Clint's Web Marketing Blog

I get requests every day about optimization and search engine marketing (SEM). The goal of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to improve your website’s organic listings for a specific set of targeted keywords, i.e. Denver Lasik, San Francisco Cosmetic Dentist, or Cincinnati Personal Injury Lawyer. Each search engine has a ranking system of algorithms, methods of determining relevancy, and how often it will index pages. Unfortunately, this information is not made public. There are, however, what I call “Best Practices” to use to give your webpage a better shot at being recognized by the search engines and have them find it relevant and credible for those keywords or search terms. There are many “Best Practices” to use, so this post will cover the single most important one, content.

Content, and the organization of your content, is the single most important need for search engine optimization. Search engines rely on the content of a webpage to assess how pertinent and credible that information is to a specific search. The more strategically and unfailing a phrase is used within the content of a web page, the more pertinent and credible the search engines may consider that page to be for that phrase. This is called keyword density, but there is a point where too much of this will appear “spammy,” and raise a red flag in the search engines eyes and hurt your credibility. Another red flag is using duplicate or plagiarized copy. This will also hurt your credibility (to be covered in more detail in my next blog).

Writing content that is made for search engines requires a lot of work. You need to make sure it isn’t just “copy and paste” content. You also need to make sure that it is formatted in a way that it is easy to read and understand for any consumer that will come to your website. People read information from a screen much differently than a magazine or newspaper. I suggest writing at no higher than a 10th grade level. I also suggest having your content written just for your website. With that being said, when I work with a client, I need them to be devoted to the content and review it and give their input. After all, this website is a reflection of you and your practice.

After you have developed and written all the content to get your webpage up and live, (I suggest having 25 to 50 pages of content depending on how competitive your market is), there is an ongoing maintenance that needs to be preformed to keep your content up-to-date and fresh. This way, when the search engine comes around and indexes your pages, it will always see new, fresh content. Search engines love to see fresh content and they will index your pages more frequently when they see it.

There are a couple of ways of doing this, such as adding new pages every month, like FAQ pages, or specific procedure pages. However, the easiest way to add pages and keep fresh content is a blog. Blogging is so easy. You can write about a patient or client that just came through your door and was ecstatic with the their results from your practice. You can also put testimonials into your blog (in addition to an actual testimonials page). Also, develop links within your blog to direct the consumer to target pages. For example, if you are blogging about porcelain veneers, have a link to your porcelain veneers page so they can get more information.

These are just a couple “Best Practices” to use. In the paragraph above, I wrote about links within your blog, which helps with link building. Link building is another way to help your search engine results. If you would like to discuss link building, content development, or any other SEO-related questions, I would be happy to talk with you.