News & Announcements (Our Blog)

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

New Features

1. 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!
2. 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/
3. Improved the aesthetics of the "pods" that appear around the site which show related content.
4. 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.
5. Live online chat support now integrated into all accounts!  If you're ever feeling stuck live help is a single click away!
6. 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.
7. Pagecontent now on testimonials - embed testimonials from 3rd party souces like Lighthouse360, etc
8. New Themes - We've hired a new designer to make some awesome themes for us.  They'll be rolling out next week.

Bug Fixes

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

More and more dentists are beginning to post video testimonials of their patients extolling their virtues online.  We believe that the best place to post these videos is on Youtube, and no where else.  Here's why:

1. Youtube delivers videos fast, so visitors to your dental website won't have to wait
2. It's free
3. Youtube is the largest video website, so you may get traffic from people browsing/searching
4. Youtube videos appear in Google search results

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!

We just added a smile but visible feature to all of our dental websites: Favorite Icons!  Now when patients come across your website, they will see the little tooth+mouse icon appear in their web browser.  Plus, if they bookmark you the icon will appear there as well.  It's a small thing, but it helps you stand out against the competition!

Here is an example of how this looks to patients:

Where would be without new features:

1. Editable Metadata! At long last and by popular request, it's here.  Our automatic metadata generation does a pretty great job with SEO, but we have had some demanding customers who wanted a little more.  So we've created editable metadata:
   
   A little window like this will now popup, allowing you to change the meta data to whatever you like.  There is a reset (and global reset) button if you want to punt and start over too!
2. SiteSettings is now way, way easier to make changes and understand what's going on.
   
   Way easier, huh?
3. Caching is now enabled for all sites.  This means your sites will load way, way, way faster.  Google likes this too.  This is all under the hood, you won't even know it's there (except your site will load faster for patients!).  Note: Caching is disabled if you are logged in
4. Small SEO tweaks and improvements
5. More new themes, and from a new designer!
6. New slideshow on the homepage (faster, smoother)
7. Some under the hood speed improvements (removed some unused graphic files and compressed some javascript to speed things up!)

In Beta (and coming soon)

1. You can now view your logs from within your website to see how many people emailed you via the website and when.have called you if you have Google Voice
2. Support for Google voice Call tracking numbers. See how many patients called you as a result of browsing your website! (Must have Google voice setup)