nazar, 2009). Malaga (2007) defines SEO as a kind of
method that uses data observation and marketing research to identify the most suitable
‘keyword’ for the site, which is also called ‘keyword advertisement’. Thus, a key element
in SEO is choosing a suitable set of keywords that may increase a certain website’s page
ranking in various search engines.
There are two techniques in implementing SEO, the white hat SEO and the black hat
SEO. The white hat SEO is a technique that is allowed by search engines as it involves no
deceit in its marketing strategy. The white hat SEO requires the content to be indexed by
a search engine to be identical with the content of the rest of the website. On the contrary,
the black hat SEO involves trickery in its practice. For example, it uses a similar font
colour with the background of the website to hide parts of the content that are not
relevant to the rest of the website. These hidden contents are still indexed by search
engines. The use of black hat SEO may be retaliated by search engines by decreasing its
page rank or removal of the website’s keywords from the search engine rankings.
302 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

One of the white SEO techniques is described by Zhang and Dimitroff (2005). They
used metadata to improve web visibility. Metadata consists of keywords that describe the
content of a web page. The selection of keywords in a metadata is important task as it can
influence the search ability of the web page in internet (Hawking and Zobel, 2007). By
putting appropriate keywords to metadata, search engine can find the web page easier.
Other approaches are keyword discovery, crawling, on-page and off-page optimisation
and different Google tools (Sinha et al., 2010). Google actually provides a framework to
implement SEO (Nazar, 2009; Sinha et al., 2010), that includes the following aspects:
defining goals, SWOT analysis of competitors’ website, keyword discovery, crawling,
considering how Google stores information and index pages, on-page optimisation, off-
page optimisation, and Google SEO tools.
Google provides some analytical tools in order to support implementation of
framework, such as Google Analytics, Google webmaster, Google Keywords and Google
Insight Search. Google Analytics, one of the business intelligent tools developed by
Google, offers a service to analyse every user’s activities to a website. By using this tool,
website developer can see and analyse the traffic data of the website in real time.
In addition, this tool also prepares the user in writing better-targeted ads,
strengthens the marketing initiatives and creates higher converting websites
(http://google.com/analytics). Daniel and Kaushik (2009) said that Google Analytics
framework includes the visitors’ pattern (how many clicks) and how the visitors entering
the website (e.g., from search engine or other sources). Google has prepared the tracking
code that can be embedded to the website that will use it. By embedding this tool, we can
track our website and capture all visitors’ activities for further analysis. Some features of
Google analytics are:

1 The rate of website’s visitors to display information about how many users visiting
the website in daily, weekly, monthly or yearly basis.

2 The keyword searching that provides information about keywords that the visitor
used to enter the website. These keywords are useful in determining the popular and
important content in the website.

3 The visitor’s origin that provides information about the origin (country) of the
visitors.

4 How the visitors entering the website, whether they enter the website through direct
channels, through the social networking websites, through advertisements posted on
a website, through search engine results or via really simple syndication (RSS)
embedded in the website.

Google webmaster helps web owners to diagnose any faults on their website. Google will
give suggestions to the existing problem by giving the proposed solutions for
improvement. Google webmaster also provides information to the Google page and the
latest website update. Instead, it is also claimed that Google webmaster will increase the
index search on the Google search engine.
 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 303

Google Keywords tool provides statistical data about keywords which are most
frequently searched by the visitors. This information is very important to help
determining appropriate keywords for a website. By having popular keywords, it is
expected that it will increase number of visits to the website. Thus, this is one of core
Google SEO tools.
In addition to the above tools, Google also provides a knowledge-capturing tool,
named Google Insight tool. This tool gives an idea about the kind of search trends around
the world. These tools provide data in accordance with terms time and territory that is
often sought by users of the Google search engine.

3 Social media

Social network is an internet-based tool for sharing and discussing information among
human beings (Neti, 2011). Social media allows intensive interaction between its users.
Users may exchange ideas, express opinions, inform others about certain products they
like, etc. Examples of popular social media are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Digg,
MySpace, Scribd, Flickr, etc.
Social media has become an important part of the internet. One of the prime examples
of social media is Facebook. According to the Institute for Information Industry and e-
Marketer, Facebook is one of the most sought-after and used website by companies. Its
active members jumped from 50 million users in 2007 to 750 million users in 2011
(Facebook, 2011), which was a significant improvement in the four year time span.
Statistics also show that people spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
The presence of social media that allows us to reach larger customer base led to the
birth of a new marketing strategy named the social marketing. Lazer and Kelley (1973)
define social marketing as “concerned with the application of marketing knowledge,
concepts, and techniques to enhance social as well as economic ends. It is also concerned
with the analysis of the social consequences of marketing policies, decisions and
activities”. Various companies, such as Nike and Amazon, exploit social media to
interact with their customers (Dumon, 2008). Moreover, social media are often used by
fans, individuals, and companies as a medium to interact (Boyd and Ellison, 2007).
According to the US Association of National Advertisers’ statistics, in August 2009,
there are 66% of US companies that use micro-blogging (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
and LinkedIn) as a marketing tool; and the survey in 2009 by the Institute for information
industry indicated that around 22% use text blog, 20.3% use audio and video blogs, and
12% use micro-blogging sites (Chen et al., 2011).
The existence of social media is expected to increase incoming web traffic to
publisher’s website when it is used in conjunction with an affiliate program. Study from
Nguyen and Hoang (2008) reported that utilising social media and social network can
increase traffic significantly. They use social network and social media, such as Twitter,
Feedburner, Yahoo buzz, Google buzz, Facebook, Digg, Technorati, Google reader, etc.
Nguyen and Hoang (2008) showed that these social media can give a contribution on
SEO.
304 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

4 Methodology

As we mention, one of our aims is to see the impact of SEO and social network websites
to web visits as one of indicators of successful internet marketing. We tested the impact
of SEO and social network to our publisher websites. It is expected that the more popular
the publisher website, which is indicated by number of traffics, the possibility of
customers to buy the products will be higher. In order to see the impact of both SEO tools
and social network websites to the web visit, we develop three websites. These websites
provide information about particular products which are derived from the affiliations
website.
The first website is a normal website without any customisation. We create this
website with default setting and without embedding any codes that we expect can
increase web visit. We use this website as our baseline to measure the performance of our
proposed strategy. The second and third websites are the customised websites where we
put some SEO tools and social network website plug-ins. Our goal in this modification is
to improve our website to be friendlier to search engine and social network.
In creating the customised website, we used two configurations. In the first
configuration, we optimised our customised website by helping the basic SEO tools such
as Google Adwords Keywords to generate suitable keywords for particular posting. The
configuration comprises the following steps: develop website infrastructure, install SEO
plug-ins, post affiliation products, and keyword analysis. In the second configuration, we
configured our customised website as our first configuration and put additional
configuration with helping of advanced SEO tools which are SEO on One Page and SEO
Search Term Tagging 2. We expect that later configuration will increase web visits. The
following are explanation of each step.

4.1 Develop website infrastructure

First, we chose domain for our websites. For normal website, we chose
www.partsoo.com as our domain, whereas for the customised website where we have
considered SEO techniques and social network in it, we chose www.reviewsoo.com as
the domain. We developed those websites by using content management system (CMS)
Wordpress 2.9. Wordpress is built on PHP languages and uses MySQL Database. Both
websites have already joined at affiliation system and been called publishers.

4.2 Install SEO and social network plug-ins

Wordpress CMS offers many benefits as it is already supported by many SEO
communities that create some SEO and SEM plug-ins to be used easily. First step of
installation is setting the permalink in order to make our website can be indexed by
search engines. The next step is installing the following SEO and SEM plug-ins:

4.2.1 Robot meta and robots.txt

This tool enables crawler to access the website. When a crawler accesses a website, it
will try to access the robots.txt file and try to comply with its contents. For our case, we
 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 305

only set that crawler is not allowed to access /temp directory. Figure 2 shows the
configuration in robots.txt.

Figure 2 Example of robots.txt

Robot meta tag has the same function with robots.txt. Robot meta tag is placed in the
header of the source page. However, in our case, we do not use robot meta tag.

4.2.2 SEO image friendly

This particular plug-in is geared towards helping search engines to index images. It is
easier for search engines if every image in a webpage is given description in its alt
attribute. Figure 3 is an example of using SEO image friendly.

Figure 3 Example script for SEO image friendly (see online version for colours)

4.2.3 All in one SEO

We put description of our posting through this plug-in. Once we have configured this
plug-in, the search engine will index the posting according to supplied information,
which include: title, description and keywords.

4.2.4 Sociable plug-in to help posting the website content on social networks

As our research also intended to see the impact of social network to the traffic of our
publisher website, we also installed sociable plug-in. However, we only select some
popular social networks which are Facebook, Twitter, Goggle Buzz, Yahoo Buzz, and
FeedBurner.

4.2.5 Wordpress auto tagger

Tag is a keyword that is added to an article, which describes its content. In Wordpress,
there is a feature that automatically tags an article; it is called the Auto Tagger, which is
depicted in Figure 4.
306 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

Figure 4 Article’s tags (see online version for colours)

These plug-ins were installed on our customised website. Completing these steps, we
have configured the basic requirement of our customised website environment.

4.3 Post affiliation products

Before creating a website that features products, we analyse the current trend in the
market. Our aim is to find the most sought after product in a given period of time. Google
has developed a tool to perform such analysis, which is called the Google insight. These
sought-after products are then featured in our publisher website.

4.4 Keyword analysis

After posting the affiliation products, we determine set of keywords that characterise our
posting. We use Google Adwords keywords to help us in determining keywords which
are expected increasing website visibility to the search engine. For this purpose, we
decided to use keywords related to the title and description of a posting.

4.5 Link building

Link building is a way to help the web spider of a search engine to index a particular
website. There are two ways of link building: setting up hyperlinks between pages of the
same domain or setting up hyperlinks between pages of different domains/reciprocal-link
(Sortrakul and Eksathit, 2009). It should be noted that these hyperlinks should
connect relevant pages as search engines weeds out meaningless hyperlinks. In this
study, we set up our link building between pages of the same domain, which is depicted
in Figure 5.
 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 307

Figure 5 Example of link building (see online version for colours)

Figure 6 Example of search term results (see online version for colours)
308 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

4.6 Search term tagging 2

This plug-in is intended to add an internal link by attaching a popular tag to a posting.
This powerful plug-in must be used carefully as attaching more tags may mislead search
engines. Ensuring the relevance of each tag to the content of an article is important. In
this study, we produced tags for each article/posting by using Search Term Tagging 2
plug-in as can be seen in Figure 6.

5 Analysis

As we explained in the methodology, we run two experiments to analyse the performance

of our configuration. We have installed the Google Analytics in order to collect statistics
that we need to analyse the performance of our configuration. Our interest is to see
number of web visits in our websites as an indicator of popularity of a website. The more
popular the website, the possibility of customers to buy the products will be higher.

5.1 Results of our first experiment: normal vs. customised websites

Our first experiments try to compare the performance of normal website and customised
website. The customised website is configured by including social media plug-ins and
basic SEO plug-in such SEO image friendly, all in one SEO, SEO tagger, and keyword
selection. We run our websites for four months. Based on data that we have collected, we
can see some data includes web visit, origin country of the visitors, etc. Table 1 shows
the number of web visit to the both websites during the four months.
Table 1 Number of visits to our websites

The number of visit

No. Month
Customised website Normal website
1 Month I 0 0
2 Month II 261 0
3 Month III 335 86
4 Month IV 219 47
Total 815 133

Table 1 shows that by using basic SEO and social network plug-in, tracing to our
websites during four months showed that the configuration can increase number of visits
to the website around six times, with average number of visit per day around 1.2 for
normal website and 7 for customised website. Moreover, the customised website needs
one month to be recognised and visited by the customers, whereas the normal website
needs around two months to be visited by customers. This result confirms that the use of
basic SEO and social network websites make the website to be recognised faster than the
website without any customisation.
We also examine our website content ranking in the Google search engine. We found
that the contents of customised website obtain higher ranking in the Google search engine
than the contents of normal website. For example, normal website only has one content in
 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 309

the first rank in the Google search engine, whereas the customised website places its two
contents in the first rank. Table 2 summarises the comparison of normal website and
customised website in term of the position of their contents in the Google search engine.
For the sake of simplicity, we show only the comparison for the top-5 rank in the search
engine. This confirms that by using appropriate keywords, our website will be more
recognised by search engines.
Table 2 Number of contents in a particular rank in the search engine

Number of contents in the rank

Rank in search engine
Normal website Customised website
1 1 2
2 3 8
3 2 6
4 7 10
5 4 14

We also recorded source of web visits for our customised website. We classify source of
web visits whether it comes from search engine, social networks, and others as can be
seen in Table 3. From the table, it can be seen when we only use basic SEO, then the
social networks attract more users than search engine. It seems that the basic SEO
configuration cannot place our website contents to high ranking in search engine, thus
customers may visit other websites with higher ranking, given keywords related to our
website contents. Social media, in other hand, is capable to inform our website in the
network. Customers that may be satisfied with our website, have role in spreading our
website contents in the social media. Thus the impact is greater than the impact of basic
SEO configuration in increasing customer’s traffic to our customised website.
Table 3 Source of web visits of customised website

No. Source Number of web visits

1 Search engine 256
2 Social media 329
3 Others 230
Total 815

Moreover, data from Google Analytics showed that visitors of customised website
coming from 28 countries, whereas visitors of normal website coming from only 12
countries. It confirms that incorporating social media plug-in and SEO offer wider access
to customers.

5.2 Results of second experiment for customised websites: basic vs. advanced
configuration
As we have explained in the methodology, in the second experiment we compare the
performance of our advanced configuration with the basic one. In the advanced
310 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

configuration, we put more SEO plug-ins, particularly for building links and tagging
popular keywords related to a particular posting. We traced the web traffic of both
websites in the same period within seven months in the year of 2011.
Table 4 shows number of web visits and clicks for both customised websites. Data
from the table showed that our advanced configuration is capable to improve our basic
configuration. The popular keywords tag produced from Search Term Tagging 2 plug-in
indeed helps our website to be more recognised by user that try to find particular product
related to product that we have posted. In other words, the Search Term Tagging 2
plug-in is capable to improve our website ranking, thus more traffic comes to our website
with order eight times more than our basic configured website.
Table 4 also shows comparison of number of clicks of basic and advanced
configuration. The data was collected from Google Adsense as one of our affiliations. As
we have said in the concept of publisher, we receive earning according to PPC scheme. It
can be seen that advanced configuration outperforms basic configuration. This is not
surprising as the more users visit a website, the more the possibility of these users to click
links in the website. Thus, there is a close correlation between number of web visits and
number of clicks. Therefore it is confirmed that in order to have more earning for our
publisher web, then we need to increase traffic to our website to get more clicks from
users.

Table 4 Comparison of number of visits and clicks between basic and advanced configured
websites

The number of visits The number of clicks

No. Month
Advanced config. Basic config. Advanced config. Basic config.
1 Month I 2,932 1,013 9 1
2 Month II 2,681 1,265 89 5
3 Month III 3,494 704 53 3
4 Month IV 3,643 306 69 5
5 Month V 5,204 399 87 3
6 Month VI 4,278 332 95 0
7 Month VII 10,900 152 166 0
Total 33,132 4,171 568 17

Table 5 shows the source of web visits of advanced configured website. In our first
experiment, social media is capable to bring slightly more traffic than search engine.
However, in our second experiment, search engine outperforms social media. It brings
more traffic than social media with order about 90 times. In this configuration, the SEO
shows its superiority over social media. One possible cause of the low incoming traffic
from the social media, 45 visits per month in average, is that we only utilise a simple
technique of content sharing. Content sharing is only effective if users are already
interested in a product or the products are recommended by a certain social clique. A
better alternative than content sharing is needed to increase incoming web traffic through
social media in the context of affiliation programs.
 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 311

Table 5 Source of web visits of advanced configured website

No. Source Number of web visits

1 Direct 4,418
2 Search engine 27,615
3 Referral 783
4 Social media 316
Total 33,132

5.3 Implication to internet marketing strategy

Although our research is mainly purposed for analysing the impact of SEO to publisher
websites, it certainly can be extended to the concept of internet marketing in general as
they exhibit similar characteristics. Nowadays, many organisations are focusing their
effort in developing attractive websites in order to increase customer intention to buy
their product. Evidences from Ling and Salvendy (2006), Kuan et al. (2008) and Wells
et al. (2011) show how the quality of website has relationship with the customer intention
to buy product in e-commerce. Similarly, social media is also considered as a promising
effective marketing channel (Watkins et al., 2009; Neti, 2011). However, this approach
only focuses on human aspects, by providing a good quality website or social media that
perhaps can motivate them to buy the products or maintain the loyalty of existing
customers. Moreover, both approaches require that customers have known the seller so
that they can go directly to the seller’s website.
How about new customers, where they are still searching for information providers
about the products they want? One of the most widely used tools to find such information
providers is the search engine. In the context of search engine, the communication occurs
between machines to machine, by regularly crawling information from the internet to
store in its database. When customers need particular information, they just need to
provide keywords about the product or information they want and then search engines
will help them by providing links that perhaps match with their needs. The problem is the
search engine will provide thousands websites, so it is important to have high rank in the
search engine in order to increase the possibility of customers to find our websites.
Among various internet marketing strategies tested in this study, one that gives the
highest source of traffic is search engine. This evidence implies that in order to be
successful in gaining new customers, one aspect that must be considered is to make our
website easy to be recognised by search engines. The easier our website is recognised by
search engines, the more likely our website to get visitors, and the greater the opportunity
to gain customers and get benefits from it. In fact, search engine is the easiest tool to find
information.
This study also suggests that one strategy to make the web become friendly to search
engine is to provide tags that are relevant to the content of the websites. Selection of
appropriate tags will be the key to winning the competition in attracting new customers.
Organisations need to reformulate the development strategy of their websites, particularly
the need to provide the SEO expert as part of their website development team.
Finally, we propose some phases regarding the strategy for internet marketing based
on our research results, which are:
312 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

• Building website awareness. Website awareness can be built through several

channels of communication that have been investigated in this study, for example
through the dissemination of address/web content to various social media page or the
use of SEO techniques in order to be recognised better by search engines. The focus
of this phase is to ensure that new customers aware on the existence of our website.
• Improving website aspects to increase customer intention to purchase. Once a new
customer knowing the existence of our website, the next step is to ensure that they
are willing to buy the products that we offer. In this phase, some aspects play an
important role to influence the customer intention to buy such as the quality of the
web (Ling and Salvendy, 2006; Kuan et al., 2008; Wells et al., 2011), transaction
security (Salisbury et al., 2001; Belanger et al., 2002; Hidayanto et al., 2012), and
so on.
• Developing programs to retain customer loyalty. In this phase the organisation needs
to develop programs to retain customer loyalty. Organisations can offer a range of
facilities in their website such as personalisation (Nasraoui, 2005) and a good quality
and secure website (Ribbink et al., 2004; Flavián and Guinalíu, 2006).

5.4 Implication to service quality of web application

Another implication of this study is related to service quality of web application.
Currently, the role of the website is not only seen as providers of information, but also
one of the means to deliver services of the organisation. For example, Amazon online
bookstore sales books via the web.
In light of the role of an ever increasing web application, its service quality becomes
increasingly important. A popular framework for measuring quality of service is
SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988, 1991) which measures the quality of service in
five dimensions:
• tangible: appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel, and
communication materials
• reliability: ability to perform the promised service dependably and accurately
• responsiveness: willingness to help customers and provide prompt service
• assurance: knowledge and courtesy of employees and their ability to convey trust
and confidence
• empathy: care and individualised attention to its customers.
SERVQUAL can be modified to see the service quality of web application such as those
conducted by Fink (2002), Iwaarden et al. (2003), and Udo et al. (2011). However, the
SERVQUAL framework is not intended to measure the easiness of information on the
web that can be searched by consumers (search ability). In the consumers’ side, they want
to find a product/service as easily as possible. The easier the consumer in finding the
information they want, the more satisfied customers on the quality of the web. In such
situation, providing tags which are relevant to any information posted on a web, of
course, will facilitate the information search process. Indirectly, this will certainly have
implications for the time-to-market of products/services offered by the organisation.
 A study of impact of search engine optimisation 313

Indeed, search ability is an important attribute that should be considered regarding

information in the web.
Taking into account the important role of the ease of finding information, we are
proposing to refine the SERVQUAL in order to measure the quality of services for web
application. The proposed model can be seen in Figure 7. Further efforts are needed,
particularly to validate our proposed model in order to make it applicable for measuring
the quality of services of web applications.

Figure 7 Proposed model for measuring service quality of web application

6 Conclusions

This research is conducted to assess the performance of various SEO and social media
plug-ins in increasing web traffic as one indicator of successful internet marketing, with a
case study on publisher website. We use freely available plug-ins such as Google
Keyword, Metadata, Image Friendly, Google Insight, Wordpress Auto Tagger, Link
Building, Search Term Tagging 2 and installed them in three developed websites. We
also installed social media plug-ins and link our web to Facebook, Twitter and
Feedburner. Our key findings after examining web traffics from three developed websites
are:
• SEO plug-in is proven to have the capability to increase the web visits to our
website. One possible answer for this improvement is due to the improvement of
rank of our websites in search engine. Number of contents with high ranking is
higher in customised website than the normal website.
• With basic configuration which includes product selection and auto keywords
generation from the content, it is capable to improve the web visits more than six
times than normal website without any SEO treatments.
• With advanced configuration that includes link building and popular keywords
generation, it is capable in bringing more traffic than our basic configuration.
314 A.N. Hidayanto et al.

• The higher the number of visitors, the higher the possibility to get more earning in
PPC scheme as the possibility of the users to click links is also higher.
• Social network websites can attracts users to our websites. However, their impact is
not as high as the impact of SEO plug-ins. We need to explore more social media
features to improve their impact to web traffic.
These findings show that in order to increase the success of internet marketing, the
organisations need to pay attention on the way they organise information in their
websites, particularly by giving appropriate tags so that it can be found easily by the
search engine. This task requires organisations to have SEO experts that will provide
suggestion on how to develop website that will attract more new customers. Considering
the importance of our result, we propose to refine SERVQUAL framework by
incorporating search ability dimension in the framework.

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