When choosing keywords for your website you should follow this 8-step procedure:

1.  Create your root keywords – What does your practice do?  Family Physicals?  Invisalign?  Cosmetic dentistry?OBGYN?  Spine adjustment?  Veneers?  Write down all of the services that your practice provides.

2.  Type each of these root keywords in the free Google Adwords keyword tool.

3. Add keywords that you think are relevant to your dental or physician practice website.  Tip:  Look for “long-tail” 3 and 4 keyword phrases as well as short one and two keyword phrases.  Example:  ’center for cosmetic dentistry’ vs. ‘cosmetic dentistry’. Create a list of approximately of 20 to 30 keywords to start out.

4.  Append the geographic locations, from which you draw your patients, to each of these keywords.  This assumes that someone that finds your website in Buffalo, New York does you no good when your practice is located in Tampa, Florida. For Example:  ’family physician practice tampa fl’ and ‘family physician hillsborough county’ (Tampa’s county.)

5.  Categorize or “theme” your keywords.  For example, place all of your ‘invisalign’ and ‘braces’ keywords in one category or theme and place all of your ‘fillings’ and ‘cavity’ keywords in another theme.

6.  Further categorize your groups of themes into two and three keyword bundles.  This should leave you with somewhere between 10 and 15 keyword bundles.  For example, from the ‘invisalign’ theme, you might have two bundles:

Bundle 1

‘cost of invisalign tampa florida’

‘invisalign price hillsbourough county’

Bundle 2

‘invisalign orthodontist tampa fl’

‘invisalign orthodontics hillsborough fl’

7.  Create a separate web page on your site (do you see why I recommend a blog for your dental or physician website?) that includes these keywords in the content.  These keywords do not have to appear verbatim.  If it is difficult to create text in proper English with the keywords used verbatim, simply use the keywords in the same vicinity as each other.

Use the keywords in your bundles in as many of the following places as possible:

-Title Tag

-Heading Tag

-Strong Tag

-Link Anchor Text

For more information about these tags visit this blog post.

8.  Interlink each page in your “theme” with the others using keyword rich anchor text for the link.  For example if you are linking from the first example Invisalign keyword bundle to the second Invisalign keyword bundle you might use some text like this:

‘Sorensen Dental has been providing Invisalign orthodontics in Hillsborough County, Florida since its inception.  We provide financing for those that are concerned about the cost of Invisalign.  Our Tampa, Florida offices have a kid-friendly atmosphere that extends to our staff, services, and waiting room. ‘

You would use the ‘Invisalign orthodontics in Hillsborough County’ text as a link to your page that concentrates on the second bundle of keywords.  This will funnel relevance to that page for that keyword.  Notice that the keyword ‘cost of invisalign tampa florida’ is not used verbatim but is used as close as the English language will allow.

Do not simply create text that uses these keywords over and over again.  This is considered spamming and could get you banned from the search engines.  Not to mention, it is not readable by your potential patients! Instead, use each keyword two or three times on the page if it is possible but don’t sacrifice the quality of the writing to fit it in that third time.

As always, leave a comment below or contact me directly if you have questions about this or any other issues with your online marketing.

First, we must understand how search engines work when it comes to keywords.  Search engines send programs out to “crawl” websites.  These programs (affectionately called spiders) read through the code on your website and then return a copy of that code to the search engine’s index.  The search engine applies its algorithm which, among other things, is looking to categorize your site based on the presence of keywords and keyword placement.

Second, we must understand how HTML works.  HTML is a “mark-up” language.  It is intended to tell a browser (such as Internet Explorer) how to display a web page to the user.  For example, if the text on a page has a <h1> tag around it in the code, the browser will display it as a heading to the user.  The “heading” tag tells the browser that the text wrapped in that tag is important.  This is crucial to understand because search engines also deem text that is wrapped in a heading tag as important and therefore give it extra emphasis when attempting to categorize your site.

Thirdly, we must understand what a search engine spider can and cannot “see”, “crawl”, or index.  This is a pervasive problem among those that don’t understand search engine optimization because many people have gorgeous websites that cannot be viewed by a search engine spider.

The following are some of the things to stay away from:

Flash-  Flash in itself is not bad.  In fact, Google has made great strides to index Flash.  It is not a problem to have a bit of Flash on your site.  The problem begins when website owners design a site entirely in Flash.  If your keyword rich content lies in Flash, chances are a search engine cannot index it.

Images-  If your keyword rich content lies in an image, the search engine cannot index it.  When a search engine encounters an image, the only bit of information it can glean from it, is the alt text that is associated with it in the code.  Keep your content out of images.

PDF’s – Many website owners keep great amounts of keyword rich content in PDF files that are available for download from their website.  Create an HTML version of the PDF content and place it on the site for the search engine’s to index.  If you leave the content if PDF form, you are hurting yourself.

Best practice dictates that you should have all of your content in HTML text for the search engine’s to index.

Ok, now you know what not to do, let’s discuss what you should be doing with your keyword rich HTML text.  Let’s talk about the most valuable “keyword real estate” on a web page.

Refer to the screenshot of the web page I have included below to see a visual representation of each element.  You can see that the dentist that owns the website in the image below is hoping to rank for the terms ‘cosmetic dentist’ and ‘Dr. Keith Warr.’

Here are the most valuable tags on a webpage:

Title Tag -  This is the most valuable piece of keyword real estate on each webpage.  This is the only tag I couldn’t show in the image below.  If you look at the code in your website, it is the text that appears between these two tags:  <title> Example Keyword </title>.

Heading Tags-  <h1> tags are given slightly more weight than <h2> tags and so on down the line.

Strong Tags-  Otherwise known as bold, the <strong> tag gets emphasis in the search engine algorithm.  For example, when I place the term dental marketing keyword tips in <strong> tags on this page, I am telling the search engine’s that this term is important on this page. 

Link Anchor Text-  These are crucial.  If you are confused about what this looks like, be sure to click on the image provided below and find the Link Anchor Text example.  Interlinking between the pages on your site using link anchor text tells the search engine that the linked-to page should be given emphasis for the keywords used to link to it.

Click to enlarge

Example HTML Tags

The search engines use the mark-up in HTML to help them categorize a web page.  Now that you know what they are looking for, give them what they want.

Let me know if you have questions about this or any other post by leaving a comment or contact me in person here.