When it comes to performing well at search engines how well are websites designed?
In November 2000 our parent company Support for Organisations Ltd performed an investigation into the design methods used in the homepages of 137 local business web sites. The web sites were obtained from the Coventry and Warwickshire Chamber of Commerce, members directory.

For each web site, we performed a detailed design analysis which studied a number of aspects of the design, essential for a good search engine ranking.

The analysis results:
The results were a concern. Soon after completing the investigation, Support for Organisations, realised there was a need for website designers that understood search engines and set up a division specialising in this area called Website Medics:

• 15 of the sites were dead links, which represents more than 10%
• 46 of the sites were using design techniques that were classified as spamming (attempting to cheat the search engine into an artificially high position) and could lead to the site being blacklisted, this represents 38%
• 48 of the site were designed such that a search engine robot would be unable to determine what they were about, this represents 39%
• Only 2 web pages were designed such that they would perform well at search engines.

The search engine investigation:
After completing the analysis, a key phrase was identified for each website that should find it in a search engine. For example for a local florist, the phrase was "Coventry Florists". This phrase was then entered into 25 different search engines to see how many of the sites were found in the top 50.

The search engine results:
The results backed our analysis, 83 of the sites did not get a single listing which is 69%. None of the sites were found at Yahoo, AltaVista or AOL.

Are things any better today?
Website Medics regularly perform comprehensive analysis's on business websites on behalf of business support organisations like Business Links and the National B2B Centre at Warwick University. A slight improvement has been noticed over the last twelve months, however, there are still too many websites with fundamental design weaknesses.

How capable are affordable ecommerce when it comes to search engines?
Website Medics are amongst the best when it comes to designing for good search engine positions. This has been recognised with a major award for helping businesses succeed online through good website design. They have also developed their own search engine emulation database and comprehensive knowledge base. Because affordable ecommerce are part of the same company, we share these tools and techniques and are hence capable of performing equally well with our designs.