Web Marketing with Bill Fukui

I attended the ASMBS (American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery) 26th Annual Meeting in Dallas at Gaylord Texan Resort and Convention Center Grapevine last week.

As an industry, the bariatric surgery marketplace is an emerging market for medical advertising and marketing firms and is not as a competitively mature as the LASIK, cosmetic surgery or cosmetic dentistry industries.

Interesting though, many surgeons we talked to were familiar with more sophisticated search engine optimization strategies, like link-building, social media, and pay-per-click advertising. Yet when we looked at their website, they lacked some of the most fundemental elements, which undermined any of their more sophisticated strategies. So this entry is about some of fundamental elements when developing your website.

1- Start with organizing your website and all of its pages with your target keyword phrases in mind, first! Don't try to cram too many topics and target keyword phrases on one page. The more pages; the better. The more focused your content on every page, the better.

2- Make sure your copy is original, not duplicated text found on other websites. Many inexpensive website design firms sell templated website designs with cookie-cutter opy that can be found on many other providers who are "leasing" the same website and copy. Bottom line, search engines don't want to waste space on its servers indexing the same information over, and over, and over again.

3- Don't stop adding to your website. Whether you add new pages, change existing information, or program a blog and make regular entries, search engines will reward you for updating your website with more current and accurate information.

So before you throw all of your efforts and energy into more sophisticated optimization strategies, don't forget to do the basics first. All of your other search engine positioning efforts will make a bigger impact if given the right opportunity.