However, I wanted to put another plug in for the blog because of its uncanny ability to breathe life into a website and  increase your search engine rankings almost immediately.

I don’t know if you have noticed but I have taken a sabbatical from this blog for a few weeks to work on some other projects and my traffic has really died down since I have stopped posting.  Google loves blogs and Google loves bloggers that keep up their blogs.

A website that is not being updated is the equivalent of a building on a main thoroughfare that is not being well kept.  It signals to Google and the others that the site is aging and thus the content on it may be out of date.  In fact, the entire dental practice could be defunct for all they know.  After all, they haven’t seen or heard anything from you in a while.  In most cases Google will decide to move your website off of that main thoroughfare (its search results for those following along at home) and replace it with something that is better kept.

Bottom line — to be a real dentist you have to go to graduate dental school.  But, if you want to watch your website rocket to the top of the search results pages – update it a couple of times a month at the minimum to let those search engines know you are still alive and kicking.

Enter Web 2.0.

I know what you are thinking…   “I am not even Web 1.0 yet, much less Web 2.0.”

Don’t worry, there is an extremely simple way to graduate your dental website into the Web 2.0 era and its name is Wordpress.

Web 2.0 implies that the content of your dental website is fresh, up to date and interactive.  Wordpress gives you all of these things and it is very easy to use (see the video below).

Wordpress spent its younger years perfecting the blogging platform.  The blog you are reading right now is built on the Wordpress platform.  In fact, most of the blogs you are reading are probably built on the Wordpress platform.  It became popular because of the following attributes:

-  It is FREE!

-  It is ridiculously easy to use

-  It is extremely friendly to search engines

-  It is open source and there are tens of thousands of people adding great applications to it every day.

Over the last couple of years Wordpress has become much more than a blogging platform.  It is an entire Content Management System that can be used to manipulate nearly every element of your website with a couple of clicks.

Don’t believe me??  Watch this short video showing you how easy it is to add content to your Wordpress site.

Web 2.0 Advantages of Using Wordpress

Control Your Own Design — Controlling the design elements on your website is just as simple as adding text content. Swap images in and out, add video, change the header image of your site all without knowing a lick of HTML or CSS.

Add Fresh Content — The search engines absolutely love websites that are adding fresh content to the web. If the search engine returns to your website time after time to find the same old stale content, it will not visit very often. The search engine will also start to think of your website as outdated and potentially full of misinformation. This is not the kind of search results Google and the others like to return for the searcher. Adding fresh content to your website using Wordpress is the most healthy action you can be taking for your website.

RSS — RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication.’ RSS is built in to every Wordpress design and it allows you to send your content out to anyone that is subscribing to your RSS feed. It is Web 2.0 at its finest. RSS subscribers can get your content where they want it and when they want it.

For those that are wondering why anyone would want to have your content about the latest piece of dental equipment in your office beamed to them via RSS, you are missing the point. RSS is a way for your content to become portable. It builds links back to your website and alerts search engines and social media sites to the fact that you have a fresh and up to date website.

Plug-Ins —  A plug-in is an application that can be easily added to a Content Management System.  Wordpress has thousands of them.  Add scrolling images, a calendar, a contact form, and virtually anything else you can possibly think of.  If you need it, chances are that someone has already created it and it is available for free.

Check out all of the Wordpress Plugins here.

Below is a link to an example website that is using Wordpress as a Content Management System:

http://www.naplesgreenbuilders.com/

Virtually everything on this site can be manipulated as easily as the text that was shown in the video above.

As always let me know if you have any questions by leaving a comment or contacting me here.

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.

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How did search engines like Google and Yahoo! become so large and powerful without selling any tangible goods? The answer lies in there most prized possession: The Search Algorithm. In order for the search engines to retain customers they must create value for them. They do this by providing the most relevant results for the search terms that are typed in their search engine. If they fail to provide good results, the customers will move on to someone who does.

With the above in mind, small businesses must begin to think like a search engine. Leverage the platform that they provide by playing by their rules. In other words, create a good website that the search engines are proud to serve up to their customers. Unfortunately, many small businesses try to take the easy way out and expect the search engines to dish up a poor website (translation: SPAM sandwich) to their customers.

What is a good website? There is an old maxim in the Internet Marketing field that “content is king.” This is becoming ever more true as the search engines continue to refine their algorithm to exclude that SPAM sandwich. The answer is and always will be to create a site that creates value for people. In my humble opinion this means doing any (or all) of the following:

Entertain Me
Use content to make me laugh, shock me, get my attention.
Inform Me
Use content to teach me something, or make me aware of something of interest to me.
Make Me Money
Use content to show me how to make more money with my business or in my profession.
Save Me Time
Use content to show me how to be more efficient or how to simplify my life.
Protect Me
Use content to make me aware of threats and how to deal with them.

This list is not exhaustive. Feel free to add your own content categories in the comments section of this blog.

Do: Create websites with good content that a search engine would be proud to serve its customers.

Don’t: Think you can create a poor website and expect the search engines to recommend it.