When Should You Start Applying SEO to Your Dental Website?
Question: When is the best time to start applying good SEO techniques to your website?
Answer: Before it is designed.
Search Engine Optimization is done best when it is incorporated into the design from the beginning. You can create a lot of extra work for yourself (or the firm you hire) if the design elements of the site are not SEO friendly. This post will detail what should be considered when planning the design or redesign of your dental practice site.
Design Elements with SEO Impact
Navigation —
Think of your navigation as huge highway signs that say “This way to information about our dental services” and “Exit here to find a biography of the dentist.”
When navigation is not considered at the design phase it can cause some serious problems. Your navigation needs to be “crawlable” and if you have been following the blog or getting the newsletter for any length of time you know that this means HTML text navigation. Use of images or javascript to display your navigation will negate the search engines ability to see your highway signs.
The other issue we see with navigation is the site architecture. Every truly important page should be linked to from the home page. If the page is too many clicks away from the home page it will be discounted by the search engine at best and not crawled at all at the worst.
Use of Flash or Images -
Although Flash is rumored to be crawled and indexed by search engines, it is not recommended that you build your site entirely in Flash. For one thing, visitors without Flash installed will not be able to view your site. As for the SEO impact, the search engines are still in the infancy of indexing Flash and my recommendation is only to use it for effect but not for displaying content.
Images are also unable to be indexed. If your content is contained in images, the search engine will not be able to view this text and therefore will not be able to display it in the search results.
Use of Content Management System -
This element is deserving of an entire post to itself because there are 100’s of different CMS systems. A Content Management System (CMS) is software that is installed on your server that gives you a User Interface to upload images, change text, and otherwise manipulate the site without needing HTML or CSS skills. They are great if you use the right one!
If you are using or plan to use a CMS you should check around to ensure that it is SEO friendly. At the very least you need to be able to do the following through your User Interface:
- Manipulate Title Tags
- Manipulate Meta-Description
- Add content to pages, including the home page
Also, if you are unable to get FTP access to your server, you should reconsider using that CMS. That goes double if you cannot do the three things listed above.
I am a huge advocate of using the Wordpress CMS to design your entire dental practice website.
Ability to Manipulate Meta Information -
As I mentioned in the CMS section, you will need to be able to manipulate all of the elements in the head of your website. This includes title tag, meta-description, and meta-keywords. Check out this post for more information on this subject
Use of Frames -
If your new or existing design is frame based this should throw up a big red flag. If your site was recently designed it is probably not in framesets but I have seen a few cases of newer designs incorporating frames as well.
To check if you are in frames:
1. View the Source Code of Your Website (View > Source in IE and Safari and Ctrl+U in Firefox)
2. Use Ctrl + F to find the text “frames”
If you find that the word frames appears in your source code and it is not part of your text content, contact me here and I will have a look for you.
Don’t make the mistake of considering the search engine marketing of your website after your design or redesign. Ensure that the design firm that you hire has a good answer to all of the questions raised by the above.
As always feel free to contact me any time by clicking on the NEED HELP? button in the top navigation or leave a comment on this post.
February 19, 2009
Posted in: Website Design
2 Responses
Is Your Website Design as Well Kept as Your Office Lobby? | The SEM Firm - February 23, 2009
[...] typical dental practice website is not a major project. At The SEM Firm, we charge $1500.00 for a professionally designed site that is SEO friendly. Most designers will be in the same price range. This is a significantly lower cost than you [...]
Well written and and got some very good points regarding SEO
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