Is SEO in Your Dental Websites Head?
The “head” of a website is critical to the success of your dental website. This post will show you how easy it is to optimize the “head” of your website for the search engines.
The “head” of your website code contains three extremely important components that should be optimized:
1. Title Tag
2. Meta Description
3. Meta Keywords
Why is the Title Tag Important to Your Dental Website?
The title tag is the most important piece of real estate in your code because the search engines treat it like a signboard that is telling them exactly what that page is about. This tag needs to be optimized using the keyword phrases that you are targeting on that page.
This tag is also the piece of text that will be displayed by the search engines in the search results page (see image below). An optimized title tag will increase the number of times someone will click on your result.
The title tag should be unique on each page, containing keywords that you are targeting on that page and your geographical location. DO NOT have the same title tag on every page of your website!
Example Search Result with Title and Meta Desription Notated
Why is the Meta-Description Important to Your Dental Website?
The meta-description is the text that is very often displayed by the search engines (see image above) in the search results page. An optimized meta-description will increase the number of times someone will click on your result.
The meta-description should be unique on each page, it should read naturally and contain keywords that you are targeting on that page and your geographical location. DO NOT have the same meta-description on every page of your website!
Why is the Meta-Keywords Tag Important to Your Dental Website?
The short answer to this is that the meta-keywords are not important anymore. Search engines used to use this to decide which keywords to display a website for but spammers took advantage of it by cramming it full of keywords that were not relevant to the page. This tag is less important now but it is still good practice to optimize your meta-keywords.
Include keywords that you would like that page to be ranking for in this tag but don’t stress over it too much.
OK… let’s find these tags on your own dental practice website. Use this image and follow the procedure below to find them on your own website:
Website Head Example
Follow this procedure:
1. Navigate to your website
2. View the source code of your website — In Firefox you will use Ctrl + U, in Internet Explorer 7 you will select “Page” then “View Source” and in Safari you will select “View” and then “View Source”. You are now viewing the code that the browser (Firefox, IE, or Safari) uses to determine how to display your site visually.
3. Find the title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tags in your head using the image above as a guide.
At this point you have determined one of three things:
1. You have all of these tags in your head and they look great.
Remedy: Sleep well knowing the head of your website is working while you rest.
2. You have all of these tags in your head and they don’t look optimized.
Remedy: Optimize those tags. See the rest of this post.
3. You don’t have some of these tags in your head.
Remedy: Create those tags and optimize them.
How to optimize your title, meta-description, and meta-keywords tags for Search Engines
You will need to be able to make changes to your code through an editor like Adobe Dreamweaver or you may be using a website Content Management System (CMS) in which case you will need to find the place in your system to change these components. Contact your web professional or contact me here … this is not a big job but it is an important one.
Hopefully you have been reading this blog for a while and have read this post about doing keyword research. If not, no worries — read the post and do some keyword research then return to fix the head of your website.
I also have a video that I will give to you when you sign up for our Free eNewsletter that goes into depth about doing keyword research. You can sign up for the newsletter in the upper right of any page of this site.
If you have your keyword research completed, now is the time to break it out.
Ensure that all of your head tags contain the keywords that you are targeting for that page. It is really that simple. Craft your title and meta-descriptions for both readers and search engines. Don’t just cram them full of keywords.
One tricky thing to consider is that your title tag should be shorter than 64 characters in length to ensure that Google will be able to display the entire tag in their search results. If it is longer, they will crop anything after these 64 characters. The meta-description should be kept to a well written sentence or two that describes the content on that page.
The text in the title and meta-description should not be “salesy” but instead informational. Leave the selling to the call to action on the web page itself.
Let me know if you have questions by contacting me through the form here or leaving a comment on this post.
February 5, 2009
Posted in: High Impact Actions, Website Design
2 Responses
Thanks for the info on the SEO for websites and I have found it to be very valuable in my strategies as well.
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