I just read the Ferrari case study and was surprised by this statement, “Site traffic has increased by 237 percent, with a 150 percent increase in unique visitors.” SharePoint by itself doesn’t increase traffic. Understanding how search engines look at your site and being able to manage the content search engines look at increases traffic.
The article did state that it’s now easier manage content than it was in their previous java based version. It almost sounded like they had to have a developer make all content changes. I’m not a Java fan, but I do think this is a cheap shot at a whole platform. There are plenty of bad content management solutions in .NET technologies too. The increased traffic was a combination of a few things.
When the content, meta tags, titles and other asset areas are easy to manage it’s easier to make the search engines like the site. It’s also important to know what they like. So it’s important to know what to do and to have the ability to do it, and this is what a properly implemented SharePoint brings to the table. Believe me you can set up SharePoint so that it doesn’t cater to search engines at all. It’s just content, like anything else it can be managed poorly or it can be managed well.
These numbers do seem modest so I tend to believe they aren’t from a marketing champagne (because even a bad one would more than double your traffic) and are really from search engine optimization but it’s hard to know that for sure.
The bottom line is that the case study didn’t clearly point out why traffic increased. I think they are trying to say that because the content was more easily managed they were better able to optimize the content for higher ranks on the search engines.
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