Jonathan's Web Marketing Blog

new strategies to get higher listings

While the Internet marketplace continues to experience sprawling growth, search engine optimization has maintained its importance as the foundation of any effort to market a website on the web. As the search engines have grown more complex to better serve up useful search results to their users, search engine optimization has grown into part of a larger search engine positioning effort. Long-gone are the days when we could just tweak some behind-the-scenes parts of a website and watch it rise on the Google listings. Now, especially in geographic markets that are even somewhat competitive, it’s necessary to implement several additional tools and coordinated strategies to set your website apart from those of your competitors, catching Google’s eye, and snagging top search engine placement.

Understanding the need for these tools and strategies is easy when you look at the needs of the search engines. Search engines exist to serve up helpful information. The challenge of the search engines is to find the most helpful information out there. The search engines aren’t interested in serving up websites that exist solely for the purpose of marketing. Think of the search engines like the front desk of your office. If someone walked into your office asking for information about LASIK, you wouldn’t want the person at your front desk to hand them your business card. That wouldn’t answer any of the potential patient’s questions. You would want the front desk person to actually address the patient’s questions.

The search engines want to address the root question of the user. In order for your site to be successful on the search engines, we have to show them that your site is a great source of answers. Google and the other search engines use more than 200 criteria in evaluating websites to determine whether or not they are good sources of information. By far, the top three criteria are:

• Relevance
• Content Freshness
• Link Popularity

Relevance

Modern search engine optimization and good copywriting will satisfy the search engines that your website is relevant to the user’s questions. Your website’s meta tags, which are some of the behind-the-scenes parts that used to be so elemental, are still important. An optimizer should make good use of these tags by including those keywords that are relevant to the text of the individual pages of your site. He/she should also be sure that the description tag of your site includes calls-to-action as the search engines use the description when they display your site in their results. This means that instead of a list of keywords, your site will be displayed with meaningful text that asks the search engine user to act.

Content Freshness

Imagine if your local newspaper published the same newspaper every day without adding any new articles. They’d be out of business by the end of the week. The search engines are on the constant hunt for new information, and if your site doesn’t offer something new on a regular basis, you won’t make much of an impression on the search engines. A competitor’s site that is more frequently updated than your site may push past you in search engine rankings. For these reasons, it’s important to formulate a plan to keep your content fresh.

There are several ways that you can keep your website updated with new content for the search engines to find.

• Add new pages
• Add testimonials
• Add a blog to your site

Adding new pages of substantial content is highly effective, especially if they add depth to key topics on your site such as, LASIK. Of course, it’s difficult to continue generating page after page of content, but with a little planning you can come up with a list of pages to augment your existing content. Write all of the pages at one time for efficiency’s sake, and instruct your web person to add one or two of them per month until all of the pages are in place. Of course, these pages should also be search engine optimized.

You can also trickle in patient testimonials. The more substantial the testimonial, the more effective it will be in satisfying the need for fresh content. A testimonial that simply says, “Dr. Smith did a great job and everyone in his office was very nice,” while certainly positive, doesn’t offer much in the way of keywords. You can improve upon the value of your testimonials by adding some information:

“Dr. Smith did a great job and everyone in his office was very nice!”

John D.
Lasik Patient, Chicago, Illinois

By adding the procedure and the patient’s location to the testimonial, you can add some keyword density to your testimonials page. The link from the doctor’s name improves the navigability of your website and increases the amount of weight that the doctor’s bio page carries by adding one more place in the website where the bio page is linked from. It’s also important to note that your testimonials don’t have to appear on a designated testimonial page. You can sprinkle them throughout your site, thereby ensuring that more visitors read your testimonials. Don’t assume that every visitor will visit your testimonials page.

Lastly, you can greatly increase the search engines’ opinion of your site’s content by adding a blog to your site and by posting to the blog on a frequent basis. A blog is an area of your site that is specially programmed to allow you to add content on a regular basis without any web design skill. Google likes blogs because blogs by nature are growing parts of websites. The only catch is that blogs do not update themselves. If you don’t feel that you or members of your staff will enjoy (or have the time for) updating the blog on a weekly basis at the minimum, then stick with monthly page additions. A neglected blog makes your website look bad. The visitor’s assumption tends to be, “If they don’t care about their website, what else tends to fall by the wayside at their office?”

A final word of warning where content is concerned: Just copying and pasting someone else’s content won’t get you anywhere. The search engines are highly adept at recognizing duplicate content and will simply disregard it.

Link Popularity

The search engines were forced to factor in link popularity in their evaluation of websites because even at their most complex level, search engines are robots. They can count the number of words on the page, but just having a certain keyword a thousand times on a page doesn’t mean that that page contains helpful information. By factoring in the number of outside websites linking to any given website, the search engines are able to determine the value of a website with more accuracy. The logic is that if a website that is run by a human is linking to your site, then that human must have found your website to be helpful. The more links you have going into your site, the greater respect Google will have for it. It’s also important that the links going into your site be relevant. If the source of the link is relevant to your webpages, it will be more valuable in Google’s examination of your site.

There are a number of ways to accrue valuable links to your website:

• Obtain “authoritative” links.
• Create a “link magnet”.
• Use press releases and informational articles that link back to your site (e-PR).

Authoritative links can win some major battles for you on the search engines, so do everything that you can to obtain links from ophthalmic organizations, any academic institutions that you are/were associated with be it as a student or as a professor, government websites, chambers of commerce, etc.. All of these can lend credence to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

If you can offer something of value on your site that is available nowhere else, other websites will start linking to your site to point their visitors to your “link magnet”. This can be an online tool. It can be something humorous. Your blog will act as a link magnet if you post enough informative content.

Another way to obtain links is to offer content in exchange for a link. Just as your site needs new content, so do other sites. If you give them content to use, many sites will link back to your site. Press releases and informative articles are great for this. You can submit an article about LASIK or any ophthalmic interest to any of a host of websites and in exchange get a highly relevant (and more often than not, free) link back to your site. The key to this type of link building strategy is to submit an article or press release on a monthly basis. The websites that are receptive to these exchanges are constantly adding new articles just like yours to their database, which means that your article will eventually lose good placement and your link will be depreciated or lost entirely. Even so, this is one of the most effective methods of link building because you have a greater degree of control. If you need links, you can get them quickly by submitting articles.

While this may all seem overly complex, the important thing to take away from this article is that in order for your website to gain and maintain good visibility on the search engines, you must be sure that your web marketing is a comprehensive effort that goes beyond search engine optimization. This is especially true in competitive areas of the country. Be certain that your Internet marketing person is taking every opportunity available to show the search engines that your website is the answer to the questions that your potential patients are asking on the web.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Internet Marketing Consultant
Page 1 Solutions, LLC

Labels: Content Freshness, e-PR, Link Popularity, Relevance