Bad design ranked No.1 by search engines

Poor web site design continues to be the primary cause of company web sites failing to make it onto the major search engines.

Despite much debate and publicity around the theme of usability in the last couple of years, web site owners – even those from blue chip companies - are still getting it wrong. New research from European search engine, Seekport has uncovered that 25 out of the top 30 FTSE companies in the UK are not easily found by search engine spiders due to the lack of relevant keywords and other basic design faults.

If the big boys and girls of the UK economy can’t get it right, there’s a case for all web site owners, regardless of company size, to cast an urgent and critical eye over their own sites.

According to Seekport, the 25 top companies identified have not achieved as a high a ranking in search engine results as they might reasonably have expected, resulting in the potential loss of site traffic. The analysis was carried out with Seekport’s online evaluation tool, Seekbot. It shows that nearly half of the FTSE 30 corporate websites are providing incorrect meta-tag data descriptions.

The worst offender was Diageo, the world’s best known drinks company, who scored negatively in eight of the eleven test categories.

One of the main problems for those companies scoring low in the Seekport tests was index pages built in Flash. Because Flash is saved as a graphics file, search engine spiders, which rely on text and HTML code, cannot index the site.

Stefan Karzauninkat, director quality management Europe at Seekport, said: “Frequent errors are made on thousands of sites such as the use of complicated linking and confusing nested frames. Specific user recognition via session IDs, although often unnecessary, also make life hard for search engines."

Firms that achieved high results from Seekport's analysis included HSBC Holdings, Shell Transport & Trading Co., Tesco, mining firm, Rio Tinto and mmO2.

“Our research has also highlighted serious problems when a Flash site is used as a corporate homepage. These are increasingly used by organisations in the fashion, media and design industries because Flash can offer fancier graphics and animation features,” Karzauninkat added.

“However, companies fail to realise that they are losing untold customers and publicity because of their failure to use proper HTML code and any text at all on the starting page, so crawlers just aren’t picking them up and indexing them.”