Keyword Research

Every online marketing strategy hinges on keywords and this is where you must begin. Do you know what keywords people are using to search the internet for the services you provide? There are several paid tools you could purchase and I use all of them. However the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool is going to be all that 99% of you will need to get good keyword research.

Get a list of 10 keywords you are interested in and put them ino a spreadsheet. Use the spreadsheet to mark your progress from week to week on these keywords.  Don’t be greedy, you will not rank #1 in Google for the term ‘cosmetic dentistry’ without several months of extremely hard professional work. However, the term ‘cosmetic dentistry joliet il’ may be something you can set your sights on. Consider appending your geographic location to all of your keywords.

Find Google’s free keyword tool here.

Title Tags

Now that you have your keywords, it is time to update those title tags. Title tags are given the most weight of any other piece of code on your website.  The title tag is a “signboard” that says – “This page of my website is about X,Y,Z.”

The title tag is also the text that is displayed in the search engine results page and is the link that will take a searcher to your page.  See below:

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Having a good, relevant title tag can increase the chances that a searcher will actually click on your result.

Your title tag is located in your code.  It is the words that come between <title> and </title> on each page of your website.  For each keyword you have selected, find the page that is relevant to that keyword or keywords.  It is best to optimize each page for no more than two to three keywords.  Put those keywords in the title tag of that page.

If you don’t have a relevant page for a keyword that you selected, ditch the keyword or create a page that is relevant to that keyword.  What do I mean by relevant page?  Ask yourself this question:

“If I typed the phrase “example keyword” into Google, would I want to land on this page?”

Duplicate Content

Search engines do not like to find the same content on more than one page on the internet.  When they find copies of the same content, they are forced to choose which one will be displayed in their results.  If you know that you have exact copies of your website on drdavis.com and doctordavis.com, you should choose one of the domains and 301 redirect the secondary domain into the primary.  If you are having trouble choosing which one to use as the primary, choose the one that is 1) oldest and/or 2) getting the most traffic.  (See Analytics below for help with gauging traffic)

Visit Copyscape and type in your domain name.  Copyscape will scan the web for any duplicate versions of your content.  It is a free tool, so you will only get 10 results.   If you find that there are copies of your website on the web, you need to do something about that. You may find that someone has stolen or “scraped” your content from your website.

Refreshing Content

How long has it been since you refreshed your content?  Search engines like fresh content to crawl when they visit your site.  Don’t change more than 10% or so of the content on your site during a months time, but you should be slowly refreshing your content from month to month.

Consider adding a blog to your site.  Search engines, especially Google, really like blogs.  The reason is because websites with blogs are providing fresh, new content to their users.  Remember that Google and the others are in the business of providing their customer (the searcher) with relevant and fresh content.  Give them what they want.

Claim your Listings

Do a search for your address, the name of your doctor or dental practice, and your name in Google, Yahoo, and MSN.  Find every local directory where you have a listing and claim the listing.

What I mean by this is that your practice is already on the internet, likely in dozens of directories (example below).  Most of these directories allow you to “claim the listing.”  Once you have claimed the listing, verify that everything is accurate and add as much information as you can.

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Address in Footer

Your address and phone number should be in HTML text on every page of your site.  If your address and phone number are contained in an image (which a search engine cannot see), put it in the footer of your website so that it appears on every page.

This site is a good example of a site with the address in an image: http://cbddentalcare.com/

This is a good example of a site with the address on every page in HTML text: http://www.phillydentistry.com/

Why is this important?  The search engines do not want to give out false information to their customer (the searcher) about the location of your dental, chiropractor, or physician practice.  They are counting the number of times that they see your address, phone number, and business name in the same spot.  It gives them confidence that they are displaying accurate information to their searchers.  Give them what they want.

Analytics

A full description of how to use an analytics program is beyond the scope of this post.  I will be following up with a post geared toward interpreting analytics in the future.  However, there is nothing that will have more of an impact than installing an analytics program on your site.  How do you know if you are doing better, if you can’t measure it?  Google Analytics is absolutely free.

Check out the free analytics program here.

Build Links

In a recent post I graded 10 different doctor and dentist websites on ten different criteria.  One of the criteria that most sites failed miserably was the presence of backlinks to their website.

Try this:

Go to Yahoo.com and type in ‘link:drallen.com’.  Substitute your website name for that of Dr. Allen’s and omit the quotes, of course.  The number of results is the number of links that your website has according to Yahoo.  Now do the same thing with your competitors that are outranking you for keywords that you want.  Do they have more?  Probably so.  And if they have more links, then you need to concentrate on getting better links and a higher volume of links.

As I mentioned before, it is also important for your address, phone number, and name of practice to be found in as many places as possible.  These are called “citations” and you can read more about them here.

Optimize Meta Descriptions

Your meta-description tag is located in your code just like your title tag. You will find it in the code and it will look like this:

<meta name=”description” content=”Our Joliet, Illinois dentist office provides 30 years of experience in cosmetic dentistry.” />

Firstly, this tag should contain the keywords that you are targeting on the page.  Notice ‘joliet illinois dentist’ is a good keyword as well as ‘cosmetic dentistry joliet il’.  Secondly, the meta description tag is likely the text that will appear in the search engine results below the title tag.  Take a peek:

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Having a well written, keyword rich meta description tag will increase the chances that a searcher will click on your result.

Implement these nine high impact strategies and you will be ahead of many of the dentist, chiropractor, and physician websites that I have found on the web.

As always let me know if you have questions by leaving a comment or contact me in person here.