Case Study: Website Rebuild and Search Engine Rankings

The SEO Guy — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 15:01:27 +0000

Fasteners Direct is an Auckland-based company specialising in supply of fasteners & hardware to the construction, building & engineering industries. Their old website was static HTML pages originally done in MS Frontpage, but which basically contained a lot of picture and not much text. We were asked to carry out an SEO Review on 24th Feb 2009, and as part of that, pointed out that the old site really would benefit from need updating.

Managing director Andrew Benton agreed and gave us the go-ahead to rebuild the website in a WordPress CMS so they could easily add / edit content as required. The additional ability to use the blog aspects of WordPress to create news, DIY articles, product reviews and distribute newsletters etc is also a consideration…

We also needed to address the following issues;
Lack of incoming links / lack of keywords in Anchor Text
No robots.txt file
No custom 404 Error Page
No sitemap.xml
Duplicate Titles, Descriptions, Keywords
Etc etc..

At the outset, a benchmark Search Engine Ranking report showed 1 solitary Top 30 Ranking for the old website. The site was duly rebuilt, the previously identified problems were addressed, and the results that have accrued within a few weeks are encouraging… click the images to see the details.

Case Study: Extreme Website Makeover with SEO

The SEO Guy — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:13:07 +0000

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by the nice folks at Flexiscreens® in Tasmania. The site had been live for years and had previously been generating good business. However, things were in a downward spiral, not helped by the global economic downturn. They needed help;

their HTML website was looking old and tired
other people had stolen their content and were getting better rankings
their site’s visibility had slowly diminished

Flexiscreens - the tired old website

An SEO review clearly showed the following serious issues;

Lack of incoming links
No relevant keywords / phrases in link anchor Text
Dduplication of Titles, Descriptions, Keywords
No use of H1, H2 in page headings, and poor keyword targeting
1st paragraphs not targeting specific keywords
Overly long pages
Text hidden in DIV’s containing blatant keyword spam
No sitemaps / robots.txt / 404 Error page handling
Etc!

The plan put forward included keyword research, link building submissions, rebuild into a WordPress CMS, full Search Engine Optimisation on all pages, and attention to all the serious issues noted in the review.

Link building was implemented immediately, as is takes months to reach fruition and is independent of site changes. I.e. all links are to the Domain Name, not internal pages. The site was reconstructed in WordPress CMS, with installaion of key plugins to provide additional functionality. This included All In One SEO, XML Google Sitemaps, Feedburner RSS subscription, WP-Supercache, Simple Tags etc.

Flexiscreens - the new WordPress CMS site

The site went live in 3rd week of February. 301 Permanent Redirection of every old page to the corresponding new page was implemented in .htaccess.

So, one month on, here’s how its shaping up… click Image 1 to view the SE Rankings changes.


Image 1

» Website Extreme Makeover

Case Study: Website Rebuild and Search Engine Rankings

Case Study: Extreme Website Makeover with SEO