Have a look at this video tutorial and check them out at www.schedulinx.com.

Design Flexibility

The most important thing to consider when getting a new site design is how much out of pocket payment are you going to have to make if you need to make changes to that website.  In many cases, to make even the slightest text change to the website you are looking at several hundred dollars.  If you are needing a design element changed, you will be expected to pay more.

Don’t make this mistake at the outset of your design.  Ensure that you will be able to make periodic updates to your site at the very least.  The ideal situation is that you would be able to add fresh content to the site every other week or so to keep the search engines coming back frequently and ranking your site well.

Getting Too Fancy

Many dental website owners think that they need to “wow” their potential clients with fancy Flash introductions, music or other bombastic elements.

The truth is that your potential clients want to see an image of you and your staff.  They want to see your phone number, address and a map to your location.  They want to have a warm feeling on your site.

Steer clear of “loud” website designs.

Search Engine Unfriendly Sites

In order to be found on a search engine a website must be search engine friendly.  If you are having a website designed, ensure that (at the very least) you are getting:

- Optimized Title Tags (on every page)

- Optimized Meta Description Tags (on every page)

- Optimized <h> tags (on every page)

This will require that your design firm has done a little bit of keyword research for you.

Avoiding these mistakes will help to ensure that you can continue to enjoy your dental website design for years to come.

I found this on RinkWorks and got a kick out of it.  Enjoy.

Doctors’ Comments On Patient Charts:

Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.

On the 2nd day the knee was better and on the 3rd day it disappeared completely.

The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 1993.

Discharge status: Alive but without permission.

Healthy appearing decrepit 69 year-old male, mentally alert but forgetful.

The patient refused an autopsy.

The patient has no past history of suicides.

Patient has left his white blood cells at another hospital.

Patient’s past medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days.

Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.

She has had no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.

She is numb from her toes down.

While in the ER, she was examined, X-rated and sent home.

The skin was moist and dry.

Occasional, constant, infrequent headaches.

Patient was alert and unresponsive.

She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.

I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.

The patient was to have a bowel resection. However, he took a job as a stockbroker instead.

Patient has two teenage children but no other abnormalities.

Skin: Somewhat pale but present.

Patient was seen in consultation by Dr. Blank, who felt we should sit on the abdomen, and I agree.

By the time he was admitted, his rapid heart stopped, and he was feeling better.

The patient was in his usual state of good health until his airplane ran out of gas and crashed.

When she fainted, her eyes rolled around the room.

Patient was released to outpatient department without dressing.

The patient expired on the floor uneventfully.

Hayden: How did you get into this business?

Brett: I have been into computers for a long time. I first went online in 1989 with Prodigy and BBS services, and I found my way onto the internet in 1992. I used it exhaustively for a hobby, but it never occurred to me that I should make a career out of it.

I was living in Oregon and working a crummy office job, when I started to talk to one of my friends about his work. He said he was a developer,
which I first thought was soaking rolls of 35 mm film in trays of chemicals and made photographic prints. We got to talking about online marketing and he told me statistics about how the spending on online advertising would be going through the roof by 2015. I felt my skin tingling with excitement. He thought that I would be talntexd at online marketing, and told me he consider hiring me, but I’d have to learn more about HTML and web technology first. I soon quit my job, enrolled in an internet marketing program at a state university. I got tremendously excited by SEO and online marketing, and I blazed right through the coursework. After graduating from the program, I worked for an SEO agency for 8 months. This January, I quit and started working from home as a freelance Denver SEO and social media marketing consultant. I’ve worked really hard since then – putting in crazy hours – but I have learned and grown a tremendous amount.

Hayden: What advice would you have for people in the professional services industry (doctors, dentists, attorneys, etc) that are not yet online but are looking to get online?

Brett: I would think carefully about a domain name. If you can get an exact match domain name that describes what you do (i.e, ‘HoustonDUIAttorney.com’, ‘MiamiDentist.com’) it can make ranking in Google a lot easier. I have bought a few of these kinds of domains and ranked them very, very easily, with minimal effort. I also recommend that you get a solid, SEO-friendly content management system to help you update your website. Wordpress and Drupal are very good, an there are plenty of programmers around the world who can work on them. Don’t start out with some kind of custom CMS that no one has ever heard of – it will be hard to change in the future.

Another thing you have to consider is that making a high-ranking website takes effort. If you just slap up a quick 4 page brochure site that does nothing but talk about YOU and your company – then you are going to have a hard time getting the links you need to secure a top rakings. Google does NOT want to rank sales-oriented pages in the organic results – they want you to have to buy AdWords. Google wants to rank only the most information-rich sites and pages. So if you want to rank well, you are going to have to provide valuable information that is actually useful to your customers and other professionals. Stuff people will want to link to.

If you are an attorney, consider providing some solid information about the kind of law you specialize in: ‘Common Misconceptions About Personal Injury Attorneys,’ ‘Loopholes in Wyoming’s DUI Laws.’ If you’re a Realtor, make a neighborhood guide or offer a virtual tour of your city in Google Earth. If you’re a dentist, write a blog about running a successful dental practice that OTHER DENTISTS will be tempted to follow and to link to.

Yes, this takes real effort. But there is no “something for nothing” online. It’s just like running a retail store or having a boutique office downtown – appearances, presentation and details really count. If you embrace making a quality website that is full of good content for users… rather than resist the process… search engines will reward you and you will outrank your competitors. You will truly have a #1 website.

If you don’t want make new content and improve your website – that is okay – but you should be prepared to budget substantially for offline advertising and pay-per-click to drive people to take a look at it.

Hayden: What advice would you have for people in the professional services industry that are already online but are looking to improve their visibility online?

Brett: If you have any flair for writing and you have the discipline to make a short article that demonstrates your expertise every month, a blog can be a good way to get more links to your website. These links will directly improve your search engine rankings. Just make sure the blog is hosted on your main domain, not on a subdomain of an external site like Typepad or Wordpress.com. An important thing to remember is that a professional blog probably shouldn’t be a journal where you talk about your business and what is happening around your office. You should share your expertise and try and create content that OTHER dentists, attorneys or doctors will take interest in and want to link to. If you do this consistently (without quitting after 3 months) – and you network with other professionals and gently let them know about your blog, you will be surprised at how much it can help your site “stay fresh” in the search engines. As you have to write about your professional and explain it clearly, blogging will give you a great sense of perspective.

Remember: you wrote detailed professional articles in medcial or law school – so I’m sure a blog will be easy compared to that!

I think that social networking can be a great tool for some professionals to use to build relationships with their colleagues and clients. Some professionals are very skeptical at how something like Facebook or Twitter could help – but social media sites are a powerful new way that people mingle, meet, remember and recommend people. It’s becoming just as important as “real life”! If you join the conversation online and you are authentic and polite about it – you will be surprised at what kind of opportunities and connections will come your way. Make a Facebook account and add the clients and colleagues you feel comfortable connecting with. Just be genuine and talk about your life – and once in a blue moon you can drop a discrete update about your professional work. People will get to know you, like you, and remember you as a real person. And they will come back or recommend you. People are talking online, and it really helps to be a part of the conversation.

Hayden: What are three “nuts and bolts” type activities that someone in the professional services industry could be doing for their own website to increase their visibility online?

Brett: I recommend most professionals get listed the Yahoo! directory, DMOZ, and Business.com . They still seem to be useful for helping to increase your PageRank. Most general directories don’t have much value anymore, Google devalued them in 2007, but it seems like these old directories are trusted and ‘grandfather claused’ in.

I recommend asking everyone you know – friends, family, clients – for links. But don’t start a reciprocal links program (google is on the lookout for those and can ban you) or get a bunch of directory links. This doesn’t work any more.

Another thing you have to consider is your online reputation. It’s important to remember that any single customer can make a negative review about you, that will rank very highly for your personal name or business name overnight. So you have to treat every customer like they were the reviewer from the local newspaper, and fix any grievances or disputes right away.

You also want to consider doing PR and social media marketing to fill the front page of Google up with positive information about your business – BEFORE there is a problem or concern. You can read my online reputation management blog for more insights.

Hayden: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Brett: There is tremendous opportunity for smart professionals who are willing to embrace the web and spend some time exploring and engaging in it. You can’t just hire an SEM firm to 100% take care of everything, it also requires a personal and expert knowledge of your field. If you treat your website as a “necessary evil,” it’s going to be a struggle. If you think of it as an amazing opportunity to generate ongoing leads with just a little bit of passion and creative effort, your website will be a huge success. I know you can do it!

You can reach Brett Borders Denver SEO practice by visiting www.copybrighter.com.

The universal search engine algorithm developed by Google, Yahoo!, and MSN has not been particularly adept at returning good local results for its customer. This has presented both a threat and an opportunity for the Big Three. The threat lies in the prospect of one of the three creating a superior local search algorithm than the other and cornering the market on this growing segment of search. For that matter, whose to say that a start-up or second tier search engine won’t master it and start to gobble up market share. The opportuniy lies in the great rewards that are promised to the search engine that can return better local results. This opportunity has spurred the search engines to invest more research and development into the local search algorithm and interface.

The release in January of the Local 10-pack by Google Maps has raised the stakes of the game. The previous Local 3-pack was garnering complaints from businesses and searchers alike for it’s limited capacity. The 10-pack has put Google in the lead among the big three in Local Search but Yahoo! has shown that they are a formidable opponent in the competition to create the most effective local search algorithm. Although the Yahoo! local interface shows more paid ads and less organic results than similar searches than Google, the results from Yahoo! focus more on reviews.

I Live in Springfield!

Firstly, for those of you that live in the many different cities of Springfield in the United States, GenieKnows has you covered. When you search “dentist Springfield” it will sniff your IP address and return results for your location … something that Google Maps has yet to master.

Proximity Drilling

The GenieKnows map interface is simple to use and makes drilling down to the most relevant location for your search needs easy:

This interface allows you to drill down to the general location you are interested in. No one wants to drive 30 miles in LA traffic to pick up pizza!

Nice Tidy Categories

GenieKnows provides nice, tidy categories related to the search that you have made, just in case you weren’t really looking for pizza. Maybe you actually have a hankering for some Italian food but your fingers just didn’t know it as you were typing.

Yes Sirree, with GenieKnows all of your wishes can come true.

Submit your business to local search and start using the local search engine at GenieKnows.