Great Dental Websites Blog!

I got the following email today from one of our do it yourself customers:

"Everything is working well so far...Now, I'm struggling to find a way to make it visible. Is there anything you can help me with to make it visible?" 

A dental website is of course, much more effective if lots of people are visting it - so how can we go about making it more "visible" to search engines?

Search Engine Optimization

I should mention that we offer a more robust version of what I am about to describe as a service:  Search Engine Optimization for Dental Websites.  But for our intrepid users determined to do it yourself, read on.  The short version is SEO comes down to two things on dental websites: 1) Tweaking the content on your website a little bit, 2) Convincing other people to link to your website from their website.

Tweaking your content

One every public page inside of your great dental website there is an option to "Edit Meta Data".  You're going to want to change the default metadata (title and description are probably enough and you can ignore the "keywords" field) to have the following information:

1) Title: 70 Characters or less.  Contains the location of your practice (ie Denver, CO).  Contains the main "keyword" for this page.  If it's a service description of dental implants, then you want "Dental implants" in there.  One time only.  You can add additional info as you please, but these items are vital.  It also can't hurt to add the relevant "professional title" you had, so Dentist, or Orthodontist, etc.

2) Meta Description: 150 Characters or less.  This should be one sentence about the page, and should again contain the main keyword term, or perhaps a variation of it.  So if the page is about "Tooth whitening", use "teeth whitening" here.  Or Bleaching.  Alternate terms.  Also try to add your location in again (once) in the short form - so just the city.

3) For Both:  These need the keywords, but don't spam them over and over again.   Google is smarter then that.  Plus, this metadata must be human readable because this is what will be displayed to users in search engine results on Google.  So try to put yourself in the user's place and write some human-friendly meta data.

Here is an example of well written metadata (For a crowns page):

Title: Wilmington Dentist: Crowns : Protect weakened teeth : Dr. Gladnick,DDS

Description: Also called a "cap", Dental crowns is a tooth shaped covering that is placed over a dental implant to restore it's natural beauty

Getting links to your site

So now that you've gone through your entire site and improved the metadata, it's time to build some links to your dental website.  Start calling anyone and everyone you know who has a website, especially dental related ones, and especially dental related sites in your area.  

Here are a few ideas:

1) Friends from dental school

2) Local dental lab

3) Other dental specialists you refer patients to

4) Business who supply you

5) Insurance companies (they have directories)

6) Patients who love you who own a business.

Hit the phone, ask them in the office, but gradually start building up the incoming links to your website!

Conclusion

There are still other things to do, but this is the bulk of the work, and it's definitely the easiest/best bang for your buck (time) that you can do.  Other things like Claiming your google places listing, setting up Google Webmaster tools, on page content optimization, keyword density, and other items will be discussed later if there is interest.  However, if you follow this advice it will dramatically improve the search engine performance of your dental website.  Of course, we also provide Search Engine Optimization for Dental Websites if you'd prefer to just have us do it!