Search Engine Optimisation
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By Barb -
on Thu Jul 15 2010
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A website that is lost in cyberspace is a website wasted.
That’s why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become a rapidly growing science. SEO has one simple objective; to make it as easy as possible for the people you want to visit your site, to find you from that vast cyber-galaxy of more than 23200000 active websites.
Effective SEO starts with planning based around a clear business
objective. For example, let's look at this in the eyes of a Medical
Clinic that wants to 'increase use of their after-hours and weekend
clinic by 50%, focusing on a particular audience 'all adults living
in suburbs within a 5k radius of the clinic'
It's then a matter of working out what someone might type into a
search engine, such as Google, when that nagging pain they have had
all week has become more acute on Saturday afternoon - and they're
not prepared to face a long wait at A&E.
It is usually not difficult to determine what terms might be used
by someone looking for a particular service. In this case,
most people would type in something along the lines of 'after
hours doctor' - then a location such as 'East Auckland' or 'Hutt
Valley'. They might also use terms such as 'accident and
emergency', 'GP', 'private', 'clinic', or '24 hours'. The
names of suburbs might also be used: 'St Heliers', or
'Petone'. You will probably be able to decide fairly easily
what terms you want to use - or you can find out more formally
through a patient survey or by getting a research firm to do a
phone survey.
Once you have your terms, you are ready to go.
Optimise page content
Search engines are becoming smarter by the day. Good
content that provides answers to what searchers are looking for,
will help you rank more highly. For your after-hours clinic,
for example, you might have information on health and wellbeing
issues for your community listed on your site. This might
include useful 'accident and emergency' information, such as a
checklist on when to call an ambulance versus ringing the clinic
for an appointment. Make sure your key search terms are
appropriately integrated into your copy.
Good content is built on through optimal use of website
coding. Here are our top three tips.
Page Titles:
Use keywords in your page titles as these provide Search Engines
with a snapshot of page content. Each HTML page has a separate
title at the top of the page beginning with <title>. You can
include variant spellings and abbreviations that wouldn't sit
comfortably within the content.
H1 tags:
Search Engines also rate the content within H1 tags.
<H1>Subject of your article</H1>. These tags can
be used once each page and provide to opportunity to provide a
brief overview of the content on a page with key search terms
strategically interwoven.
Image Alt tags:
Images on a website cannot be 'read' by search engines so they
look for the Alt tag to provide a description of the image. The
best practice is to provide descriptive text around the image
content and purpose, adding in key search terms wherever
appropriate.
Once you have your basic SEO in place, you can increase your
searchability (and improve your service to those who visit your
site) by strategic use of links to other high quality sites.
Plunket, for example, has useful online information for parents
around "What to do about hiccups, colic & crying" - a
classic 'after hours' concern for first-time parents.
Finally, there is no easy way to push your site up the search
engine rankings. Ignore those emails that offer 'thousands of
inbound links'. Links that are not relevant to your site are likely
to result in lower rankings, not higher. Attention to quality
content, and links that deliver real value to your audiences, are
the best guarantees of long-term success.
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