SEM firm Oneupweb released a new edition of its tracking study of the poor search engine performance of the Fortune 100 websites. Only about one in eight of the Fortune 100 sites prove to be adequately optimized for organic search engine placement, up from one in eleven a year ago and only one in twenty five in 2002. Many of the 100 sites - whether well optimized organically or not - relied on paid search advertising for additional exposure online.

Oneupweb found that fully 42 percent of the sites had what it termed "moderate" optimization, and that a look at where they fell in Google results reflected a partial boost from the limited efforts. The number of sites showing little or no signs of optimization actually increased by one to 45. About 27 percent of sites with moderate optimization saw their URLs show up in the first 10 Google results against the most relevant search - compared to 77 percent of those with full optimization. Only 16 percent of those with limited optimization appeared in the top ten Google results.

To determine how well optimized a site was, Oneupweb looked at meta tags, descriptions, keyword tags, page content and the structure of sites to determine how well they served up content to search engines.