Every practice with a website should make Search Engine Optimization (SEO) a priority in their online growth strategy; and for those that are just now building a website for the first time, integrate SEO from the beginning.

What is the goal SEO?
The goal of SEO is to increase the amount of traffic that your website gets from people doing searches on Google. So, if you are an optometrist in Detroit and someone goes to Google and searches for ‘Optometrists in Detroit”, you want to be the first website listed in the results.

The Basic First Steps Of SEO
When the user types in their search into Google, the words they use are called “keywords”. The first step in SEO is to choose the keywords that you want to appear in the Google search results for.

Choosing Your Keywords:
When choosing your keywords, we suggest being location specific. This is because keywords as broad as “Optometrist” are going to have lots of competition, making it very difficult to be listed on the first page of Google search results for that term.

Instead, be specific based on your location with keywords like “Optometrists in Detroit” or “Detroit Eye Doctors”. These types of keywords will have less competition, and because they are location specific, it’s likely that the traffic you get from the search results will be from potential new patients in your neighbourhood.

Choose a different keyword for each page of your website.

Where To Put The Keywords:
The basic strategy dictates that for each page you should have the keyword in three places. The person that helps you code your website will know these areas, so you just need to tell them your keyword for each page, and have the keyword listed here:

Title tag: This is the term that will show up in Google search results, and is also shown in your browser's tab for this page. You can see that the title tag for this page is “SEO Basics For Doctors”.

Header tag: This is the most important text on your web page. For your home page it might be “Dr. You – Detroit Optometrist”, for us on this page it’s again “SEO Basics For Doctors” which is in the blue at the top of this post.

Body of the page: While the previous two are the most important, it’s also helpful to have your keyword one more time on that page, casually mentioned in a paragraph.

Three important things to mention with keywords:

1. Do not put your keyword on a page a ridiculous amount of times. Google does not like this and it will hurt your chances of being listed on the first page
2. Always use text for your keywords. Google can’t read images well, so make sure your keywords are actually text, not graphics. If you do have an image, ask your web developer to include your keyword in the "alt" tag.
3. Like images, Google can’t easily read Flash, so avoid it! Flash is a dying platform anyways. Don’t use it.

Selecting your keywords and properly placing them on your website just covers the very basics of SEO for your practice. Feel free to subscribe to the blog to be notified when the next SEO related blog post is up!