The American Idol website is the online interactive window to the American televised program where young people compete to become sing stars. The program was launched in July 2002 as part of the Idol franchise. The program has its roots in the Pop Idol program which ran in the UK from 2001. The aim of the program is to identify talent through a series of auditions throughout the USA. The public also plays an important role through voting based on the critique offered by three judges on the program. The American Idol website has been nominated by Hitwise as the most visited television program website in 2007. As such a website analysis of the site is quite appropriate to determine its functionality, appeal, rank at search engines, SEO techniques employed, and its usefulness.

The homepage of the site strikes as extremely colourful with blue, red, and white being the dominant colours. The main menu is on top of the page and sub-divides to provide entrance to pages in sub-categories. It is an attractive first page, which surprisingly doesn’t take long to load, considering the amount of animation, videos, clips and images on the page. One drawback is the fact that horizontal and vertical scrolling are required if your screen resolution is set 800 x 680 pixels. Users will have to set their screens at the highest resolution to browse with ease.

Excitement fills the whole page, but it would have been better if the user receives the choice of watching ads or videos rather than having them run from the moment that the page opens. It becomes a bit annoying to have to wait for videos to open if you are attempting to go back to the previous page. Another feature that may be helpful is the sitemap which lacks. At such a complicated site, it becomes an essential tool for quick navigation. Fortunately the website does include a search facility for quick navigation.

One of the features notable is the use of audio. Warning – don’t attempt to surf this site at work if you don’t press the mute button on your desktop first. It features a lot of audio which makes for interesting surfing. The level of interactivity is what makes this website so unique. There is a forum, the ability to send pages to friends, place information at Facebook or one of the social network sites, download freebies, join the blog network, and more. Interviews with contestants, the ability to join in voting and other features such as the virtual tour also make this an exciting website.

The images have ALT tags and although hidden at the FAQ page, there is a help function in terms of how to stream videos at the site, how to vote and more. It would have been helpful if the plugins could have been downloaded from a link at the main page. The site is geared towards the more sophisticated Internet user rather than someone that still needs a lot of guidance.

The information is highly relevant and images compliment text. As an information resource about the show, the American Idol website succeeds. There is a copyright notice. The sponsors are clearly identifiable, and the information is current. Directions for usage of the site are not clear, but once you find the FAQ section you will be home free. The links are well organized on top of the page, with limited anchor text links. You can always find your way back to the start. There is ample opportunity for feedback by users.

In terms of search engine optimisation, from a website analysis perspective this site does amazingly well in Internet Marketing. It employs viral marketing techniques, taps into the social network structure, banner adverts, video, flash, audio, and text to bring messages across. It has a well organized internal linking structure, enough text on the pages for search engines and clearly ads new and useful content on a daily basis.

The American Idol website, although it lacks a sitemap and is packed with multimedia, also includes Metatags with title, description, and selective keywords which are present throughout the web pages. This together with the fact that the title is also present in the domain name is a reason for it doing so well at search engines. The fact that it makes use of viral marketing is another reason. Newsletters, blogs, and referrals all drive traffic and are excellent SEO tools.

The website analysis shows that it has a Page Rank 7 at Google. It has an Alexa Traffic Rank of 8 558 with an overall total of 218, 272 incoming links with some overlapping possible at the time of website analysis (May 2, 2008). The website also has 110 outgoing links. The balance between inbound and outbound links is another reason for its high page rank. It competes for keywords such as American, idol, American idol, and contestants.

In conclusion the website analysis showed that not only keywords, but also linking, viral marketing and excellent content can help to push up the Page Rank of a website. The American Idol website is an exciting place to visit and offers online community life for the public. Visit the site and enjoy the chats, interviews, downloads, and more.