Date published: 01.09.08 - not release date

British Airways’ website is top of UK airline internet league table

British Airways’ website has been a vital factor in helping it post record profits today (May 16th).

It is the best performing UK airline website in a new league table published today by Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company NetCallidus.

Shockingly, the UK’s second biggest airline by turnover, Virgin Atlantic, sits at fifth place in the table. It is beaten online by low fares rivals such as easyJet.

Analysts at £2 million turnover company NetCallidus compared airlines’ market share by turnover to online traffic levels.

British Airways is the top dog online and in the real world (turnover £8,753m). Its website is the 139th favourite website in the UK.

easyJet is the third biggest airline (£1,797m) yet online claims second place, as the UK’s 149th most popular website.

TUI and Thomas Cook take third and fourth places online, pushing Virgin Atlantic into fifth as the UK’s 682nd favourite website.

The MD of NetCallidus, Mark Furber, has been a professional search engine optimiser for 11 years, and said it was easy to see why britishairways.com performs well.

He said: “In a nutshell, traffic from search engines comes down to how many pages you have indexed, and how many quality links are pointing at those pages.

“The BA website has significantly more pages indexed in Google (147,000 in comparison to Virgin’s 3,240), which means it has a much higher chance of being found for different search terms typed in.

“The BA website also has a significantly higher number of inbound links found in the search engines (214,192 in comparison to Virgin’s 24,674), which are of a higher quality as well.”

The firm compared published turnover figures of the airlines to their three month UK performance on web stats website Alexa.com.

The full figures are:

Rank -> Airline -> Turnover (m) -> Website -> Alexa UK rank
1 -> British Airways -> £8,753 -> britishairways.com -> 139
2 -> easyJet -> £1,797 -> easyjet.com -> 149
3 -> TUI -> £1,017 -> thomson.co.uk -> 387
4 -> Thomas Cook Group -> £1,785 -> thomascook.com -> 439
5 -> Virgin Atlantic -> £1,912 -> virgin-atlantic.com -> 682
6 -> BMI -> £905 -> flybmi.com -> 851
7 -> Jet2 -> £239 -> jet2.com -> 1,066
8 -> Flybe -> £367 -> flybe.com -> 1,089
9 -> Monarch Airlines -> £445 -> flymonarch.com -> 1,507
10 -> XL -> £325 -> XL.com -> 2,770

NetCallidus is a strategic search engine marketing company, employing 32 people at Sywell Aerodrome in Northamptonshire.

Its clients include Dunelm Mill and York Fitness.


NOTES TO EDITORS:

• For any further information or interviews please contact Paul Green on 08452 303049, or e-mail press@publicityheaven.com
• You can download press resources at www.netcallidus.com/press