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9 Ways to Make Your Dental Website Do It's Job Posted by Tyson Downs on 3/26/15 8:30 AM Keeping your dental website high in the search engine ranking positions is important in maintaining a high number of visitors. By making just a few small tweaks to your website, you can help improve how high up your site appears for keywords (those pesky terms you want to show up for in Google), and maybe even rank for some that you weren't even targeting.
Listen to this blog post:
1. Speed Up Your Site Search engines try to give users the bes t search results possible. One thing that they look at is how fast the website loads. Using terabytes of data, search engines know that visitors won't spend more than a couple of seconds waiting for a site to load before they decide to move on to another website. Because of this, your position in the search engine placements can suffer if you have a slow loading site. In order to combat this problem, you can start by reducing the size of on-site images (you can compress them with something like Smush.it ), or by using thumbnails instead of fullsized images. Any extra script or plugin that can be removed would also help to speed up loading times, especially if the function isn't particularly important to you. A great tool that you can use to test the speed of your site is Pingdom. You can also use Pagespeed Insights from Google.
2. Keep Your Content Updated When you add new content to your site, search engines will see it as content that is current, not outdated, and it's been debated that 'fresh content' can give your website a bump in the rankings. Content is one of the most important factors in how high your site is ranked, and is arguably the one thing that you can control the most on your website. You don't necessarily need to update your website every day, but once a week for a fairly active site, or once a month for a static business site, should be just fine.
3. Create URLs that Describe the Content A common mistake, especially on pages generated on website platforms, is a random string of numbers and letters being used as a URL for new content. This is often called making your URL's SEF. The URL in this case does nothing for your search engine visibility as the string after the forward-slash is completely unrelated to what is on the page. If you are creating these pages manually, be sure to name them something related to the content. For website platforms, there is usually on option to format your new pages a certain way, this includes using the title in the URL. Doing this will help your internal pages rank well, which in turn will help your main page to rank well.
4. Be Sure Search Engine Bots can Navigate Your Site
The easier it is for a search engine bot to crawl your site, the better the site's link structure is going to look. You can do this by creating a sitemap. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages are on your website and where they are located. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to do this manually. You simply "fetch your site as Google" and Google will send a bot through your website and it will immediately report back if there are any errors. If there are errors, such as broken links, you'll want to fix them. "Fetching as Google" also ensures that they read a particular page on your site so that it can be included in a search result. While not imperative to do, it certainly can't hurt.
5. Create a Mobile Version of Your Website For large websites built on proprietary platforms, having a mobile site professionally designed can help keep mobile users engaged. For smaller websites, a responsive theme can detect when a user is visiting from a mobile device and display a mobile version of your site automatically. This should reduce your bounce rate, which will help maintain a higher search engine ranking.
Plus, the upside is that Google now tells visitors if a website is 'mobile friendly' which can not only have an impact on your CTR (click through rate) when you show up in the search results, but it is also a ranking factor, so don't lose out on those clicks and make sure your dentist website is mobile friendly.
6. Don't Neglect Your Title Tags Having more than one of the same title tag on website isn't something you typically want to do. This is usually something that's pretty easy to fix, though you'll need to go to each page to fix it. Remember-each page has it's own purpose; you'll want to optimize each page for that specific purpose.
7. Consider Using SSL Encryption Making sure that your website has an extra layer of protection for visitors is an aspect of website management that has been important for a long time, but has only recently started to factor in to website rankings. It usually doesn't take much to use SSL encryption, and you only have to take the initial steps to put it in place one time. While it may not count a lot towards ranking algorithms now, you shouldn't be surprised if website security starts to matter more in the future.
8. Give Photos a Description
When you have photos on your site, you have an opportunity to give search engines a little bit more information on what your site deals with. Giving your image alt tags a solid description can help your site, or your picture, show up higher in the SERPs (search engine results page). In addition to a description, properly naming your images can help as well. Too often you see pictures on websites with a name consisting of random numbers and letters. Just like URLs that do not describe the page content, a random name for a picture will not help your site or your image show up in a search engine.
9. Give Your Website Social Media Credibility Linking to your social media accounts can help your website get a higher number of social media signals, which do play a role in how well your website will rank. The more popular your site is on social media, the better of a chance that someone will share it either on the social media site, or on a different website. This helps to increase the number of quality backlinks you have, which has a positive effect on your rankings. By implementing these little changes, your website will look better in the eyes of search engine bots, and you should see a rise in the search engine ranking positions.
Let's face it, when you really get down to it, websites for dentists can get quite technical. But, don't use that excuse as a reason to ignore it. How many of these strategies are you using to to make your website more visible?
Topics: Web Design