Visibility Scorecard

A Visibility Scorecard is the analysis of a collection of known elements (such as meta tags, file formats, code efficiency) that search engines rank websites upon using a scorecard technique. This analysis is an ongoing process used in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that allows websites to pin point the areas their content is being missed by search engines.

History

The Visibility Scorecard was introduced by SearchForecast as a means to analyse the search engine visibility of the top global websites. The first Visibility Scorecards looked at 16 factors including Meta tags that described a website, frames and flash files that hide navigational links and file formats that were readable and indexable by search engines.

Today, the Visibility Scorecard looks at over 50 factors, including code efficiency, spider crawl times, the presence of tracking code, absolute positioning techniques and the presence of external Javascript and Cascading Style Sheets files.

Modelling

The Visibility Scorecard can be made to create models for search engine friendly sites and group of sites. The Visibility Scorecard α is determined by the sum of the factors $b\_k$ times by a weighting $v$.

$alpha,\; =\; sum\_\{k=1\}^N\; b\_kv$

The Visibility Scorecard analysis becomes a critial tool for micropublishing networks who rely on a steady flow of traffic to their websites. Publishers run both horizontal and vertical crawls over their websites to gain insight into their search engine visibility. As the scorecard and crawling techniques are patent pending technology, publishers and advertising agencies alike gain this data from [http://www.searchforecast.com SearchForecast] .

Web 2.0

The Visibility Scorecard focuses on many of the aspects introduced by Web 2.0. As the focus of search engines are always changing, so too must the elements of the Visibility Scorecard. Examples of elements introduced for Web 2.0 are Audio and Video files, Tagging, Blogs, RSS Feeds and tracking code.