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What is SEO?

"Search Engine Optimisation" or "SEO" refers to the process of improving how your website appears in "organic" results of search engines such as Google or Bing. As a general rule of thumb, sites that appear higher up in the results will get more traffic to their pages. As the algorithms that determine the order of results are subject to tweaks and improvements, SEO habits themselves are constantly changing.
SEO is considered to be a bit of a "black-art", with large numbers of companies offering their services at a premium. Whilst the concept of "doing it yourself" may seem daunting, keeping in mind the key best-practice concepts will ensure that you and your website are well-positioned to target a wide and suitable audience.

Keyword-Rich Content

One of the key strategies employed by the "spiders" that search engines sent out to crawl your websites is identifying the actual copy written on the page and the repetition of key words and phrases. As a result, you will need to consider the search-habits of your target audience, and ensure that the terms they would use to find your practice are reflected on your pages. For example, if you offer "physiotherapy" services, you may wish to focus on similar words people may search for, such as "massage", or specific problems such as "lower back pain". Remember that text included in images cannot by crawled by spiders, so you may wish to revisit the design of some of your pages.

An additional tool for identifying your keywords is using Google AdWords Keyword Finder, that whilst intended for paid advertising campaigns can help to show you the competitiveness of keywords and their search frequency. Once you have identified your keywords, ensure that they appear in the body of your pages and in the "meta data" of your page, unseen information that gives the spiders fundamental information about your page. This can either be done by yourself with a little knowledge of HTML and access to your server, or can be done by your web designer.

Linking

"PageRank" is a number out of 10 given to your website based on inbound and outbound links which helps search engines to verify how "trustworthy" your site is seen to be. Linking between sites allows "link juice" to be carried through, so if your site it linked to by a site with a good PageRank, link juice will be carried forward to your site, improving it's PageRank. Whilst you can often not control the inbound links to your site (and Google disapproves of link farms or other artificial linking means), there are some steps that can be taken. Ensure that your site is linked to from your social media pages, and attempt to get listed on free open directories such as DMOZ or professional bodies associated with your specialty.

Outbound links are also important to consider, so wherever you mention a site or a source, make sure these include a reference and a hyperlink. Making sure that your site is linked internally is also important as it will increase the time spent on your site by the spiders. You may wish to revisit your menu structure or implement a "quick links" footer which ensure that all your pages have a link to all other pages on your site.

In order to determine the PageRank of your site, you can download some handy plugins for your browser such as PageRank Status for Chrome.

Fluid Content

The rate at which search engine spiders crawl your site can be determined by how frequently the content of your pages change. With this in mind, you may want to create a monthly task to change text, images or add or remove pages to ensure that your content is up to date.

Keeping Up to Date With SEO

Whilst we have only touched on the basics of SEO, you may wish to further your learning. There are a number of online tools that you can use to improve your knowledge, such as Google's Webmaster Academy. Matt Cutts, Head of the Google Webspam team, also documents changes to the Google algorithm and new SEO tactics on his blog. Getting to grips with the basics of HTML may also further enhance your understanding of SEO and give you the ability to quickly implement changes for yourself.

WriteUpp provides web-based practice management software for individual healthcare professionals and small practices. Visit their website for more details

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