• Home
• About
• Contact

Using HTML to Properly Position your Dental Marketing Keywords

Congratulations!  If you are reading this post you are light years ahead of most of the dentist, family physician, or optometry websites I have reviewed.  The fact is, most people in the professional services industry do not understand how the Internet works, and more importantly, how search engines work.  This post will show you how to go about properly positioning your dental and physician marketing keywords.

First, we must understand how search engines work when it comes to keywords.  Search engines send programs out to “crawl” websites.  These programs (affectionately called spiders) read through the code on your website and then return a copy of that code to the search engine’s index.  The search engine applies its algorithm which, among other things, is looking to categorize your site based on the presence of keywords and keyword placement.

Second, we must understand how HTML works.  HTML is a “mark-up” language.  It is intended to tell a browser (such as Internet Explorer) how to display a web page to the user.  For example, if the text on a page has a <h1> tag around it in the code, the browser will display it as a heading to the user.  The “heading” tag tells the browser that the text wrapped in that tag is important.  This is crucial to understand because search engines also deem text that is wrapped in a heading tag as important and therefore give it extra emphasis when attempting to categorize your site.

Thirdly, we must understand what a search engine spider can and cannot “see”, “crawl”, or index.  This is a pervasive problem among those that don’t understand search engine optimization because many people have gorgeous websites that cannot be viewed by a search engine spider.

The following are some of the things to stay away from:

Flash-  Flash in itself is not bad.  In fact, Google has made great strides to index Flash.  It is not a problem to have a bit of Flash on your site.  The problem begins when website owners design a site entirely in Flash.  If your keyword rich content lies in Flash, chances are a search engine cannot index it.

Images-  If your keyword rich content lies in an image, the search engine cannot index it.  When a search engine encounters an image, the only bit of information it can glean from it, is the alt text that is associated with it in the code.  Keep your content out of images.

PDF’s – Many website owners keep great amounts of keyword rich content in PDF files that are available for download from their website.  Create an HTML version of the PDF content and place it on the site for the search engine’s to index.  If you leave the content if PDF form, you are hurting yourself.

Best practice dictates that you should have all of your content in HTML text for the search engine’s to index.

Ok, now you know what not to do, let’s discuss what you should be doing with your keyword rich HTML text.  Let’s talk about the most valuable “keyword real estate” on a web page.

Refer to the screenshot of the web page I have included below to see a visual representation of each element.  You can see that the dentist that owns the website in the image below is hoping to rank for the terms ‘cosmetic dentist’ and ‘Dr. Keith Warr.’

Here are the most valuable tags on a webpage:

Title Tag -  This is the most valuable piece of keyword real estate on each webpage.  This is the only tag I couldn’t show in the image below.  If you look at the code in your website, it is the text that appears between these two tags:  <title> Example Keyword </title>.

Heading Tags-  <h1> tags are given slightly more weight than <h2> tags and so on down the line.

Strong Tags-  Otherwise known as bold, the <strong> tag gets emphasis in the search engine algorithm.  For example, when I place the term dental marketing keyword tips in <strong> tags on this page, I am telling the search engine’s that this term is important on this page. 

Link Anchor Text-  These are crucial.  If you are confused about what this looks like, be sure to click on the image provided below and find the Link Anchor Text example.  Interlinking between the pages on your site using link anchor text tells the search engine that the linked-to page should be given emphasis for the keywords used to link to it.

Click to enlarge

The search engines use the mark-up in HTML to help them categorize a web page.  Now that you know what they are looking for, give them what they want.

Let me know if you have questions about this or any other post by leaving a comment or contact me in person here.

December 21, 2008    Posted in: Dental Keyword Research

• « Previous post
• Next post »

• Recent Posts

  • Consider the Children in Your Dental Marketing
  • Schedulinx Online Appointment Scheduling Software
  • Real Dentists Own Blogs
  • 3 Pitfalls to Avoid in Your Dental Website Design
  • Good Marketing Starts With a Good Platform: Wordpress as a CMS
  • Is Your Website Design as Well Kept as Your Office Lobby?
  • When Should You Start Applying SEO to Your Dental Website?
  • Video Quick Tip: Does Google Know What You Are All About?
  • The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 4 – Conversions
  • Is SEO in Your Dental Websites Head?

• Contact Us

  Your Name (required)
  

  Your Email (required)
  

  Your Phone (required)
  

  Your Message