The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 3 – Connection
What is the one thing that makes the Internet a more powerful medium than any other that has come before it?
Interactivity.
This is the third of the Four C’s of Professional SEO. If you have not read the other posts I would encourage you to start from the beginning by reading the first two C’s — Content and Crawlability.
The Internet gives us the ability to interact and connect to other individuals and organizations anywhere on the planet with a few keystrokes. Your ability to create a network of connections on the Internet will be paramount to the success of your website.
Why?
The search engines have placed a lot of algorithmic stock in what I call your “footprint” on the web. Your “footprint” on the web consists of all of the connections that the search engine spiders find that can be attributed back to your contribution to the world wide web.
How the Search Engine Spiders Work
Notice that in my definition of footprint I used the term “contribution.” Search engines are in the business of finding and ranking websites based on their usefulness to the searcher. Your network of connections acts as a gauge of the popularity of your website content, business, and brand on the Internet.
A lack of connections on the Internet indicates your lack of “contribution” to both the Internet and the physical world to the search engines. If you are not creating connections your website and your business must not be worthwhile and is thus unworthy of being displayed in search engine results.
The “spiders” are programs that scour the web at all hours of the day returning information to the search engines index. The main objective of the spiders is to gather information and return it to the index to be categorized. For example – “This page is about dental veneers and this other page is about crowns and bridges.”
At the same time, the spider is also indexing any connections that they find that can be attributed to another website on the Internet and returning that information to the index.
How to Get Connected
Inbound Links
An inbound link is any link that is pointing to your website from another website on the Internet. As a rule of thumb “any link is a good link.”
However, all links are not created equal.
- You should be looking to garner links from websites that are relevant to the content on your website.
- You should be looking for links from pages on the Internet that other people are linking to.
-Â You should be looking for links where one domain is linking to you but you are not linking back to them. Known as one-way links.
- You should be looking for links that do not have the no-follow attribute appended to them. For more information about the no-follow tag read here.
Outbound Links
An outbound link is a link from your website to another website. This is a great way to make connections on the Internet. Since website owners understand the importance of having inbound links to their website, linking out to other websites is a great way to get noticed and drum up a connection.
The search engines are also beginning to rank sites based on whether or not they share “link love” with other sites. If a site would be useful to the users of your website, then link to it. 
Citations
A citation is similar to a link except it doesn’t necessarily need to have an actual hyperlink to your website. Any time your dental practice or your name is found by the spider along with the address and phone number of your practice you receive a citation.
Citations are important because each time one is found it reinforces the confidence that the search engine has in the location of your website. A search engine DOES NOT want to return local search results with an incorrect address or phone number. More citations that are consistent with what they have seen before will lead to an increased chance of your site being displayed in local search results.
Check out this oral surgery practice that has 38 citations noted in the Google Local Business Center.
Citation Example in Google
Reviews of Your Practice
Reviews of your dental practice online indicate that you have a thriving practice. Encourage your patients to review your practice in Google Maps or Yahoo Local.
Social Media
What’s all they hype about Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?
Connections.
You should be using these as outlets to create connections that the search engine spiders can use to verify that you and your practice are active on the Internet and open for business. At the very least create profiles for you and your practice at the aforementioned social networking websites.
Forums and Blogs
Making it a habit to post useful information in forums and on blogs that are relevant to your dental practice is a great way to make connections online. Do not SPAM. Forums and bloggers have no tolerance for SPAM and it will create a bad reputation for you and your practice if you give in to this temptation. Consider regularly posting on Yahoo Answers or adding your expertise to a Wikipedia article.
It Won’t Happen Overnight
The Internet is known for moving at high speed but your “footprint” won’t grow as quickly as you hoped it would. I promise you that. I will also promise you that if you stick to the above practices for several months it will start to pay dividends.
Search engines are on a constant quest to find the 10% (that might be being too generous) of content on the web that is useful amongst the 90% that is useless. Creating a website that is useful to your user will ultimately lead to connections. Do you see why I advocate blogging on your dental website?
I hope that you have found this content useful and if you have I encourage you to increase our “footprint” by linking to our website or passing the word along to friends and colleagues.
The next of the Four C’s is more important than all of the others combined – CONVERSIONS. Look for it next week on the blog or sign up for the free newsletter if you would like to receive it via email.
February 3, 2009
Posted in: Build Links to Your Site, Four C's of SEO 
One Comment
No Brainer Link from a “Do-Follow” Dental Directory
Links make the internet go-round and here is a free do-followed link from a dental directory that each and every dental office should be taking advantage.
Remember that search engines use inbound links to determine which pages on the Internet are valuable and therefore are worth displaying as search results. The more links you can garner that are pointing at various pages throughout your website, the more trustworthy your site becomes in the eyes of the search engines.
All links are not created equal. Some links have a “no-follow” attribute appended to the code. This tells the search engine that despite the presence of a link, the link is not indicative of an endorsement of the website that the link is pointing at.
The link you will gain from DentistryOffice.com does not carry the no-follow attribute and is therefore a do-follow link.
As I say in the title of this post… it’s a no brainer. Take advantage of this free link by navigating to the directory at www.dentistryoffice.com and entering in the information for your dental practice.
January 28, 2009
Posted in: Build Links to Your Site One Comment
The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 2 – Crawlability
This is the second part of a four part series of posts that reveals what professional SEO’s know about search engine marketing and you could easily learn. You can drive more patients to your dental practice if you understand the Four C’s of SEO. You or your office assistant could apply these strategies about an hour a day and see major improvement in the patients you are receiving from your dental website.
The first post about the importance of SEO Content is here and I recommend that you read it first.
Crawlability
The second of the Four C’s is Crawlability. In the previous post we discussed that if you have no content for the search engines to index you will have zero probability of being returned as a search result. The same is true for Crawlability. If you are creating “speedbumps” or “walls” for the search engines to navigate over or through to index your content, you are increasing the probability that search engines will not index your site and thus you will have zero probability of being returned as a search result.
Here are some things to avoid:
Frames
A website that is built in frames cannot be indexed by a search engine. You can see a great example of a site that is in frames here: Roger Washington Dentistry. When you visit the site you may think that it looks fairly normal. But to a search engine it does not. Try clicking on the “Office Information” link on the left of Dr. Washingtons site. You will notice that the URL does not change from rogerwashington.com to rogerwashington.com/officeinformation.
This is because all of the content for this site is being pulled from a frameset. If your site is in frames, you have erected a wall for the search engines and they are not able to climb it.
Remedy: If your site is in frames, this is a relatively easy redesign procedure. It should be fairly cheap and painless to get your content out of frames.
Flash
Although Google has lately released information claiming that they can now index Flash content, it is not a good idea to have your ENTIRE site built from Flash. This is a speedbump and if you are having trouble getting your site indexed, this could be the reason.
In addition, if a visitor comes to your site and does not have Flash installed on their machine they will not be able to view your content.
Remedy: Consider a redesign that will create an HTML version of your site to be displayed if someone (like a search engine spider) visits your site and doesn’t have Flash installed.
Robots.txt File
The robots.txt file is a file on your site that a search engine will visit when it hits your site (if one is present.) Don’t be afraid of the technical name. The “Robots file” is simply a place that a search engine spider visits to determine if there are any pages on your website that you DO NOT want the search engine to put in it’s index.
For an example visit the “Robots File” on my website: www.thesemfirm.com/robots.txt
Here is what you find:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
The first line says (in code) “Attention All Search Engine Spiders”
The second line says (in code) “Feel free to visit and index any page on this site”
If your robots.txt file says:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
you are saying (in code):
“Attention all Search Engine Spiders (first line), Go Away! (second line)”
The robots.txt file can get tricky if the person who created your website wanted to exclude many different files from being indexed for any reason. If you need help interpreting your “Robots file” contact me and I will be happy to help.
Remedy:Â If your robots.txt file is not allowing search engines to index your site, change it to reflect what I have in mine.
XML Sitemap
The three reasons above are the most common problems that we encounter with Crawlability. The best way to determine if you site is being crawled is to follow the instructions in this 2 minute video about verifying that you are in Google and Yahoo’s index.
If you have determined that your website is crawlable, you should move on to improving that crawlability by adding an XML Sitemap. Don’t be afraid of the word XML, I am going to give you a link to a free tool that will create this file for you in the XML programming language. You won’t ever need to know or care what XML means. 
An XML Sitemap is a road map for the search engine to find all of the pages on your site quickly and easily. Remember that the search engines have a huge job to do. They have to index billions of pages on the Internet and adding an XML Sitemap will:
- Increase the depth that they crawl your site
- Increase the frequency that they crawly your site
These are good things. Get your free XML Sitemap by using this tool and let me know if you have any problems.
Upload your sitemap to your website at the same level (directory) that your home page is located.
If your trying to figure out whether your site is indexed at all and thus may be having crawlability issues, have a look at this video.
Let me know if you have questions by contacting me here.
UPDATE: The third of the Four C’s concerning links to your dental website is located here.
January 25, 2009
Posted in: Four C's of SEO 3 Comments
Video Quick Tip: Is Your Dental Website Well Connected?
Links and the Search Engine Algorithm
–FYI… For those that receive the Free Email Newsletter, this is the post I was referring to in the video that was sent out.–
This video post tells you why inbound links are important and shows you how to check your links on Yahoo. In the video below, I demonstrate how to check the number of inbound links you have and the number that your competitor has as well.
Inbound links can explain a lot about the reason that your website is ranking above or below another website in the search engines. Remember that search engines have to manage information from billions of web pages. They cannot do this manually. Therefore, they create algorithms that allow them to automate the ranking of a website.
One of the most important aspects of the search engine algorithm is “link popularity.”
It is very similar to the method that we use to determine which businesses are trustworthy and which businesses are unproven.
For example — When you need your car repaired you are more likely to choose a mechanic that has been in business for a longer time versus one that has been in business a short time. You are more likely to choose a business that someone else has recommended to you rather than one you have never heard of.
Similarly, a potential dental patient will base some of their decision about which dentist they prefer on the length of time they have been in practice and whether they have been recommended by someone.
The search engine applies the same criteria to web pages automatically through the use of it’s algorithm, and more specifically the “link popularity” portion of the algorithm.
The search engine is more likely to show results of web pages that have been online longer (accumulated lots of links) versus one that been online a short time (accumulated few or zero links.) The search engine is more likely to show results that someone else has recommended (accumulated lots of links) rather than one it has never heard of (accumulated few or zero links.)
In essence, they are attempting to mimic what we do as consumers when we are deciding with whom we would like to do business or from whom we want to get our information.
It is the invention of this portion of the algorithm that allowed Google to usurp Yahoo! as the search engine of choice. Although Yahoo! has since begun incorporating this into their algorithm, the head start that Google achieved by being the inventor has kept it in the lead.
Want to know how many links you have pointing to your website? Watch this video and apply what you learn. Let me know if you have questions by contacting me here or leaving comments on the blog.
6 Minute Video – How to Check Your Links
January 21, 2009
Posted in: Build Links to Your Site, Video Quick Tips No Comments
The Four C’s of Professional SEO for your Dental Practice Website – Part 1 – Content
This is the most important set of articles I have ever created and if you are a member of my email list you received this via email.
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.Â
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
-Â The site probably has up to date information
-Â 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:Â 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.
January 19, 2009
Posted in: Create Great Content, Four C's of SEO 3 Comments
Video Quick Tip: Do Google and Yahoo Know you Exist?
I often hear the following statement from dentists that are concerned about their website — “I am not even in Google!” If you have found yourself wondering if you are being noticed by Google or Yahoo! you need to watch this video. Learn how to ensure that you are on Google and Yahoo’s radar.
If you want to ensure that you are in Google’s index watch this video tutorial and see for yourself. If you find that you are actually not in Google’s index, read on. If you see that all of your pages ARE indeed indexed, get cracking on getting results on those keywords by reading this blog and setting yourself or your office assistant into action!
Ok, so if you are reading this part you didn’t see any pages returned when you did the site: command in Google or Yahoo. Don’t panic.
Here are some questions to ask yourself:
1. Is my site brand new? If it is 3 months or older it should be in the index by now.
Remedy: Award your website at least one backlink. A backlink is a link from any other domain on the Internet that is indexed. In other words, it is any other site linking to your site. The easiest way to accomplish this is to post an answer on Yahoo! Answers and drop a link to your website in the “Source” field. You could also post on popular forums and drop a link back to your website. Be careful that you do not SPAM these forums or Yahoo! Answers.
2. Is my site 100% Flash? Although Google has recently announced that it can index Flash… if your stie is 100% built in Flash it could be causing you indexing problems.
Remedy: You should contact an SEO professional and web designer about this. Consider adding an HTML alternative to your website that is SEO Friendly.
3. Have I done anything “shady” with my website that would get me banned? Have you been paying for links? Stuffing your code with keywords? Showing the search engines one version of your site and the visitor another version?
Remedy: You can file a reinclusion request with Google by installing Google Webmaster Tools here and Yahoo here. They will review your claim and make a judgement as to whether to reinclude you in their index.
There are some cases where this can get complicated, if you run into problems you can contact me here or leave a comment and I will be happy to help.
January 11, 2009
Posted in: Video Quick Tips 2 Comments
Do Something… Anything but Sit Idle!
Isaac Newton’s first law of motion applies to business — “a body in motion tends to stay in motion.” With the economy in this dismal state it is those practices that take action to increase their visibility to new, high-dollar patients that stand to gain.
Your reading this blog because you understand that internet marketing is the way to bring in new patients for the least amount of money. You or your office assistant are capable of doing what is necessary to bring targeted traffic to your website.
Here are some ways that you should set yourself in motion in 2009 to ensure the success of your dental practice:
- If you don’t have a website, GET ONE! It really is a simple process to get online in 2009. If you need guidance, contact me.
- Install Google Analytics on your site so that you can see how your visitors are interacting (or not interacting) with your website.
- Google your name and the name of your practice and determine your online reputation. Take action to own your name in the Top 10 search results for your name and the name of your dental practice. Read this post.
- Consider running a Pay Per Click campaign.
- Do some keyword research so that you know what you are aiming to increase in the search engines.
- Claim the listings of your dental practice in local directories like Yahoo! Local or Google Maps. Add detailed information about your dental practice in these local directories.
- Ensure that your name, the name of your dental practice, the address of your practice, and the phone number are on every webpage in HTML text. This is for both your website visitors and the search engines.
- Make sure that visitors to your website know exactly what to do to convert from website traffic to dental patient. For example – “Call 555-555-5555 to set an appointment today!”
Don’t overwhelm yourself with all of these at the same time. Tackle one of these items per week for the next two months.
You or your office assistant can handle this! It’s not difficult, but it does require that you take action!
If you have any trouble with any of these action items please click on the NEED HELP link above or leave a comment and I will do what I can to keep you in motion.
January 4, 2009
Posted in: High Impact Actions No Comments
8 Steps to Professional Keyword Research for Your Dental Website
As owners of dental, physician, and chiropractor practices we must understand that each Google search has one thing in common – it starts with a keyword. Â You may have typed in ‘digital camera reviews’ in Google as you were searching for the perfect Christmas present for your spouse. Â You might have typed in ‘best pot roast recipes’ as you were gearing up for a big dinner. Â And your potential patients are typing in ‘braces Anytown, USA’ when they are looking for a reputable dentist.
When choosing keywords for your website you should follow this 8-step procedure:
1. Â Create your root keywords – What does your practice do? Â Family Physicals? Â Invisalign? Â Cosmetic dentistry?OBGYN? Â Spine adjustment? Â Veneers? Â Write down all of the services that your practice provides.
2. Â 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. Â Tip: Â Look for “long-tail” 3 and 4 keyword phrases as well as short one and two keyword phrases. Â Example: Â ’center for cosmetic dentistry’ vs. ‘cosmetic dentistry’. Create a list of approximately of 20 to 30 keywords to start out.
4. Â Append the geographic locations, from which you draw your patients, to each of these keywords. Â 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: Â ’family physician practice tampa fl’ and ‘family physician hillsborough county’ (Tampa’s county.)
5. Â Categorize or “theme” your keywords. Â 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. Â Further categorize your groups of themes into two and three keyword bundles. Â This should leave you with somewhere between 10 and 15 keyword bundles. Â 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. Â 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. Â These keywords do not have to appear verbatim. Â 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. Â Interlink each page in your “theme” with the others using keyword rich anchor text for the link. Â 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. Â We provide financing for those that are concerned about the cost of Invisalign. Â 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. Â This will funnel relevance to that page for that keyword. Â 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. Â This is considered spamming and could get you banned from the search engines. Â 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.
December 28, 2008
Posted in: Dental Keyword Research 6 Comments
Using HTML to Properly Position your Dental Marketing Keywords
Congratulations! If you are reading this post you are light years ahead of most of the dentist, family physician, or optometry websites I have reviewed. The fact is, most people in the professional services industry do not understand how the Internet works, and more importantly, how search engines work. This post will show you how to go about properly positioning your dental and physician marketing keywords.
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-Â <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.Â
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.
December 21, 2008
Posted in: Dental Keyword Research 2 Comments
8 Tips for your Dental Practice Blog
In one of my previous posts about why your dental practice should be blogging, I promised that I would offer some blogging tips. Here are 8 tips that will make your blog more visible on the internet.
Make it informative
There are numerous reasons for making your blog informative, not the least of which is that you will want those that land on your blog to find it useful. This will increase the chance that they will subscribe to your blog, bookmark it, or otherwise become regular readers.
Another, less obvious, reason for making your blog informative is that it will attract links. Remember that links are the currency of the internet search engine. Search engines count each link that comes to your site from another site as an editorial vote for your site. When you create informative and useful content, you are more likely to garner links for your site. This will increase your search rankings.
Use Wordpress
I could write an entire post about why you should use Wordpress and perhaps I will in the future. However, I will cast a vote for Wordpress in this post due to the “search engine friendliness” of the platform. You can install the All-in-One SEO Pack on your blog and manipulate all of the tags you will need to create search engine friendly blog posts. Other useful plug-ins are the Google Analyticator, and XML Sitemap plug-ins. Wordpress is free and has an enormous community of support built around it.
Install the All-in-One SEO Pack
I wanted to mention this plug-in a second time in this post for emphasis. The All-in-One SEO Pack gives you the ability to manipulate your title, meta-keywords, and meta-description tags in the blog post. This is extremely important as the title tag is the most valuable piece of keyword real estate on your web pages and the meta-description tag are important for improving the click-through rate in the organic search results pages.
Read more about title tags and meta tags for dental websites here.
Interlink Your Posts
Directly above the heading for this section I linked to another blog post on this blog with the link anchor text “title and meta-tags for dental websites.” I did that for two reasons. For one, I think that you will find the linked-to blog post very informative when it comes to best practices for building your website in a search engine friendly manner. The second was to lend “relevance” for that page on my blog for the keywords ‘title tags for dental websites’ and ‘meta tags for dental websites.’ By interlinking from my own blog using keywords as the anchor text I can help to boost the ranking of the linked-to web page for the keywords I used in the link anchor text.
Install the blog on the same domain as our website
If it is possible to do so, it is advisable to install the blog in a sub-directory of the root of your website rather than on a sub-domain of the website. For example:
blog.dentalwebsite.com (Good)
-or-
dentalwebsite.com/blog (Better)
Why? It boils down to links, as most things do in the search engine optimization world. It is hotly debated that links to a sub-domain (First example) may not pass as much “link authority” to the root domain as they would if the incoming links were pointed at a sub-directory on the root domain (Second Example.)
Do Some Keyword Research
You cannot hit your target if you don’t know what you are aiming at. You need to do some keyword research. Follow the steps in this article concerning how to do good keyword research. Once you have finalized a list of keywords you can begin creating blog posts around those keywords. Don’t shoot for the moon right away, start out going after 3 and 4 word keyword phrases and move on from there. A blog is an excellent way to create lots of keyword rich content for your dental website.
Plan Your Posts
Sit down at your computer and, instead of writing a blog post, plan your next five. This will ensure that your topics are of higher quality. Set up a schedule and research the topics before you post. Save the posts as drafts in your blogging platform and return to them often to make updates and add information. Post on a regular schedule so that your audience becomes familiar with the days that you will add fresh content to the blog.
Share the Link Love
If you are a regular reader of this blog you know that there is nothing more important than garnering links to your dental website to improve your web presence in the search engines. With that in mind, be sure that you link out to other blogs and authorities in the dental community when you write your blog posts.
Search engine’s like to see that you are linking out to others. <– That link is a prime example . It proves you are referencing others in your content. I should caution you, however, that when you link out to others you are, in effect, endorsing that web page. Investigate the site to ensure that it is “link-worthy” before you go casting a vote for their content.
Secondly, when others notice that you are linking to them, they will come check out your content. This may generate links for your website.
If you need help installing a blog or have questions you can leave a comment below or contact me in person here.
December 16, 2008
Posted in: Blog on Your Dental Website No Comments