Your physician business website needs simple SEO strategies
Friday, February 10, 2012 at 12:19PM 
How much business does your physician business website deliver to your door?
Do you even know?
My first website was admired for its good looks but I can't honestly claim it ever drove a single client to my doorstep.
Now, whereas I kinda like how The Entrepreneurial MD looks, that isn't what matters to me any more. How it performs as a relationship- and business-building tool is what really counts.
The reason I value this so much is that marketing can be very expensive. Ads, booths at health fairs or conferences, 4-color brochures, even traveling to places to give speaking presentations for no fee or small honorariums -- all this adds up.
As my understanding grew of how the Internet and search engines work, I learned some important strategies to get business via that Internet doorway. Once your website is up and paid for, if you are willing to use some of your time in ways I'm about to suggest, your marketing costs will plummet, just like mine did.
1. Woo the search engines as vigorously as you woo visitors and prospects
I didn't understand anything about search engines when I first launched a website. But through somewhat painful experience and lots of reading of books like eBoot Camp, Mastering On-line Marketing and The New Rules of Marketing & PR, I began to appreciate the power of words to woo people AND search engines - how you use them, where you place them on your website or on-line content, and how create links from and to authoritative content elsewhere.
2. Have your article or page title embrace your key words
The "key" to keywords becomes the secret to unlocking the door to your website. Research one main keyword or keyword phrase you want to use for each page on your website or article on your blog. Include them in the title of your content as close to the beginning of the title as possible. The key is that they should show up somewhere appear in the title.
3. Use hyperlinks throughout your page or article.
Linking is the fundamental basis of the web. Search engines want to know you’re sufficiently “connected” with other pages and content, so linking out to other pages matters when it comes to search engine optimization.Here are some “rules of thumb” for linking based on generally accepted best practices:
- Link to relevant content fairly early in the body copy
- Link to relevant pages approximately every 120 words of content
- Link to relevant interior pages of your site or other sites
- Link with naturally relevant anchor text
Again, these are guidelines related to current best practices. Don’t get hung up on rules; focus on the intent behind what search engines are looking for – quality search results for people.
A favorite tool that I use without fail for every blog post now, is Copyblogger Media's Scribe software (this is an affiliate link). The goal is to write a post or article that you can then have analyzed, at the push of an on-line button, from the perspective of a search engine indexing "bot", showing how your copywriting would be perceived by the search engines. Naturally, as a competitive physician, my goal is to score 100% every time! What I love about the tool is the accompanying education AND opportunity to link to other authoritative sites on the web without having to do all that research myself!
Okay, time to analyze this post and see how I did :-) (Yay - I got 100% first time!!!)
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