Privacy is becoming an important issue both for web users and for website managers who have to deal with growing compliance issues internationally. This is a crucial area for Sitemorse and we have a multi-stage offering designed to assist.

Ensuring regular monitoring of a large organisation's web presence is now essential and third-party errors such as the one above can be effectively prevented by applications such as the Sitemorse privacy module, which can alert site owners to potential issues like this one. See more about this issue on the Sitemorse website.

That's because Google is changing it's famous search algorithm to penalise those who add keywords and exchange too many links "beyond what a normal person would expect" according to Matt Cutts, who heads Google's 'Spam team'.

A content strategy driven by what readers want, not what search engines want, is the direction that Google has been actively working toward rewarding, a not unreasonable goal.

If you're selecting topics based on what your audience would find helpful, you're probably doing content strategy right. If you're choosing what to write about based on the keywords you want to be found for, you may fall foul of the new Google changes.

Sitemorse's new Governisation product helps our clients manage web compliance and could warn users of potential problems ahead such as the Google change. Governisation - a blend of governance and optimisation - will check and warn about too-high word density or over-use of keywords.

We will be busy rolling out the Governisation product shortly, along with a website to better explain what it can do.

In fact, Sitemorse has contributed data to a parliamentary briefing document being presented to MPs shortly.

According to our latest benchmark survey of UK force websites, out today, highest scorers in the Police sector on accessibility, rated nine out of ten, were Dumfries and Galloway, Gwent, and Grampian, whilst the North Wales force scored a creditable 8.

Three websites, Central Scotland, Derbyshire and the 'Ask The Police' site, an official police resource developed to reduce the number of non-emergency calls to police forces, scored zero on accessibility, which makes us wonder how anyone with disabilities is expected to consult them! 

The full details of how the various forces stack up on the web can be seen in our survey, published on the main Sitemorse website.

And a crucial part of attracting them, given that most students today can't remember a world without the internet, is the university's own website.

So you'd think a lot more effort would be put in by universities and colleges into making their websites a good experience for users - but not according to the latest research from Sitemorse. Our Q2 universities benchmark of nearly 300 FE websites shows most of them - with some honourable exceptions - are still full of errors and not accessible for the disabled.

The Times Higher Educational Supplement recently published a poll of 150,000 international students that found only four per cent of students used social media to select a university and only six per cent were persuaded by staff at university fairs. No less than 45 per cent of students said recommendations by friends were the most important factor and 41 per cent cited the institution's website.

Our benchmark of almost 300 websites of universities and colleges has now been published. The results may surprise you. Check out the summary or full results data on the Sitemorse website.

In top spot with a score of 7.52, having risen nine places from our last survey of this sector in 2011, is Latin American convenience stores operator Femsa Comercio. 

Majoring on beverages - Femsa is the largest Coco-cola bottler in Latin America, operates a chain of convenience stores and has a major investment in Heineken beer -we found Femsa's website to score very highly on functionality and performance, whilst other attributes prized in Europe such as accessibility did not do well. 

Joining Femsa Comercio in our list of top five retail websites is UK convenience store major Spar, former leaders in this sector,  the California-based supermarket chain Stater Bros, UK-based computer gaming company Game Group - which has unfortunately ceased trading since our survey - and Japanese online retailer Uny (Apita). Marks for their sites varied from just over seven out of ten to 7.5, a little below the level Sitemorse would normally see for the winners of a major sector website benchmark.

It's interesting to see how standards vary when looking at the websites of a very disparate group of retailers, some online, some store-based, around the world. Many sites in countries where accessibility is not a legal requirement do not feature this at all, something that was the case in the UK and Europe five years ago but which is extremely rare today. Our findings would suggest that on balance UK and European sites score slightly more highly in all the major website requirements, accessibility included, than others in the rest of the world. 

Find out more about this survey - and how other major retailers around the world scored - by studying the results on the Sitemorse website.

Of nearly 350 websites  we surveyed in February on quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and search engine optimisation, HMRC's site came top with a score of just over eight out of ten possible marks.

Sharing the top five places with HMRC this time are the websites of the Health and Safety Executive, Northern Ireland Direct, the Met Office and Passenger Focus, an independent body set up by the government to protect the interests of passengers.

Running an efficient website or web presence depends so much on getting all the little details right , and very often small organisations do this better than large ones, so all the more credit to HMRC and the Health and Safety Executive for doing so well here.

The UK Government's record on accessibility however is not uniformly good, according to this latest research. Which makes us think - if the people who make the laws tell us websites, just like everything else, have to be accessible why is there apparently one rule for them and another for the rest of the UK? There's a clear case to say the politicians and civil service should put their own house in order, and quickly.

The full survey results are available now on the Sitemorse website.

An extreme example, but it tends to spotlight what can happen when inappropriate words get into an organisation's electronic domain. Company websites rather than internal emails can often have wrong or inappropriate wording, often outside the immediate control of content managers. 

Website managers who deploy our new 'Governisation' platform across their enterprises get automated content screening pre launch to ensure nothing slips through and across live sites to ensure that no content feeds deliver such inappropriate content.

We have long bemoaned the fact that so many companies at this level seem to value the efficiency of their websites so little; this latest benchmark shows that to start a site from scratch can pay off in terms of functionality and code quality. 

The established companies in this sector have mostly been on the web for many years and have websites weighed down by legacy content. Web users need to find what they are seeking quickly on a company's site and go elsewhere quickly if they have problems. 

Perhaps it's time for a spring-clean at the highest levels of the FTSE, as our experience shows that addressing the top problem points of most websites can quickly bring about an enormous improvement in efficiency.

There does seem to be some evidence that FTSE websites are improving - the leader this time, HICL International scored 9.9 out of a possible ten marks, and several established sites rising more than 200 places. You can see the full survey results on the Sitemorse website.

Post, the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, has been asked for a policy briefing on ICT for disabled people. The briefing will summarise major issues in the 'digital inclusion' of disabled people.

As soon as we heard we contacted POST to offer our help and provided them with our most recent central government website benchmark, which shows many government departments, including the Office for Disability Issues, with a less-than-perfect score on accessibility.

POST responded and have asked to see our next central government benchmark, which will be published on 27th March."Web accessibility is very much a part of what I'll be covering and stats like this highlight just how bad the situation is" their spokesman told us.

But like having to wait in a long queue, or dealing with a cashier who doesn't yet know the ropes, the online banking experience can match the high street for frustration.

In theory going online should give us a great chance to shop around for savings accounts or even for commercial financing for business. But latest research from Sitemorse shows that only a small percentage of the main players in the consumer finance sector have efficient websites, with less than ten per cent of the 266 we surveyed in February scoring more than 7 out of 10 in checks to quality, user experience, accessibility, performance and search engine optimisation.

An organisation's website is its main channel of communication and although the top banks surveyed clearly use this to their advantage, we think many of the others need to up their game.

We reveal the good, the bad and the frankly not very good at all in our survey of the websites of the main players in the consumer finance sector, available on the Sitemorse website. You may prefer the full summary or the detailed data .

In the latest research from Sitemorse, we took a close look at the websites of nearly 250 of the best-known Swiss banks to see which of them were the most efficient.

Like most sectors we survey, the Swiss Banking websites provide a mixed picture, with some much more efficient than others. Since the Internet is now a vital source of information, everybody, especially bank customers and prospective customers, need well-performing websites.

Swiss Banks may still maintain a reputation for secrecy and glamour, but their websites need to be available and working properly 24 hours a day.The full benchmark can be seen on the Sitemorse website.

The rapid move up our chart for Q1 of companies like Costco,Dreams and Claire's Accessories supports this view.

Exceedingly high scores were recorded this time for top-of-table DFS, followed by clothing retailers Anoushka and posh shirtmaker Turnbull and Asser. DFS, with a score of 9.7 out of a possible ten, scores nearly perfectly on Quality, User Experience, Accessibility, Performance and SEO capability.

Our full survey is now available and you can read more at Retail Bulletin.

Latest figures from the IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index reveal that shoppers in the UK spent a total of £6bn online during January, equivalent to £118 per person.

Sitemorse audit reports provide a detailed breakdown of the exact results seen by us when auditing your site, and after the summary page potential problems are listed under a variety of categories, from function and accessibility to performance and spelling errors. 

Long lists of errors within each category  went to second or third pages, but users who did not spot the link (see image above) often could not see later problems. 

Now we have changed the reports so that all errors under a particular category are kept to a single page, which can be scrolled, ensuring all of our users can see all areas of concern in a single screen.

Legislation on making websites accessible was brought in in 2002, and although most - if not all - large organisations have made the right noises on their intentions in this area, Sitemorse continues to find many examples of non-accessible sites in its research.

No serious cases have come forward in the UK, but large companies have always worried that charities or pressure groups would eventually initiate action on  behalf of the large numbers of disabled and partly-disabled people who use screen-readers and other software aids to view websites and who cannot find their way around websites not designed for those aids.

Sitemorse has little sympathy for large organisations who have the resources to improve their sites but who so far have failed to do so, and we regularly hear a litany of excuses - including one from a major retailer who complained we always check their site on the wrong day of the week.

The long arm of the law may finally be catching up with those who could make their sites accessible in hours or days but who never seem to get around to it.