In most cases, medical practices are small businesses, and small businesses need to advertise. Making sure you have a website is the first step to expanding your client base. Many business owners believe that paying someone to make a website and put it up online will instantly bring a flow of customers in; unfortunately, this is not the case. There is much more to setting up an online presence and it’s called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Most people have heard this term but they don’t truly understand what it means. When you start a website, the search engines will automatically begin to “crawl” your website. In other words, it will read all your website content. Once it reads your website, it will determine in which category to place it in: health, medicine, sports etc. Once it has determined the category of your website, it will begin to follow a certain algorithm that is defined by the search engine creators. The point of this algorithm is to determine your ranking for the content on your website. 

Having a website is only the first step in competing in the search engines and it’s probably the easiest. When starting your website, you need to thoroughly research the keywords that you want to be ranked. Google has very good free tools that will help you look at keywords based on monthly searches. Usually when you start your website, you should look for less competitive keywords. Instead of competing for the keyword “Hamburger”, you need to look at other alternatives and compete for the keyword “Best Hamburger” or “Hamburger recipe” or “how to grill a hamburger”. Even though these keywords have less monthly searches, they will help build you a steady flow of traffic and still slowly rank you for “Hamburger”. Once you find these keywords that you want to rank for, you need to insert them in your Meta Tags. (If you don’t know about meta tags, I will be writing an article next week about them and how they help search engines crawl your website.)

Once you have located the keywords that you are competing for, the hardest part is getting them ranked. This is where most business owners have problems; it’s not as easy as putting the keywords in your tags and hoping you rank. Some of your keywords will naturally rank but some will not and that's where you need to know how to build backlinks. A backlink is a url redirecting back to your website from someone else's website. What’s important when building a backlink is the anchor text, this simply means the text that is the anchor for your backlinks. Example : If you have a link on Myspace dot com and the anchor text is hamburger recipes and when they click that it redirects to your url. That is a good example of a backlink with a targeted anchor text. Finding websites that allow you to put backlinks on their website with the defined url is not an easy task, there are many tools that can help you locate them but they cost a pretty penny. The next problem that you run into is how do you make sure these backlinks stick and do not get deleted by the sites admin. In next week's blog post I will tell you how to find some of these websites and how to make sure they don’t get deleted.