July 9, 2008 | Filed Under Chiropractic Websites | 3 Comments
I just received an email from a company offering a link to my chiropractic website to help build my search engine ranking.
For just $120 a year, they will add me to their site!
The letter states:
“The number and quality of incoming links determines the popularity of your web site in the search engines.”
This is true. So I decided to check out the company and see how much “quality” their site had, using the free PageRank Checker service.
This company’s PageRank?
0
This $120 would be a total waste, and unfortunately, many chiropractors will fall for this scam.
What’s really frustrating, is that for $150 a year, we provide over 350 pages of content for your website, plus a free search engine optimized site. This material has real search engine benefits. Here’s one of the free sites we include with our service.
At any rate, if you’re thinking about spending $120 on search engine links, give us a call first.
July 9, 2008 | Filed Under Chiropractic Websites | No Comments
Getting your chiropractic website to rank high in the search engines is a major priority for many doctors. Search engines are a great source of new patients, and you want your site to show up in the first few results. As we know, content is important in ranking well, but there’s another issue that gets very little attention:
Markup validation.
“Markup” is the code that your site is built on, and there are standards for this code. The standards are put together by an international group called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards are in place to create some kind of order on the web. By following the W3C standards, a website should appear correctly anywhere, on any browser.
Why is W3C validation important?
Because it makes the job of a search engine bot easier. When a Googlebot is traveling through your site, looking for content, incorrect code can mean that your site content is not indexed properly. And that might harm your search ranking.
Checking your site for validation is simple. Just go here, and the W3C will validate your code for free. It even tells you where the errors are on your site, making it simple to fix.
Here’s one of our sites: Salem, OR Chiropractor, Dr. Richard Layman
We code our sites so that there are no errors, which helps you dramatically in Google and Yahoo search results.
July 4, 2008 | Filed Under Chiropractic Websites | 2 Comments
Patient testimonials are a fantastic addition to your chiropractic website.
There are a few reasons why:
First, search engines LOVE original content. By publishing your patient testimonials, you’re adding new pages for the search engines to gobble up and index.
Second, it makes your service tangible to your potential patients. While it’s important to have a variety of video and written materials on your site for you patients to read, testimonials make the benefits of chiropractic real. A picture of the patient with the doctor can reinforce this image.
Having a patient discuss how you helped them with their back pain or headaches can be a powerful way to show new patients how you can help them.
So, now that we know how important it is to include testimonials on your site, we need to have your site set up so that it’s easy to add testimonials.
A common problem with many chiropractic websites is that they aren’t updated often. This is especially common when you have your site built by a local company, since they oftentimes don’t provide an easy way to add your own content.
With our clients, we provide a very simple tool that allows you to add and change content in just seconds. Then, when you get a new testimonial from a patient, you can easily add it to your site.