subject: Seo Basics For The Medical Professional: How To Increase Your Visibility Online [print this page] If your medical website cannot gain exposure, it cannot contribute to the growth of your practice. Connecting with new patients who are searching for doctors online requires positioning your site where they are looking: the search engines. SEO is the practice of using a symphony of strategies to push your medical website into the top organic rankings of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN's Bing. It increases your online visibility to those who are actively searching for your services. In doing so, it drives more traffic to your site, which increases your case acceptance.
Below, we'll introduce you to the basics of SEO. These are the components that must be a part of your search engine optimization campaign. If you implement them, your medical website will gradually climb to the top positions for your targeted keywords.
Conducting Keyword Research
Websites and their individual pages rank competitively in the search engines based upon specific keywords. This is more important than it seems. If your SEO campaign focuses on phrases that receive few search queries, your site may rank well, yet fail to generate any traffic. Compiling a list of keywords requires researching those that are most appropriate for your medical practice.
There are a number of methods you can use to conduct keyword research. You can use online tools, though their accuracy is questionable. You can also ask your current patients to suggest keywords they might use on the search engines. Eventually, you'll be able to refine your keyword list as you study your analytics and identify which phrases are most effective within the context of your SEO campaign.
Creating An Intuitive Site Architecture
Site architecture receives very little attention, but has a tremendous influence on the search engines' ability to crawl, index and rank your website. Obstacles include page URLs with session IDs, dynamic parameters, frames and certain types of redirects.
The good news is that the major search engines have always favored sites and pages that follow a simple architecture. That means your medical website's pages should be categorized intuitively and the individual page URLs should follow a simple naming convention. As long as the information on your site is organized well and accessible through HTML links, search engines can crawl, index and rank it.
Integrating Compelling Content
At one time, it was possible to control the top organic positions for competitive keywords with a website that had only a few pages. It's far more difficult to accomplish that feat today. The search engines' organic algorithms tend to favor larger sites. From their perspective, a larger site with high-quality content will likely deliver a better experience for their searchers.
A library of procedure-specific information fits perfectly within the framework of your SEO campaign. Each procedure should have its own page. The page's title should specifically reflect the content. Subheadings throughout the content should also reflect the page's theme. And if the content mentions other procedures or related topics on your medical website, links should direct visitors to those pages.
Building Inbound Links
Inbound links (those which point to your site from other websites) have an enormous influence on your organic rankings. This is one of the key barometers that search engines use to determine your site's authority. The more authority your site is considered to have, the higher you'll rank for your keywords.
The number of links is important, but volume is merely one of many criteria. The links should be thematically related to your site and the pages to which they point. Ideally, they should originate from medical sites that the search engines already consider authoritative. Plus, your inbound links should increase over time, helping your site to further strengthen its positions for your main keywords.
Search engine optimization can deliver a continuous stream of motivated patients to your office. If you implement the SEO basics described above, your medical website will climb the organic rankings, delivering a boost in visibility for your practice.
