The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 1 – Content

This is the most important set of articles I have ever created and if you are a member of my email list you received this via email.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is not difficult, your office assistant could be making drastic improvements to your website from their desktop computer spending approximately an hour a day.

The fact is that professional SEO’s do not want you to know that you or your office assistant can improve the visibility of your dental website easily.

SEO boils down to four categories: Content, Crawlability, Connection and Conversion. I call these the Four C’s of SEO because if your dental practice is spending time working these into your online marketing strategy, you are doing everything that a professional SEO would do.

Content

The first issue on the checklist for the first of the Four C’s is that there is actually content present on the site.

Content is king. This is something you will hear most professional SEO’s saying when they are evaluating a website. It’s true… if you have nothing for the search engine’s to index (AKA spider, crawl, “sink their teeth into”) you will have nothing that can POSSIBLY show up in their search results.

Add Content to Your Website

When I say add content, I mean keyword rich HTML text that the search engines can:

1. Crawl

2. Index

3. Return as search results when potential patients need a root canal.

This is why I am a huge advocate of blogging on your dental website. A blog is an easy place to add content and if you use an easy platform like Wordpress you or your office assistant can be adding SEO friendly content at the click of your mouse.

If you don’t have a blog or have no interest in blogging you should add content to the HTML pages on your site. Do some keyword research and find out what people are typing into Google when they are looking for your services and especially in your location.

Bottom Line — If you have no HTML content for that search engine to see, you can forget about getting any traffic through a search engine.

Do you want to know what Google sees when they visit your website? Click on this link, type in the name of your domain and see what Google sees. Essentially this tool is returning everything that a search engine spider can see when it visits your website.

Here is a good example website: Dallas Dental Spa This site has lots of flaws from an online marketing point of view but it does have a lot of content in HTML. The content does not contain any targeted keywords (Do some keyword research!) but at least there is lots of HTML content present for the search engines to index.

Unique Content

The second issue is that the content that is present on the site should be unique. Yes — that’s correct, search engines do not like to have duplicated content in their index.

Imagine this… you run a search in Google for the following keyword phrase:

‘are dental veneers painful?’

When you click on the 1st result returned in Google you find an article that talks in depth about the veneer process but does not address your question about the relative pain that you can expect from having the procedure done. You hit your Back button and head to the 2nd result. WHAT! This is the same article that you just saw but on a different website. You leave Google and head over to Yahoo for some better service. Google doesn’t like that.

To avoid your leaving for their competitor Google is going to penalize sites that have duplicated content either on their own site or a duplicate of any other content they have indexed on the web.

If you have duplicate content on your site you run the risk of that content being filtered out of the search engine’s index.

Do you want to find out if there are duplicated versions of your web content on the Internet? Try this tool… just type in the name of your site and check the results.

Fresh Content

The search engines have a big job to do. Each day there are 100’s of thousands of web pages added to the Internet. They have to separate the good from the bad and ugly.

One of the ways that they do this is by giving preferential treatment to websites that update their content frequently. When a site is keeping its content fresh it tells the search engine the following:

- The site is probably not SPAM

- The site probably has up to date information

- The site is being maintained by a business that is still operating

Search engine’s DO NOT want to return SPAM, outdated information, or sites associated with businesses that are no longer in operation. Your dental practice can send a signal that you have a vibrant, up to date website associated with a thriving business simply by updating your content. Again… do you see why I advocate for blogging?

Next week… we dive head first into the 2nd of the Four C’s — Crawlability. Sign up for our free eNewsletter (upper right corner) to receive the next installment via email.

UPDATE: The second of this four part series about the crawlability of your website is located here.

As always, let me know if you have questions or comments by leaving a comment or contacting me via the web form.

January 19, 2009 Posted in: Create Great Content, Four C's of SEO