8 Tips for your Dental Practice Blog

In one of my previous posts about why your dental practice should be blogging, I promised that I would offer some blogging tips. Here are 8 tips that will make your blog more visible on the internet.

Make it informative

There are numerous reasons for making your blog informative, not the least of which is that you will want those that land on your blog to find it useful. This will increase the chance that they will subscribe to your blog, bookmark it, or otherwise become regular readers.

Another, less obvious, reason for making your blog informative is that it will attract links. Remember that links are the currency of the internet search engine. Search engines count each link that comes to your site from another site as an editorial vote for your site. When you create informative and useful content, you are more likely to garner links for your site. This will increase your search rankings.

Use Wordpress

I could write an entire post about why you should use Wordpress and perhaps I will in the future. However, I will cast a vote for Wordpress in this post due to the “search engine friendliness” of the platform. You can install the All-in-One SEO Pack on your blog and manipulate all of the tags you will need to create search engine friendly blog posts. Other useful plug-ins are the Google Analyticator, and XML Sitemap plug-ins. Wordpress is free and has an enormous community of support built around it.

Install the All-in-One SEO Pack

I wanted to mention this plug-in a second time in this post for emphasis. The All-in-One SEO Pack gives you the ability to manipulate your title, meta-keywords, and meta-description tags in the blog post. This is extremely important as the title tag is the most valuable piece of keyword real estate on your web pages and the meta-description tag are important for improving the click-through rate in the organic search results pages.

Read more about title tags and meta tags for dental websites here.

Interlink Your Posts

Directly above the heading for this section I linked to another blog post on this blog with the link anchor text “title and meta-tags for dental websites.” I did that for two reasons. For one, I think that you will find the linked-to blog post very informative when it comes to best practices for building your website in a search engine friendly manner. The second was to lend “relevance” for that page on my blog for the keywords ‘title tags for dental websites’ and ‘meta tags for dental websites.’ By interlinking from my own blog using keywords as the anchor text I can help to boost the ranking of the linked-to web page for the keywords I used in the link anchor text.

Install the blog on the same domain as our website

If it is possible to do so, it is advisable to install the blog in a sub-directory of the root of your website rather than on a sub-domain of the website. For example:

blog.dentalwebsite.com (Good)

-or-

dentalwebsite.com/blog (Better)

Why? It boils down to links, as most things do in the search engine optimization world. It is hotly debated that links to a sub-domain (First example) may not pass as much “link authority” to the root domain as they would if the incoming links were pointed at a sub-directory on the root domain (Second Example.)

Do Some Keyword Research

You cannot hit your target if you don’t know what you are aiming at. You need to do some keyword research. Follow the steps in this article concerning how to do good keyword research. Once you have finalized a list of keywords you can begin creating blog posts around those keywords. Don’t shoot for the moon right away, start out going after 3 and 4 word keyword phrases and move on from there. A blog is an excellent way to create lots of keyword rich content for your dental website.

Plan Your Posts

Sit down at your computer and, instead of writing a blog post, plan your next five. This will ensure that your topics are of higher quality. Set up a schedule and research the topics before you post. Save the posts as drafts in your blogging platform and return to them often to make updates and add information. Post on a regular schedule so that your audience becomes familiar with the days that you will add fresh content to the blog.

Share the Link Love

If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that there is nothing more important than garnering links to your dental website to improve your web presence in the search engines. With that in mind, be sure that you link out to other blogs and authorities in the dental community when you write your blog posts.

Search engine’s like to see that you are linking out to others. <– That link is a prime example . It proves you are referencing others in your content. I should caution you, however, that when you link out to others you are, in effect, endorsing that web page. Investigate the site to ensure that it is “link-worthy” before you go casting a vote for their content.