News & Announcements (Our Blog)

Preserving SEO ranking for existing websites with our handy 301 Redirect Tool

If you are migrating an existing dental website onto our platform, and you had a decent SEO presence before, it's very important you setup 301 redirects for each page you want to preserve ranking for. This helpful video shows you how to do it, step by step.

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Customer Question: Do I need to make a blog?

I received the following question from a customer today:

"I want to tie a blog into the site we are building, which Blog software should I use (Wordpress)? Something else?"

My Reply

You have a couple options,

WordPress and Blogger/blogspot are the two most mature platforms, and both are free.

Posterous and Tumblr are the up and comers and all would make good choices.

We typically don't recommend new customers go for a blog because we have a hard enough time just convincing customers to add some new content to their primary website (Job #1) at least once a month. but if you have the time and inclination it will certainly help.

Here is how we linked up one customer's blog (pod on the right): http://www.nwafamilydentist.com/

The blog will give you some links back to your website plus additional results on search engine pages - but don't neglect your website for the blog! Make sure you have time set aside to:

1) Get some Google reviews for your Google places page.

2) Get some youtube video testimonials

3) Post some more before & after gallery images. At least 1 per service you offer and preferably 2-3.

Once you have 1-3 under control and you want to do more - blogging is one option! Social Media promotion is another - more on that later.

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How to write landing pages for Long Tail Searches

We received an email from a customer who wanted to know how to create landing pages for "Long Tail Searches" for her dental website. Long Tail searches are unlike primary search terms you're interested in (Your city + dentist) and are instead terms that patients may enter that are more specific, like "invisalign your city".

You want to have a long description in the services that will serve as a landing page to target searches for specific services in your area. For example:

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&q=invisalign+wilmington+delaware&btnG=Google+Search

This is a search for "invisalign wilmington delaware"

On the first page is my dad's detailed service page for Invisalign: http://www.drgladnick.com/Services/Wilmington-Invisalign/113

He's not the top spot but he's placing. This is your goal.

Here is a checklist for you:

1) at least 300 words. 400 preferably. helpful tool: http://www.wordcounter.net/

2) Write a custom title/description (edit meta tags on that page)

3) make sure that the name of the service appears in all its possible forms at least 2x on the page. And you probably want at least 5-7 mentions total, perhaps more depending on length. It shouldn't be obnoxious, but it should be present a lot.

4) Try and casually slip in the name of the city into the page somehow.

Example:

"Many of our patients from WIlmington to Hockessin, to Newark and the Pike Creek area have been very pleased with the results.

Whether you are a student @ The University of Delaware trying to make a good impression, a professional in Wilmington "

Do this for each service and you're golden. Seems like a lot of work, and it kind of is (we typicall charge ~ $50 per service), but it's worth it. You can always shoot for 1 per week, and do the most profitable ones first.

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Warning! Cut & Pasting content from Microsoft Word into your Dental Website: We got the following question from a customer today:

I'm working a bit on the website and wanted to know if there is a way to copy some text either from Word, Safari, or the Web and paste it into the text of the Welcome to the Practice page?
When I'm on that page the Word icon is grayed out in the toolbar.

Pasting from word is dangerous because word dumps in a bunch of junky meta-data that you don't want and will slow your pages down and/or mess up formatting. The best practice way to paste from word is this:

1) Open notepad

2) Open word

3) Paste from word INTO notepad

4) Paste from notepad into website.

This will strip all the junk you don't want and help keep the pages trim and quick!

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Why should I use Great Dental Websites instead of a WordPress system?

We actually considered Wordpress (and a few other CMS systems) early on but rejected them for the following reasons

The High Cost of Updates: We regularly update & improve our dental website system (last release: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/news/new-features-improved-dayshours-open-faster-sites-phone-call-tracking/) based on changes in the Google/Bing algorithms to improve our customers' website performance as a whole. Because each wordpress site is configured individually, this isn't really possible. This lets us keep our customers ahead of the competition for minimal cost (cost of improvements / total customers) and as you can imagine, it is always getting cheaper as we expand.

If you have a custom WordPress site, you can of course make these changes too, but you'll have to pay a developer each time you want to make changes, or hope someone makes a plugin you can use. With our system, we just roll the changes out and your website is seamlessly upgraded.

The analogy I like to use with customers is that with our service, it would be as if every time you took your car in for an oil change, they added 3 HP, 1 MPG, and a hookup for your iPhone or something like that.

There are a one good reason to use a WordPress site and NOT use our system: You have a very exact idea of how the graphic design should be and you do not want to compromise. You will pay more for this in the long run (at least by our calculations, which is why we didn't go wordpress) but for some customers this is a must have.

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The Importance of A Dental Website and SEO Presence: What if we told you that you could expand your patient base for very little money?

One of the best ways to expand your dental practice is to make it more

visible to potential patients. The quickest way to accomplish this is to improve your SEO presence.

Studies have shown that 42% of men and 39% of women use search engines every day. In the next

decade these numbers are projected to grow tremendously. Yet some small businesses have yet to

grasp this trend. Approximately 27% of U.S small businesses have no SEO plan. Dentists that

ignore the power of an SEO presence to generate interest for business risk being left behind. Search

engines are quickly becoming the most popular way to find local search needs. It is no longer a perk to

have an SEO presence; it is a necessity.

In order to have a strong SEO presence, you need to have a great dental website. The ability of a

website to transform a dental practice cannot be overstated. An engaging demtal website allows potential patients

to learn about your dental practice and its successes, to know the nature of your practice (i.e hours of

operation, insurance providers accepted, etc.) and even can make it easier to make appointments.

Having a place where customers can get these questions answered saves lots of time that you can

devote to giving your patients better care. It also can add a personality to your business that will give

you an edge. Patients want health Dentists that understand them and their needs and a website

is a great way to communicate this in a unique way.

A great way to get more patients is to become a valuable source of information to them. For

this reason it may benefit you to answer some common questions on your website. Not only will this

save you the time of having to answer it in person, it will also create a sense of trust and reliability that

is crucial to any patient-dentist relationship. It will allow patients to look to you for valuable advice on

their dental needs. It serves as a great ice breaker that can pay dividends to you down the line. Consider

posting FAQs (frequently asked questions) as well as articles on common conditions that patients come

in with. Also, you can survey some of your patients about information that they would like to know

about if you are looking for the right topics to write about.

Each of these steps is predicated on improving one thing: communication. In a world that

has become smaller from technology, consumers are looking for providers that are not only the best

caregivers, but the most effective communicators. Increasing your SEO presence, building a great

dental website as well as providing valuable information to potential patients are all great ways to exhibit

communication. Not only will this make your practice run more efficiently, it will give you a needed edge

on all of your local competition.
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Creating QR Codes for your Dental Practice's website - make sure to strip down the URL!

One of our customers had followed our handy QR Code Guide For Dentists, but ran into a problem generating a code for his Google Places page. This was the QR code he initially generated:

As you can imagine, this isn't easy to shrink down to a small size, and as a result, it was difficult to scan with a mobile phone. The problem here is that Google Generates giant URLs by default, with lots of worthless junk in there that you don't need. All you really need is something like this:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=13693662398849837547

Compare that to the URL string on the same Google Places page generated by Google:

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?hl=en&safe=off&gs_upl=&ix=sea&ion=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&biw=1680&bih=889&um=1&ie=UTF-8&q=brentwood+dental+group+st+louis&fb=1&gl=us&hq=brentwood+dental+group&hnear=0x87d8b4a9faed8ef9:0xbe39eaca22bbe05b,St+Louis,+MO&cid=13693662398849837547&dtab=2&action=openratings&ei=4Y5GT5_QOK_-iQKz1enaDQ&sa=X&oi=local_result&ct=write-review&resnum=1&ved=0CEQQtwQwAA

Good Grief! After we got rid of all the junk, we had this nice little QR Code:

Much better huh?

What about URL shortners:
Avoid them - a lot of them are fly by night and might go about of business. Plus if the user scans the code and sees a url shortener, its anybody's guess where this might point to. Could be to your dental website, could be to malware. Better to just give them a link to the real thing.

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5 Things Dentists can do to improve Social Media Marketing Efforts: A few things for Dentists to keep in mind if you are trying to outsource some of your social media efforts:

1) Make sure that if you hire a company to post content to Facebook/Twitter/etc that it is 100% original, and not simply posted for every single one of their clients with some minor changes/customization.

2) Even if you don't have time to be involved completely, be involved a little. Responding to comments is one thing that is a pretty low time commitment ( < 5 min per day?) and your receptionist could take care of.

3) Don't use personal accounts to create social media profiles. We create a new Google Account for each one of our customers before we create any other online presences. Its awkward if you have to share your personal facebook/gmail/etc account with an outside firm who would then have access to your email or personal messages.

4) Make sure your patients know about your social media accounts. Put QR codes on your business cards or letter head. Post something like this in your waiting room: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/news/promote-your-dental-website-facebook-page-reviews-etc-in-your-waiting-room-with-this-handy-template/.

5) Ask for reviews. If a patient had a positive experience and it was obvious, have your front desk send them a personalized email followup and ask for a positive review. Give them a direct link to your Google Places page or Yelp page.

These are all little things you could do today!
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New Features: Improved days/hours open, faster sites, phone call tracking

New Features

Vastly improved hours/days open system. It's now way, way easier to setup your days/hours open. Plus the new system places nicely with the way Google expects to find your data!
Improved page load time for all websites by 1.6% - Blog post: http://www.greatdentalwebsites.com/news/caching-improved-all-dental-websites-now-load-16-faster/
Improved the aesthetics of the "pods" that appear around the site which show related content.
Made it easier to delete records while editing them if you please. If you're editing a record, you can delete it on the same page.
Live online chat support now integrated into all accounts! If you're ever feeling stuck live help is a single click away!
Dynamic Phone number switching - if you want to track how many calls you get via your dental website or from adwords campaigns or anything else, we'll help you setup "Dynamic phone number switching": A different, tracking phone number for each source of patients that helps you calculate ROI.
Pagecontent now on testimonials - embed testimonials from 3rd party souces like Lighthouse360, etc
New Themes - We've hired a new designer to make some awesome themes for us. They'll be rolling out next week.

Bug Fixes

Smile gallery before & after gallery images are displayed with more variety in the services section. Before sometimes there was unnecessary duplication
Video testimonials can now handle the new style of youtu.be links (and anything else youtube throws at it)
Smile Gallery images always display at the right size now

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October 24, 2011

How to do SEO yourself on your Great Dental Website (Simple version)

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!

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