by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

How the use of “keywords” within website text has changed significantly and how *not* to do it.

are keywords importantSometimes we forget that clients may not be as close to the ever changing landscape of web design and SEO as we, the designers and search marketers are.

For example, updates to how Google evaluates and ranks websites are fairly clear to us but may not be so apparent for the website owner. This is fine where we control all aspects of  a new website design as we simply build-in best practice as we progress; however, where the client is also involved, for example in generating all of the text content for the site, problems can arise.

This was amply brought home to me recently when I looked back at a website where we had provided a framework for a client who wished to add all of the text content themselves using the content management system. Normally we do all of this, ensuring that each web page is optimised correctly for Google. However, in this particular case, the practice manager advised that she knew a lot about SEO and would work this into the text that she was going to produce.

The practice had a very tight budget for the new site and decided to save money by using their own resources to generate as much of the web content as they could. This was fine in principle, however problems soon became evident.

Keyword stuffing

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

Twitter for dentists – does it make sense?

using Twitter in businessEarlier this week I discussed the pros and cons of Twitter with an experienced dental practice manager. The guy is quite savvy about the benefits of online marketing and had been tasked by his principle to deliver the “best bang for buck” from their web marketing initiatives. Very solid and commendable objectives.

To support their new website, the practice started to use Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus, along with a plan to start blogging and structured search marketing to boost their Google ranking. Within the first couple of months, the practice accrued over 700 Twitter followers – however, soon after they closed the account.

This came as a slight surprise, particularly as they had made good headway, at least as far as followers are concerned, in a relatively short space of time. The explanation was understandable in that the manager had quickly realised that the huge majority of their followers were of a “business to business” nature and not their preferred target i.e. existing patients or potential new ones. Given that the guy was looking for quick and quantifiable ROI, he made the decision to quit Twitter and focus resources elsewhere. Understandable but potentially premature – but why?

The less-well understood benefits of an active Twitter presence

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

How not to get up-sold for your new dental website……..

One of our objectives at Dental Media is to bring transparency to the oft murky world of dental web design and marketing. For the uninitiated, it can unfortunately be a world of up-sell, hidden costs and onerous monthly fees if you are not on your guard.

In this article, I’ll take a quick look at what some designers try to do to encourage the unsuspecting to spend well over the odds when starting out on a new website project. In particular, how web design “packages” are used to try to up-sell to more expensive services. Importantly, we’ll also take a quick look at how to avoid all of that and get what you really need at a realistic and fair price.

The dental website design package

It worth understanding how this technique is used to try to sell you more than you might actually need. Typically a range of services will be offered, starting out with a lowly “starter” site building through to a “platinum” website, apparently filled with all of the latest bells-and-whistles. The designer’s plan here is to encourage you to spend more to get those latest “essential” features – but do you really need that and what value does it really add?

As a sensible alternative, we prefer to give our clients the opportunity of a great design at a sensible price from the outset. We then help them to add new features progressively as needed and when budget allows. There is no need to spend over the odds for those “bells and whistles” which frankly aren’t going to help you much.

Restricting the number of pages you can have

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Mobile

Google offers more incentives to implement full tablet and mobile optimisation. Does your dental website pass Google’s tests?

Google recently announced that they will be adding tags to search results indicating whether the website in question is mobile friendly or not. So the searcher will easily be able to see if you’ve considered all users; desk-top, tablet and smart ‘phone when building your dental practice website.

At the same time, Google announced that they are considering mobile “friendliness” as a ranking factor i.e. actively promoting websites where an effort has been made to ensure that the site is accessible to users on all sorts of devices, whether a large screen desk-top or hand-held. Normally Google does not make this sort of announcement without extremely careful consideration and a certain intent – so it’s usually wise to sit up and take notice when they do.

The “mobile friendly” tags are currently being rolled out into the search results and take this form:

mobile friendly Google tag

How can you ensure your dental website gains the mobile friendly tag?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in blogging

5 reasons why your dental practice blog is still a great investment

Dentists often ask me “why do I need a blog” when we are discussing the recommended tools any small business needs to start making headway with their presence on the internet.

This is a very valid question and so popular that I thought it would be useful to list the five main reasons why a small business blog is so useful….

You need to engage your patients with useful, fresh information

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Content Management

Diligent and regular maintenance to keep WordPress secure

WordPressI’ve blogged before about the pros and cons of WordPress.

I love it as a blogging platform but I’m not keen on it as a content management system for updating websites. For me, it does an excellent job for straightforward blogging but is arguably quite clunky for average users who want to update their web pages easily and intuitively.

However, everyone has their own preferred CMS and it’s fair to say that WordPress is very popular, both for blogging and for those who are content to overcome the learning curve and use it for managing websites. Likely as a direct result of its popularity, WordPress receives a disproportionately large amount of attention from hackers who seek to exploit vulnerabilities in the underlying code and the “plugins” which developers add to extend the functionality of the main platform.

As a result of this unwanted attention, unfortunately WordPress has been compromised quite regularly, resulting in defaced websites and consequent grief for the website owner.

Earlier this month, a huge security flaw in WordPress was published which resulted in many hacked sites as website owners struggled to get their sites patched in time. So why are hackers soon keen on WordPress and how do they get in……?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

Bland dental social media posts ≠ patient engagement

Active use of social media is important for a number of reasons; the primary ones being patient engagement, to demonstrate “social proof” (more here) and also to indirectly assist your search engine rankings. The individual elements are covered in detail elsewhere in this blog.

But is your social media marketing (or SMO as it is known) something which you can just hand off to a third party marketing organisation for a few hundred pounds a month, or is it something which you need to take an active role in at the practice? Let’s take a closer look at what’s needed to make your social media efforts pay off….

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Is your dental web marketing working?

The world of search engine optimisation generally has a bad reputation and I would say justifiably so. Whilst there are some decent practitioners out there, there are still far too many web marketing companies who peddle poor quality SEO services which, at best, may improve a website’s ranking position in the short term, but ultimately will result in the site being penalised by Google.

We get a lot of new enquiries from dentists who ask us to help after their websites tank in the search rankings – often as a result of dangerous SEO performed by well-known companies who really should know better. So what is still going on which shouldn’t be?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

How Twitter can be used to fuel your content marketing.

Twitter iconOne of the questions I’m regularly asked when training dental teams is about how to keep momentum in their social media campaigns. It’s relatively easy to convey the benefits of social media and also easy enough to set up the appropriate channels for dentists to use; however the hard part starts next i.e. actually getting sufficient content out there to attract an audience and encourage them to engage with you.

Panic usually sets in when the dental team or the nominated “social champion” start to wonder how they will be able to think about suitable topics and worse, how do they get sufficient time to write about them. We’ve probably all seen the social media accounts of dentists where they started out with good intentions and then within a few weeks the tweets and posts disappear to nearly nothing? Indeed I would suggest that there are more examples of this than where accounts are actively being managed and delivering results.

Well it doesn’t have to be such an uphill struggle and with a little bit of guidance and an understanding of how to make the process a whole lot easier, you can be successful with social media without killing your time schedule.

Here’s one quick way to help you gather the content you need to keep your social media rolling……

Using Twitter to gather information as well as for broadcasting it

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by AdminPosted on Posted in email

Email set-up options for dental practices

A surprising number of dentists still rely on free web-mail services for business use, e.g. Hotmail, GMail and even AOL.

Whilst some of these services, I’m thinking GMail specifically, are robust and easily accessible, they are generally considered to present a much less professional image than using a domain associated email address e.g. reception@yourlocaldentist.co.uk or similar. So it is widely acknowledged that an email address(es) directly linked to the domain name on which your website is published is the recommended way to go.

Why use a domain based email address?

The main reasons for using a domain based email address are as follows:

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