February 18, 2009 by Andy Russell
She may be the Head of State but it seems the Queen’s website is far from regal. According to a review in the Daily Telegraph, the Queen’s personal ‘gov.uk’ lacks several basic search engine optimisation points.
According to the review, royal.gov.uk commits several cardinal SEO sins including basic errors like not clearly labelling the homepage and even duplicating the homepage. The tragic thing is that the site could be fantastic, it has a pretty useful 30,400 pages indexed on Google though unforgivably, more than 22’000 of them are error pages. Even worse, there aren’t even 404 error pages – a basic requirement for even the simplest site.
There are also no h1 or h2 tags present on the whole site, and the h3 tags are full of non-optimised text. On the non-optimised text front there are further crimes, with key messages and words going unemphasised and highly inconsistent use of alt text on images. Also, embarrassingly, though not really essentially, there is even a misspelling of commonwealth “commonwaelth” in the page’s meta description.
According to the Telegraph these are just the tip of the iceberg, there are apparently many more inconsistencies and problems. Your majesty, if you’re reading this, give us a call – you need our help.
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