Optimizing web structures using web mining techniques

With vibrant and rapidly growing web, website complexity is constantly increasing, making it more difficult for users to quickly locate the information they are looking for. This, on the other land becomes more and more important due to the widespread reliance on the many services available on the Internet nowadays. Web mining techniques have been successfully used for quite some time, for example in search engines like Google, to facilitate retrieval of relevant information. This paper takes a different approach, as we believe that not only search engines can facilitate the task of finding the information one is looking for, but also an optimization of a website's internal structure, which is based on previously recorded user behavior. In this paper, we will present a novel approach to identifying problematic structures in websites. This method compares user behavior, derived via web log mining techniques, to an analysis of the website's link structure obtained by applying the Weighted PageRank algorithm (see [19]). We will then show how to rise these intermediate results in order to point out problematic website structures to the website owner.