The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 3 – Connection
What is the one thing that makes the Internet a more powerful medium than any other that has come before it?
Interactivity.
This is the third of the Four C’s of Professional SEO. If you have not read the other posts I would encourage you to start from the beginning by reading the first two C’s — Content and Crawlability.
The Internet gives us the ability to interact and connect to other individuals and organizations anywhere on the planet with a few keystrokes. Your ability to create a network of connections on the Internet will be paramount to the success of your website.
Why?
The search engines have placed a lot of algorithmic stock in what I call your “footprint” on the web. Your “footprint” on the web consists of all of the connections that the search engine spiders find that can be attributed back to your contribution to the world wide web.
How the Search Engine Spiders Work
Notice that in my definition of footprint I used the term “contribution.” Search engines are in the business of finding and ranking websites based on their usefulness to the searcher. Your network of connections acts as a gauge of the popularity of your website content, business, and brand on the Internet.
A lack of connections on the Internet indicates your lack of “contribution” to both the Internet and the physical world to the search engines. If you are not creating connections your website and your business must not be worthwhile and is thus unworthy of being displayed in search engine results.
The “spiders” are programs that scour the web at all hours of the day returning information to the search engines index. The main objective of the spiders is to gather information and return it to the index to be categorized. For example – “This page is about dental veneers and this other page is about crowns and bridges.”
At the same time, the spider is also indexing any connections that they find that can be attributed to another website on the Internet and returning that information to the index.
How to Get Connected
Inbound Links
An inbound link is any link that is pointing to your website from another website on the Internet. As a rule of thumb “any link is a good link.”
However, all links are not created equal.
- You should be looking to garner links from websites that are relevant to the content on your website.
- You should be looking for links from pages on the Internet that other people are linking to.
-Â You should be looking for links where one domain is linking to you but you are not linking back to them. Known as one-way links.
- You should be looking for links that do not have the no-follow attribute appended to them. For more information about the no-follow tag read here.
Outbound Links
An outbound link is a link from your website to another website. This is a great way to make connections on the Internet. Since website owners understand the importance of having inbound links to their website, linking out to other websites is a great way to get noticed and drum up a connection.
The search engines are also beginning to rank sites based on whether or not they share “link love” with other sites. If a site would be useful to the users of your website, then link to it. 
Citations
A citation is similar to a link except it doesn’t necessarily need to have an actual hyperlink to your website. Any time your dental practice or your name is found by the spider along with the address and phone number of your practice you receive a citation.
Citations are important because each time one is found it reinforces the confidence that the search engine has in the location of your website. A search engine DOES NOT want to return local search results with an incorrect address or phone number. More citations that are consistent with what they have seen before will lead to an increased chance of your site being displayed in local search results.
Check out this oral surgery practice that has 38 citations noted in the Google Local Business Center.
Citation Example in Google
Reviews of Your Practice
Reviews of your dental practice online indicate that you have a thriving practice. Encourage your patients to review your practice in Google Maps or Yahoo Local.
Social Media
What’s all they hype about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?
Connections.
You should be using these as outlets to create connections that the search engine spiders can use to verify that you and your practice are active on the Internet and open for business. At the very least create profiles for you and your practice at the aforementioned social networking websites.
Forums and Blogs
Making it a habit to post useful information in forums and on blogs that are relevant to your dental practice is a great way to make connections online. Do not SPAM. Forums and bloggers have no tolerance for SPAM and it will create a bad reputation for you and your practice if you give in to this temptation. Consider regularly posting on Yahoo Answers or adding your expertise to a Wikipedia article.
It Won’t Happen Overnight
The Internet is known for moving at high speed but your “footprint” won’t grow as quickly as you hoped it would. I promise you that. I will also promise you that if you stick to the above practices for several months it will start to pay dividends.
Search engines are on a constant quest to find the 10% (that might be being too generous) of content on the web that is useful amongst the 90% that is useless. Creating a website that is useful to your user will ultimately lead to connections. Do you see why I advocate blogging on your dental website?
I hope that you have found this content useful and if you have I encourage you to increase our “footprint” by linking to our website or passing the word along to friends and colleagues.
The next of the Four C’s is more important than all of the others combined – CONVERSIONS. Look for it next week on the blog or sign up for the free newsletter if you would like to receive it via email.
February 3, 2009
Posted in: Build Links to Your Site, Four C's of SEO
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The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website - Part 2 - Crawlability | The SEM Firm - February 6, 2009
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