Poor website design is costing FTSE companies online hits, Seekport research shows

Internet Business News, June 8, 2005

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Seekport, a European search engine company, has released the results of its research into the effectiveness of the top 30 FTSE company websites.

The results revealed that 25 of the 30 websites are not easily found by search engine crawlers due to flaws in website design such as failure to source appropriate keywords on their web pages.

The analysis was carried out with Seekport's online evaluation tool, Seekbot, and reportedly demonstrated that most companies ignore simple rules in website design, with nearly half of the FTSE 30 corporate websites providing incorrect meta-tag data descriptions. In addition, the use of flash sites as company homepages makes it difficult for crawlers to find and index them, as they do not use HTML codes.

Drinks company Diageo received the worst results by scoring negatively in eight out of the 11 test categories. HSBC Holdings, Shell Transport & Trading Co, Tesco, Rio Tinto and mmO2 all achieved equal high results from the analysis.

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