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 The search engine will also start to think of your website as outdated and potentially full of misinformation.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.

Most dental practices understand that the first impression made in the office lobby is an important one.  What most dental practices don’t realize is that increasingly, that first impression is being made online by your website.

Too many dental practices have web designs that are unappealing or content on the website that is outdated.  And for those that don’t yet have a website for their dental practice, it is certainly time to make the move.

Although your new patient may come to you via telephone, there is a good chance that they checked you out on the web first.  What did they find when they did so?  You should be able to say with confidence that they found your dental website to be professionally designed, up to date and easy to use.

If you cannot say that, you should consider a redesign of your website.  Potential clients do not call you when they choose to go somewhere else because of the quality of your website.  They simply move on.

Redesigning a 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 will incur from losing even one or two potential patients.

As always, you can contact me here or leave a comment on this post.

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.

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.