Multi-million pound turnover company 1st Direct (supplier of swimming pools & spa products) have been working extremely hard with Alphomega to enhance their natural search engine listings along side other aspects of online marketing such as pay per click.

Pay per click has been their core way of generating traffic to the swimming pool website costing thousands of pounds each and every month, sometime every week! Whilst this is profitable to the company their ultimate strategy was to move away from the pay per click and achieve natural positions which could prove to be more cost-effective.

In the last year we have been steadily employing cutting edge SEO tactics to aid this with now fantastic results.

An initial observation made this week showed that they are now receiving an average of 500-600 visitors per day to their website and in the region of 3,000 page views. The majority of this now made of organic click from SEO results.

Fantastic news when this is shown to be more than the business peak the site has ever had - even in peak season. Google traffic alone (excluding other search engines) produced 10x more traffic last week than it did in the same week of last year.

To add to the sucess of this campaign we have compared the complex analytics read-outs for the website with regards to conversion ratios. These show that natural SEO results are producing over twice the conversion rate to checkout of pay per click visitors and over 3x the conversion rate when it comes to the contact us form.

This is yet another demonstration of how the public is tending to favour natural search engine results over paid listings when it comes to purchasing B2C consumer products. Pay per click still does, and always will, have a place for 1st Direct in targeting the very specific and tangent product areas but for the main they are now safe in the knowledge that they will dominate the natural listings and now be paying for every click that comes through.

Below are some examples of results:

• Swimming Pools - MSN
• Swimming Pools - Google
• Swimming Pool Products - MSN
• Swimming Pool Lights - Google
• Above Ground Pool - MSN
• Swimming Pool Filters - MSN
• Swimming Pool Heating - MSN
• Swimming Pool Pumps - MSN

For more information about seo please visit our search engine optimisation page.

As part of the online marketing strategy we have been performing extensive search engine optimisation on the website for phrases in and around 'Office Furniture', 'Office Chairs' and 'Ergonomic Furniture'. Before coming to Alphomega they were no-where to be found in the search engines.

It's still early days for this project but we are delighted to announce some of the search engine positions obtained so far in this extremeley competitive market. Click on the keyword to view the results:

• Office Chairs - Number 5 in Google
• Office Furniture - Number 18 in Google
• Ergonomic Chairs - Number 7 in Google
• Low Cost Furniture - Number 2 in Google
• Italian Office Furniture - Number 2 in Google
• Italian Chairs - Number 5 in Google
• Call Centre Desks - Number 7 in Google

For more information about Space Office Furniture please visit their website - www.spaceofficefurniture.co.uk.

Many modern computers effectively waste up to 90% of clock cycles. What this means is that during normal use e.g. writing emails or browsing the web, your computer is not using anywhere near its full power. Alphomega has many computers in our offices, so we thought we would donate our unused clock cycles to a good cause.

This is known as Distributed Computing. The way this works is when your computer is not maximsising its processor usage, it will run other tasks for another project. The project we have chosen to support is Folding At Home. With many thousand of computers donating spare clock cycles are put together, in reality, it makes one huge global super computer.

Folding At Home is a project that analyzes protein folding and how this is linked to disease and cancer. The Folding At Home project has already had some results from this distributed computing method.

We are very happy to be putting our computers to a good cause when we are not using them fully and glad that we can play a part in medical research.

Too many local competitors get focused purely on sales and neglect the customer service aspects of the web industry including providing confidence to its clients that in fact they can provide high-quality web solutions as shown by their own site.

As you can see we have put a significant amount and time and energy into our site which now boast a series of cutting-edge technologies.

There is a lot of buzz going around about "web 2". Just to create a shiny new web site with the currently fashionable glass effect look and slap in some ajax was certainly not the route we were going to go down with this new Alphomega web site. To use "web 2" is not just about chucking in some fancy effects, its more about the ability to share content in our web site with other applications than just your web browser. Our company news and articles section has dynamic RSS feeds. This enables you to either read the news or articles list on the web site or instead subscribe to our feeds using a RSS reader or web browser that supports live bookmarks. This way you will always be informed or new news or articles without visiting our web site! We have also integrated the hcard Microformat into our Contact Us page. Microformats may be young at the moment but soon you will be able to add our contact details into your email client with the click of the mouse. There are many more exciting Microformats coming as well!

We have been building tabless web sites for a while now, but with our new site we have decided to extend the CSS ability. Now the new Alphomega web site has print styles and also styles to make the page more readable for some users. Clicking on the "enlarge page" link on the top right of any page will switch your web browser to use a larger style sheet with larger text and images. What's even better is that your web browser will keep this "enlarged style" every time you return to our web site, or until you click the "return to normal size" link. We are also planning to add CSS styles for new generation mobile phones as well soon.

We have gone to a great deal of effort to make this web site accessible and valid XHTML and CSS. All pages meet the W3C's accessibility requirements of level AA and most reach AAA. All pages in this web site are valid XHTML 1 Strict as well to boot!

We have used and interesting technology called sIFR. This technology displays the web site to you in the fonts it was designed to use, without the users having to have these fonts installed on their machines. It also means we do not have to use image replacements for headings, which increases this web sites accessibility and reduces download time.

Experienced Developer

We are always on then lookout for talented Web Developers. For successful Web Development, the quality of skills is paramount. We are not looking for a "Jack of all trades" but masters in their fields.

A medium level knowledge of PHP, full knowledge of XHTML, CSS, WAI, Accessibility, W3C Recommendations, and Web Site Semantics is absolutely essential. We are not looking for table based layout coders.

Graphic Design abilities is not required but knowledge and experience with Ecommerce and CMS would be a distinct advantage.

Sales & Account Manager

We require an in-house sales and account manager to develop new relationships with clients as well as maintaining existing relationships to consistently delivery on our promises. You will be highly driven with a pro-active attitude, passionate and with experience of the web industry.

For full job details please contact us

Carl West joins us in the development team bringing 6 years industry experience with him in PHP, ASP.NET, XHTML, CSS, Relational Database Design and a fantastic knowledge of web site accessibility and semantics.

Carl is yet another valued asset to the company and we look forward to him helping us build Alphomega into even more of a success with his dedicated, passion and vibrance.