Our Work - Search Engine Optimization Case Study

Houlon Berman Case Study

Houlon Berman is a law firm with offices in Greenbelt and Rockville, Maryland. The firm's attorneys have vast experience in a variety of different practice areas including civil matters such as domestic relations, divorce, child custody, personal injury, Maryland workers' compensation cases, other general civil litigation and appeals. Houlon Berman had an existing web site that ranked poorly in the major search engines. They contacted WebConnection to improve their existing site's rankings without incurring the costs of a complete redesign.

During our initial consultation, we discovered that the search engine that most people use, Google, was not indexing the Houlon Berman web site. The reason Google was not indexing their web site was because of the strategies and coding techniques that the original design firm had employed. The home page was designed entirely in Flash and therefore the search engines were not able to acquire any useful keywords, links or content from the embedded Flash file. WebConnection added an alternative navigation of html text links to the bottom of the home page. This navigation was linked to the main content areas, including a site map that indexed all of the pages within the site. Search engines were then able to navigate past the home page and into the pages that contained content that they could analyze.

WebConnection also researched keywords and keyword phrases that Houlon Berman's perspective clients would enter into search engines. It was determined that the many law specialties offered by Houlon Berman would be the content that visitors would be searching for. WebConnection modified the content of the site to contain the selected keywords and keyword phrases. WebConnection also incorporated these keywords into the hidden meta tags that the search engines read. Improving the navigation of the web site's home page in addition to the crafting of keyword rich content resulted in the site's traffic more than doubling, while ranking in the top 10 for the following phrases:

Please click on any phrase to show their ranking in Google:

"Houlon Berman"
"DUI Lawyers Maryland"
"Real Estate Law DC"
"Personal Injury Attorney Maryland"
"Divorce Attorneys Maryland"