We’ve handled Integrated Power Services, or IPS, since they opened their doors in June 2007.  IPS is the nation’s leading independent provider of power services electric motor and generator repair for continuous process industries, such as power generation, petrochemicals, mining and metals.  We created the brand, launched the first website and built an integrated marketing platform that includes advertising, collateral, tradeshows, public relations, direct mail and internal communications.  The new site integrates the former IPS site with the sites of the other IPS companies — IPS Electro-Mec, IPS Monarch, IPS PennCoil and IPS TRICO.

We started working on the new site in January.  It went live on May 30, featuring 100 90-plus pages of content and well over 1,000 images, plus completely revised and optimized coding.  Google has raised the bar on the SEO industry with its new search algorithm, called Panda.  Panda was developed in response to online content farms that were exploiting keywords to game the system, pulling visitors in and showing them ads (their keyword-stuffed content skewed search results and frustrated both Google and its users).

What Google has done, essentially, is tell website developers that search engine rankings are no longer dependent solely on keywords and artificial links.  Henceforth, multiple metrics will determine where your site appears when a user types in a search term, such as “B2B advertising.”  No one single SEO tactic can guarantee a top or high ranking—a top-ranked site needs both “on the page” and “off the page” SEO.

Panda emphasizes content quality as well as quantity in “on the page” SEO.  Sites have to be well written, carefully researched with appropriate keywords and fresh content, i.e., frequently updated and focusing on popular topics.  Coding is still important (and often overlooked, in our experience).  HTML tags, meta descriptions and header tags have to work properly and the site architecture must be well conceived and executed, so search engines can “crawl” easily.  The site has to load quickly.  And the URLs need to be tight with relevant keywords.

“Off the page” SEO includes links to other high-quality respected sites, a strong reputation and shared content on social networks, and the appearance of trust.  When other sites and users link to your site and treat you as an authority, it helps your rankings.

We like Panda because it eliminates purely mechanical efforts at optimization.  Now it’s as much about conversion as it is about traffic, so art counts as much as science.  You can see how this works on the IPS site, as well as how IPS manages to rank so highly in key searches (try looking for “VPI rewinds” or “wind turbine generator repair” and you’ll see what we mean).

Now that the site’s up, the plan moving forward is to continue to add fresh content and news, refining our market-specific focus on key industries.

Visit the new IPS website at www.ips.us.

Posted Monday, July 18th, 2011 at 3:14 pm under: Branding, Design, SEO, Spotlight, What's New @ radii.
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