Collaborative engineering decision-making for building information channels and improving Web visibility of product manufacturers

Abstract

Product manufacturers have spent the last years improving productivity and process efficiency in order to face increasingly competitive markets. Today, the visibility of technological innovations has become essential to achieve the targeted market. It is now very difficult for a product manufacturer to reach customers without owning a website that is visible on search engine results pages. The goal of this paper is to build information channels between a company and its customers through improving both a company’s content of information on the Web and its website rank on the Internet through search engine results pages. Company information and knowledge are distributed through multiple stakeholders. The problem of building information channels between a company and customers is solved through a collaborative and distributed approach, on the one hand, and is supported by decision-making tools, on the other hand. The paper proposes an engineering model for building information channels and improving the visibility of the company on the Web. Agents are used for the implementation of the approach. The proposed model and its implementation handle the requirements, constraints, functions and solutions for improving Web visibility. The prototype tool, called CAWIS (Computer Aided Web Information Sharing), examines Web visibility in real time and evaluates the performance of the proposed content of information. CAWIS allows an exploratory and open way for building information channels and improving the visibility of product manufacturers on the Web.

Introduction

The Internet affects the way people buy, enquire and express their opinions about various products. This transition from traditional business to e-business has forced product manufacturers to change their visibility strategy. Customers are now online, they use search engines to find products that meet their requirements and express their opinions publicly. To take advantage of this, product manufacturers have to have an online presence through a website presenting their expertise and products’ characteristics. However this is not sufficient; to be visible on the Internet the website also has to be present on search engine results pages and, ideally, in the top positions. Indeed, information overload has made consumers highly selective [1]; in this way, Internet users are only between 5% and 10% to consult the second page of search engines [2]. Potential customers prefer to reformulate their query rather than looking at the other results pages.

To improve the position of their websites, product manufacturers can apply search engine optimization (SEO). By using some techniques touching the source code and the website environment, SEO permits a ranking improvement. The objective is to rank a website on a list of keywords in order to attract qualified traffic through these new information channels. The final goal is to generate new contacts by promoting product expertise and technological innovation in order to acquire the voice of customers. Indeed, the design and manufacturing of the products in a company are results of collaborative and distributed processes. Distributed stakeholders work and interact actively on the design and manufacturing of the product according to the aspects and constraints of their domains [3]. In this way, the improvement of product visibility on the Web permits the gathering of online customer reviews and comments, which are useful for stakeholders in identifying their products’ potential enhancement [4], and can motivate potential customer decisions.

A webmaster in charge of the SEO strategy faces a number of problems: search engines frequently update their search algorithms in order to always propose relevant results to the users, ranking models are not made public and the SEO process is unstructured. Moreover, collaboration between the webmaster and stakeholders working on product design and manufacturing is difficult due to knowledge differences. Finally, SEO results take time and are uncertain while product life cycle quickens and product manufacturers cut development time [5]. This leads to a situation where new innovative products are unknown because they cannot be found in time by using the right keyword on search engines. For all these reasons, the SEO process is considered complex [6].

The goal of this paper is to build information channels between a company and customers through improving both a company’s content of information on the Web and its website rank on Internet search engine results pages. Company information and knowledge are distributed through multiple stakeholders. The problem of building information channels between a company and customers is solved through a collaborative and distributed approach, on the one hand, and is supported by decision-making tools, on the other hand. The paper proposes an engineering model for building information channels and improving the visibility of the company on the Web. The formalization of different steps of the SEO process through different bridged models creates consistency towards a collaborative SEO process assisted by computer Web information sharing tools. Agents are used for the implementation of the approach. The proposed model and its implementation handle the requirements, constraints, functions and solutions for improving Web visibility in real time. The prototype tool called CAWIS (Computer Aided Web Information Sharing), examines Web visibility and evaluates the performance of the proposed content of information. CAWIS allows an exploratory and open way for building information channels and improving the visibility of product manufacturers on the Web. In addition, CAWIS allows a better control of the SEO process.

The proposed model and the implementation through agent technology permitted the decomposition of the SEO process in several entities. Interactions that took place in this process allow the building of a collaborative and intelligent approach. In the proposed approach, the solution is the result of collaboration between the webmaster and stakeholders. It satisfies stakeholders’ requirements as well as Web constraints that include: competition, technological evolution, and algorithm changes. The prototype tool CAWIS implementing the approach allows building bidirectional information channels between a company and customers as well as improving the visibility of the company through the ranking of a product manufacturer website.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the literature review. Section 3 describes the proposed approach, including the use of an engineering meta-model to define and describe the SEO process, and the modeling of a multi-agent system to assist the SEO process. Section 4 presents a case study to validate the approach. The discussion and conclusion present and analyze the findings.