Business Constraints Integration in a Search Engine Optimization Fuzzy Decision Support System

The Internet has dramatically changed the way companies can reach their clients. Henceforth, to develop their business online, companies have to drive qualified traffic to their website. For this, their website must be visible in the first pages of search engine results. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) permits the improvement of the position of a website on the search engines results pages. However, the practice of SEO is complex, and results are uncertain, because search engines do not communicate much about their ranking methods. Moreover, this activity takes time, and requires the implementation of modifications that can alter the visual appearance of the webpages. This paper proposes a decision support system that allows managers and webmasters to have better visibility on their SEO activity. Thanks to the creation of decision rules that take into account the constraints of the manager and the technical needs of the webmaster, the system is able to prioritize the SEO actions. The objective is to give companies that insource this activity better mastery of the SEO process. We illustrate our approach with examples of decision rules created from a typical insourced SEO project scenario.