marketing, web development, graphic design blog

Background 

Our client, Flexachem UK Ltd is the UK division for the Flexachem Ireland group. The company manufactures and distributes a range of engineered products for the chemical, petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries.

In 2011 the company set about creating a dedicated UK website at Flexachem.co.uk, whilst leaving the main ‘group’ site hosted at Flexachem.com. The objective of creating a dedicated site was to allow the UK based team to target and promote specific areas of the business aligned to the needs of their local domestic market. 

Studiowide were not only given the task to develop a new website – based on the original format, but we were also commissioned to provide an introductory Search Engine Optimisation  programme in order to establish the new domain name within search engines. 

The challenge

The challenge was getting on page 1 of Google for five chosen keywords. At this stage of the project it was unclear as to which segments of the business would be targeted and by which keywords until a full keyword analysis was undertaken. From doing such an analysis we quickly establish the level of hours required in order to get the new website onto page 1 of Google search results pages.

The solution

Keyword research is the cornerstone to any search engine optimisation (SEO) programme. By conducting some industry analysis and keyword research we were able to determine the competitiveness of certain key word phrases within the industry and target those keywords that had a sufficient level of web traffic. 

Keyword Phrases

There are 7 steps to finding the right keywords:

1) Brainstorm
2) Categorise
3) Research
4) Compile
5) Winnow
6) Determine competitiveness
7) Select

Once we had selected the right keywords the task was to now get the final chosen keywords into the website content. This can also apply to images by way of the image Alt attributes (alt tags).  

We initially conducted our on-page optimisation across the Flexachem website to ‘creatively’ weave in the specific chosen keywords. There is a fine line when conducting search engine optimisation relating to the insertion of keywords. Too many and the main communication and overall message of the website gets affected and watered down, too few and the process becomes futile.

So often we hear this part of the optimisation process referred to as the ‘sprinkling’ of keywords or even worse keyword ‘stuffing’. Getting the right on-page optimisation done, in particularly using keywords in content, is all about the user. Users come first, the final content must make sense to people, not just to search engines, this is why we approach this part of the process whilst inserting the keyword content, with an element of creativity in writing.

Search Engine Optimisation in HTML tags

There are many tags used when coding webpages and there are some tags that when keyword phrases are used within them can help the search engines determine the relevancy of the web page. Such tags are; 

·        Title tags – these are the most useful of all html because search engines give them lots of weight
·        Meta description tags – These should describe the page so that it entices users to click on your listing in the search engines
·        Header tags – These are great places to use keyword rich headlinesAnchor text – this is the words you use in the clickable part of any text link
·        Image alt attributes (alt tags) –  Used when you have image navigation on the website

With the Flexachem website we did not place keywords in all of the potential tags above – we recommend that just because you can put keywords everywhere, it doesn’t mean that you should. Therefore, in this project and in all of our projects, we only use the keywords where it makes the most sense for each page.

Once we had conducted effective on page optimisation we then turned our focus to further content. As part of our web development project for Flexachem we included a news and information feed which could be picked up by newsreaders as a RSS feed. 

RSS feeds are one of the best methods of getting fresh content out to the search engines on a regular basis – this is our number 1 tip for building web site authority within the search engines. Having someone internally who can do this part of the website maintenance is a great advantage. 

However, with this project we opted for the traditional method of backlinking, where we post content onto relevant websites with a URL link back to the Flexachem site.

The results

As with any search engine optimisation project that we undertake our client receives a monthly snap-shot report of how the programme is performing. Within 1 month we had hit one of our objectives with Flexachem. We had achieved a page 1 listing for one of their 5 chosen keywords. Over the 6 month period we achieved listings on page 1 of Google for 4 out of 5 keywords.

At the end of the 6 month project we have firmly established Flexachem within the search engines and provided a platform for further on-going promotions. Our overall objective was met and the client was very happy.