SEO uses the power of search to allow patients and prospects to find your web site as efficiently as possible.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A Highland Group SEO program is designed to help your web site rank highly – and outrank your competition – for key search terms on major search engines.
As described in the Web Strategy page, we’ll work together with you to determine the optimum keywords to use for each campaign you’ve selected. We’ll proceed to go through every element of the logical entry page for each campaign, whether we’re building you a new site or updating your existing one. There are many areas that search engines pay particular attention to; some of them visible to the viewer and some not.
On-Page Optimization
We’ll consider the content and placement of each headline and subhead on the page, as well as the amount and applicability of the body copy, making sure that the selected keywords are used liberally (and appropriately) throughout. All images used on the site will also be “tagged” with terms that will both help with searchability and make your site more usable to viewers using screen readers.
The behind-the-scenes activity includes creating a metatag that summarizes the contents of the page for search engine display, a listing of all the keywords employed on that page and a meaningful page title that is search engine-friendly.
All the above procedures are used to improve your web site’s “organic” search engine ranking – you can supplement these results by employing paid search to “kick start” your web site’s performance. Please see Pay-Per-Click for more details.
Off-Page Optimization
We’d like to take a moment here to address the area of off-page optimization (or “backlink acquisition”). As you may have already heard, the generation of links back to your web site from other sites is a part of the typical SEO package. We stress the word typical here, because medical web sites have issues that most other sites do not.
The establishment of backlinks is a thriving industry right now, where the organization doing the work strives frantically to place links to your site on any manner of other web sites (none of which are under your control or influence). They use internet directories, blogs, forums, aggregator sites, etc., many of which exist solely for this purpose. They sometimes write “articles” about medical subjects and submit them to these web sites, with a link back to you.
We believe that most medical professionals would be understandably alarmed to find direct links to their practice’s web site spread around the web this way. The situation could exist where a new patient finds your practice by linking from a web site which promises unobtainable medical results (we’ve all seen them) and then seeks legal solutions when you don’t deliver them. You have no way of knowing what these other web sites will evolve into over time – we’ve seen medical web site backlinks appearing on porn sites!
The other factor to consider is the future of the whole backlink idea. Google is very good at changing their search algorithms to try to provide the most accurate, meaningful results to their searchers. They are also very aware of the “backlink factories” that have multiplied (many of them overseas), and it’s only a matter of time before the practice is diminished, or even disregarded when calculating search engine rankings. Backlink acquisition is also very expensive, and we don’t feel that our customers should be taken down this road when it promises such suspect and potentially temporary benefits.
