The state of Web Design in the UK.

At the recent Technology For Marketing Show (TFM)at Olympia last week, with our colleagues at Periscopix, XSEO were running the shows Search Clinic.

This was a new feature of the show which was designed as a free resource to help visitors to improve their online marketing. Whilst Periscopix were assisting visitors in their paid campaigns, XSEO were providing advice and assistance for natural search engine optimisation. What became clear was that a great number of sites were being produced that could not be optimised because of poor basic web design. However it wasn't until we collated the stats that it really became apparent to the extent that web designers, many of them agencies, have no understanding of how search engines work.

For many years we, along with other SEO's, Google, Yahoo and MSN, have been trying to reeducate web designers to consider search engines and how they navigate web sites. We were stunned at the show how many web sites are still being produced without basic search engine spider accessibility.

The process of being search engine friendly (or search engine accessible) is not complicated. The search engines use computer programs (often called robots or spiders) that crawl the internet looking for web sites and their content. Once this data is collected it is processed and it forms the basis for the search engines to derive the sites relevance to any given search. Being search engine friendly allows them to enter the site and read the content. So conversely having a site that does not give the crawlers access to the readable text will prohibit them from understanding the sites content thereby, destroying any ability of being ranked highly in a search for a product or service.


The Search Clinic highlighted the extent of the problem and it is a great disappointment that the message is still not getting across. During the show we evaluated 88 sites in the 2 days.

We were pleased that 41% of the total visitors were looking for advice prior to embarking on a new web site. Whilst the 32% of sites reviewed had poor search engine access of the total, if you consider the numbers out of those with existing sites, a staggering 62% were designed with little or no consideration to search engine crawlers.

So yet again the warnings are out there, if you are going to look at going on-line, research how search engines work, or speak to an expert, don't trust or expect your web developer to know enough about the subject to be able to advise you correctly. Failure to plan for natural search will result in you being confined to paid search only, the cost implications of which can dwarf your initial web design outlay significantly.

More information is available for free on our SEO Tutorials page.

M.P