Make Sure Your Website is The Top Result Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is key to attracting new patients to your website. SEO is utilized to improve a website’s visibility on search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing and others. If you have a practice in Denver and a potential patient searches the terms “LASIK Denver” on Google, you would like to be the first practice listed, right? To appear first, you must rank higher than other practices. The ranking system is devised by the search engines as a way to relate keywords with the websites that want to be found by those searches. The higher a website ranks when someone enters a search, the more potential traffic that site will obtain, which ultimately means more business. Search engines like Google develop their own list of essential attributes a website must have in order to rank effectively. The algorithms these search engine companies use to rank your site change constantly. There is no guarantee on ranking and ultimately it’s something that has to be constantly monitored if you are to maintain a higher ranking. Parts of SEO can be broken down into 3 categories: Basics Backlinking Socials Basics The basics can be divided into several small steps: Step 1: Research Step 2: Meta Tags Step 3: Content Tagging Step 4: Reporting Step 1: To accurately understand what you need to do for your SEO you have to know who your competitors are. How do they rank? What are they doing to rank high? Once you have a firm understanding of what you’re up against you can begin to figure how much time and money is necessary to advance your own SEO. Step 2: The next step is applying the basics. The internet uses its own language known as HTML. Meta tags are code within HTML that is not seen on the actual webpage, but is read by internet browsers that “tells” the browser what that page is about. Simple meta tags and descriptions came out when the web was invented. These simple procedures haven’t gone away nor have they diminished in importance. It is vital to understand how and what to tag in order to have tagging work effectively for you. Key word stuffing (using key words excessively) can count against you. Location is pivotal within your key words and description tags. Step 3: Not only are tags important but content tagging is just as important. Content tagging is using tags and images in conjunction with key words and descriptions. Your content must use the right phrases and key words to ensure top ranking. Step 4: The final step is all about reporting. In order to see how you’re doing you need to track your site’s progress and understand how to analyze the numbers. Fluctuating between ranking is normal, however, jumping entire page ranks means there is an issue. Backlinking Backlinking is having your website’s URL posted throughout the internet. Simply having a backlink can be helpful even if the backlink never provides a valid source. It is important for you to understand how backlinking works. PR1 – PR4 are backlink scales which report the effectiveness of your backlink. The ranking goes as high as PR6 although typically finding a valid PR4 is awesome. Avoiding spamming and phishing is the top most important factor in backlinking. You always want to use a trusted source and typically look for one-way backlinks. Backlinks need to be added on a monthly basis and through reporting you can determine how many, and how high a backlink rank you should shoot for in order to create the desired result. Socials Social media, review sites, and local business listings (LBLs) are important for SEO. For example, you want to ensure all the information about your practice is the same across all platforms. There are over 200 sites out there to monitor so sometimes it helps to employ a monitoring software. Each one of these sites can be an additional link into your practice. Think about it as widening the possibility that someone can reach you by doing simple keyword searches. Perhaps your website doesn’t show up until #7 on page 1 but you have google review, your Facebook and your maps listing before. What you are doing is increasing the chances that someone clicks to your practice!