British Airways is a well-known and acclaimed international flight service which offers low fares and a comprehensive international network of flights to and from well placed airports. Visitors to the website can book a variety of services such as hotels, flights, cars and more from one central online location. The British Airways website is packed with useful features such as an easy to follow navigation system, online search facility, online booking system, and offers excellent features such as airfares identification, and more. A website analysis of the site has been done and even from an SEO standpoint it makes headways into Internet Marketing. It compares favourably with other airfare booking sites.

The clean looking home page has definitely been designed with the international market in mind as it provides the immediate option for entering the UK, US or site of country. For the purpose of this website analysis we selected British Airways UK. Immediate browsing is available, but if you need to make use of the advanced features you will need to login.

The British Airways website uses the main colours effectively and with a lot of white space and white as a background it succeeds in creating a clean cut look. The homepage and all subsequent pages download fast.

Users often struggle to find out exactly where they are at booking sites, but at this particular website the titles are clearly marked, a site help is provided, the images have Alt tags and navigation is easy through the cascading style sheet menu. A comprehensive sitemap is provided making for good SEO policy as well as quick identification of pages available by the user.

The British Airways website which has been online since July 1998 also provides numerous ways to contact them for more information on a given topic. This is definite plus for such a huge organization as users need to know exactly who to contact for what.

It is not often that you get a comprehensive site help feature. The website is a good example of the customer service level that a commercial airliner should offer. The website help feature provides all the information and step by step guidance required for using plugins, making use of the audio features which are especially helpful for people with reading disabilities, and for setting your page resolution for optimal viewing. Videos are not used which is one of the reasons for the quick loading time. All the internal links are useful and outbound links work properly. Images have been limited to that required for information purposes and are clearly marked.

Browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 and Mozilla Firefox one and up can be used to explore the website. The web design has been done for optimal viewing at 800x600 and 1280x1024 pixels.

One of the really useful features is browse aloud feature which provides a higher level of accessibility for the blind and illiterate users. It allows for an audio version of the website content. Users can download the tool by clicking on the button. Although plugins are not required for most of the functions the site does state that it will highlight content which requires Flash or Acrobat Reader which can also be downloaded by following the appropriate links. A standard web font has been applied to ensure easy reading and the font sizes are adjustable.

The information is current and old or outdated information is not visible. The same format has been used throughout the entire site which is important as users become familiar with the lay-out and content display methods. The site includes terms and conditions as well as disclaimers.

The website analysis also includes a closer look at its SEO features such as the use of Metatags which are present. Keywords have been included and over optimisation avoided. Linking between pages is present. It has a current Page Rank of 8/10 and an Alexa Traffic Rank of 2203 at the time of this evaluation (May 2, 2008). The total number of incoming links from Google is 7640 while there are also 606 incoming links from Yahoo and 3648 incoming links from Alexa. No outgoing links were found.

It currently competes for keywords such as air, airways, British airways, flight services, cheap flights, as well as flights and holidays. A description is present in the Metatags with main keywords present in the title, description and keyword sections. JavaScript has been used.

If you are looking for well designed and SEO optimised site then British Airways is tops. It is also an excellent website for visiting if you want great bargains on airfares, hotel bookings, holiday packages and more. The webmasters have succeeded in creating a fully functional online booking system and advanced features such as audio. The website performs well in terms of Internet Marketing and online customer service.