February 2, 2008
On site or off site optimization for a dental website?
Had a question from a dentist who just became a client. He asks, what is most important for search engine optimization for a dentist who wants the web to bring in more patients?
So here's my answer. Search engine optimization has two parts to it.
One is what you do on your site.
The other part is what you do off-site.
On site optimization is what most "SEO" companies do. For instance, on your site, you have a lot of links that say "click here". That is bad SEO. You want to change something from
to
click here for information on how a Richmond sedation dentist helps you relax in the dental chair.
On site SEO has certain principles such as making sure your keywords are in the text that a user sees, called anchor text. "Click here" is poor anchor text.
There are other things you can do on site and they are worth doing. How you link between pages on your site has some impact. And how you name the pages. And how the "meta tags" especially "title" and "description". But these don't make a lot of difference, in most cases.
The thing that is especially helpful is having original text on your site and no duplicate text. Many doctors use dental website companies that use boilerplate text and that won't get you anywhere on Google.
I see guys who pay $20,000 for a website and it doesn't rank on Google.
Off site dental practice website optimization is much more important
That's because beyond some basics, what you do on your site in terms of SEO has very little impact on your search engine ranking.
There are a lot of WRONG things you can do on your site that will hurt you. If you remove those WRONG things, you can do a lot better. Beyond that, though, the stuff you do off-site has a lot more impact.
Backlinks are the most important thing for SEO. Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. But not just any links. I've written more about dental practice website backlinks.
Good backlinks come from other high-authority sites and link from articles or content on those sites about dentistry, and they link to deep parts of your site. They contain good anchor text like the example above.
A poor backlink would be a link from a site's "links we like" page that links to a hundred other websites.
A good backlink would be an article about gum disease that links to your site's content about gum disease, and the link anchor text has something about gum disease in it.
Some SEO companies will create backlinks for you. But much of the time this is simply a scam. They have sites that will create backlinks for you but the pages they link from have hundreds of other links and no real value for Google. See this article on dental website search engine optimization for more.
And if you feel this is helpful, get my $59.95 bestselling book on dental practice case acceptance and dental marketing, completely free, via instant download. I will never share your info with anyone and you can opt out anytime you want.