Search Engine Optimization - How To?

Search Engine Optimization is commonly referred to when discussing your veterinary website ranking on any Search Engine. When a pet owner does a search for a veterinarian on Google in your city, where does your website rank when Google produces its results?

Does it really matter? In an earlier post, I mentioned that 48% of the market share clicks on the first "free" listing. A combined 84% view the first three listings. If you believe that pet owners are using the Internet to find a veterinarian, than it needs to be your goal to appear on the first page; and ultimately in the first spot!

Where you appear in the "free" listings in dependent on how well your website is Optimized. The article below is an excellent resource on ways you can optimize your website. However, at My Hometown Vet, we realize that the busy veterinary practice doesn't always have time to optimize your website. That's why we're here!

What Can You Do To Make Your Site Optimized?
By Dan Deceuster
http://marketseedling.com/?p=58

“One of the most common questions people ask about SEO is this: “What can I do to my site to make it optimized?” While that is a loaded question, its important to recognize that SEO is not simply optimizing a site. It is a process that takes time and involves doing things both on your site and off your site.
I would like to focus on the on site changes anyone can make to better optimize their website. I will explain off site tactics in another post. But first, let’s start with a few misconceptions.

You do not need to optimize your meta description or keywords. Search engines no longer use these to affect your rankings in their search results. However, having a good description is key for the users, as they will see it just below your title in search results. Make it compelling so that people will click on it. But remember, no matter how many keywords you put in your description or keywords tags, the search engines will not use them to determine your ranking.

The most important on site thing you can do is optimize your title tag. This is the title people see in the search results and the title at the top of most web browsers. Make sure it is between 60-70 characters. Anything longer will usually get cut off in the search results. Above all, make sure the keywords, terms and phrases that you are targeting are in the title, or at least the most important one(s).

It is important to remember also that search engines rank web pages, not websites. Each page on your site should have a unique title that is optimized for the content of that page.

The second most important thing you can do is optimize your internal linking structure. Breadcrumbs are an excellent start as they will link your pages in a hierarchy and your most important pages will end up with the most links from your other pages. That’s not to mention the great anchor text in those links as well

You don’t want hundreds of links on your pages, even if they all point to your own pages. Google always has recommended no more than 100 links on any given page. Make sure your home page has navigation links to your other pages along the top and in the footer. Make the anchor text of those navigation links relevant to the content of those pages. Include the keywords you are trying to optimize for on each page in the links pointing to each page.

The third most important thing to do on your site is have a sitemap and robots.txt file. A sitemap is a search engine friendly thing to have for your site. It makes sure web crawlers will find all of your pages. A robots.txt file will give instructions to web crawlers. Don’t want certain pages indexed? Have duplicate content? Then use the robots.txt file to tell the web crawlers what to do when they get to your site.

The fourth most important thing to do on your site is use keyword rich text and content. Each page should have a couple of paragraphs of text that has a high density of keywords you are targeting. Put the keywords in bold, this helps increase their importance in the eyes of search engines. But make sure your content is not overly stuffed with keywords and is still user friendly.

The last thing to do is optimize your images. Some people disable images in their web browsers. If they do this, they can either see a big red “X” where you placed an image, or they can see keywords. This is done in the “alt” attribute. Make sure all your images have one that uses keywords.

Follow these five pieces of advice and you will have a site that is ready to rank!”

To your Internet Marketing success!
CJ Levendoski

Our goal at My Hometown Vet is for your practice to be found when a pet owner searches for a new veterinarian.

To your Internet Marketing success!CJ LevendoskiManaging PartnerMyhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Search Engines

Are all Search Engines (SEs) the same? Ask yourself this; when you sit down at your computer and search for a local business, which SE do you use? Which SE do pet owners use when searching for a new veterinarian or an animal hospital? Here's the breakdown:

Google makes up 70% of all searches done in the United States. Yahoo is second at 20% and MSN makes up close to 10%. The remainder is shared by several other SEs, like AOL, Ask, etc.

So, how should this effect the way you market your veterinary practice online? Should you just advertise on Google? No. Certainly, advertising and optimizing your website in order to rank well on Google is important, but don't neglect the thousands of searches done on the other SEs. In some cases, advertising on the smaller SEs is less expensive. You may not see the amount of traffic, but the clicks are no less valuable when pet owners are searching for a new veterinarian.

Remember, meet your prospective clients where they are. Don't limit yourself to just one "venue" on the Internet. The Internet is huge and clients can find you many different ways.

At My Hometown Vet, we use Pay-Per-Click advertising on all SEs using a variety of key words. We also employ Search Engine Optimization techniques for each of the SE's. But we don't stop there. We work on your local business results (that's the map with the little push pins on the SE results page), Social Networking sites like Facebook, Blogs (like this one!), and business profile sites like City Search, etc.

Our goal at My Hometown Vet is for your practice to be found when a pet owner searches for a new veterinarian.

To your Internet Marketing success!
CJ Levendoski
Managing Partner

Myhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.

Search Engine Success

If you sit down at your computer and do a Google Search for a veterinary practice in your city, where does your website rank in the results?

Why is it important for a veterinarian's website to appear at the top of the natural ("free") search engine results? If your a veterinary practice owner and your goal is for pet owners to find your practice online, it's imperative that you appear at the top of a search engine's results page. Why?

Did you know that the top three results make up 84% of the clicks? The No. 1 spot gets 48% of the market share, No. 2 gets 25%, and No. 3 spot gets 11%. The number 10 spot (still on the first page) only gets 7%. Listings on the second page get 2% and listings on the third page get a whopping .005% of the clicks.

Let's put this in perspective. If there are 1,000 searches per month in your city of pet owners looking for a veterinarian (if you'd like to know how many searches take place in your city, call us and we'll tell you), the veterinarian's website that's listed first will be clicked 500 times. If you're not on the first page, you might not get clicked at all! If you're number three, you could go from 110 clicks to 500 clicks by having a strategic Internet Marketing campaign.

A realistic conversion goal (number of visits that become new clients) is about 5%. So, if you're No.1, you could realistically see 25 new clients per month as a result of a solid SEO ranking.

Our goal at My Hometown Vet is for your practice to be found when a pet owner searches for a new veterinarian.

To your Internet Marketing success!CJ LevendoskiManaging PartnerMyhometownvet.com allows veterinarians to market their veterinary practice on the internet; marketing your veterinary practice website; search engine optimization for the veterinary practice. Veterinary practice management. Veterinary marketing. Veterinary advertising, veterinary reminder cards.