Comparison between Top-Ranked Iranian Medical Universities and Top-Ranked World Universities based on the Website Analysis

Evaluating the quality and quantity of information presented by universities on their website is the main strategy to ensure that the university web-based activities are in the correct order. In this regard, there are several ranking systems that evaluate the quality and quantity of web-based activities of universities and accordingly rank them. Comparing the universities based on web activity measurement is a suitable tool to find out the weaknesses of the university for presenting itself on World Wide Web. In this study, top-ranked Iranian medical universities were compared with topranked world universities according to the website traffic data. For this purpose, the website traffic information was acquired from “Similarweb” website. The results showed that the total traffic size, bounce rate and backlinks from referrals and social networks were significantly different between Iranian medical and world top-ranked universities. Furthermore, the results of this analysis revealed that the quality of website, which expectedly increased the visit duration and visited pages, was not significantly correlated with total traffic size for nor top-ranked world and Iranian medical universities. In addition, the results showed that the total traffic size of topranked world universities was significantly correlated with backlinks from direct access and search engines, while for Iranian medical universities such correlation could not be found. In conclusion, the main gap between top-ranked Iranian medical universities and top-ranked world universities was due to the search engine optimization issues and the link between social networks and universities, that both need more enhancement.