Information and Web Communication Science

The understanding and usage of techniques and tools that determine the visibility of web content is a cross-cutting and pervasive theme within the world of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). It is of interest not only to its professionals within the discipline, but also to communication experts and humanist scholars in general. The first part of the course provides basic notions on the structure of the web, search engines and techniques for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), with special focus on the emerging theme of the "web of data". The second part discusses the objectives of digital marketing concerned with the visibility of web contents, by discussing tools and channels where the marketing practices are implemented, and by finally presenting the professional opportunities in this field.

The student will need to have an adequate measure of Knowledge and Skills.
Knowledge: the student will acquire knowledge about web information retrieval with a particular emphasis on search engines and related techniques for text transformation, and indexing. They will be able to illustrate the basic features of the vector-based retrieval model, and the techniques to measure the term relevance through tf-idf. In addition, the student will have knowledge about website visibility in terms of search engine retrieval (the so-called SEO - Search Engine Optimization). To this end, the student will need to know the main constructs of the HTML5 language, link analysis techniques, as well as the definition of "web of data", the various types of microdata and the impact that these notions have on both on-site and off-site SEO techniques.
The student will integrate SEO-related knowledge with an overview of the objectives of digital marketing, acquiring the comprehension of some tools and channels where digital marketing practices are implemented, with the goal to structure a simple marketing plan. The student will be able to identify the roles which are assigned in companies and agencies to who is in charge of digital marketing activities. Some concrete cases of people and teams who actually work in the field will be presented, so that it will be possible to obtain an understanding of the competencies that are required to work in the field.
Skills: The student will acquire the following skills:
· distinguish the features and the applicative issues of the vector-based retrieval model;
· know how to apply text transformation and indexing techniques of an information retrieval system;
· know how to apply TF-IDF-based techniques for measuring the term relevance in a vector-based retrieval system;
· know how to use HTML5 for webpage creation;
· know how to describe link analysis techniques and the main link analysis algorithms for ranking search engine results;
· distinguish the features of the main formats for the "web of data", such as microdata, RDFa and JSON-LD;
· know how to apply SEO techniques;
· know social media management and social advertising fundamentals;
· know how to use Mailchimp, the world leading email marketing platform;
· know how to use Wordpress to create a blog article and Yoast SEO to optimize the visibility of the article on search engines;
· know how to use Keyword Planner, a tool to identify search terms on Google.