by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Essential internet tools to help promote your new practice website

The days of launching a website and expecting it to do well as a stand-alone entity are long gone.

Even for non-competitive environments, it makes sense to establish a few free internet properties which will give your website an initial boost in the search rankings and also help to circulate the word about your new launch.

Let Google know you’ve launched

Whilst Google should eventually get around to finding your new site, you can accelerate the process significantly by producing a site-map and submitting this directly to Google. This is simply a file which details the web address (URL) for all of your site pages which acts as a sign-post for Google to go and index them. You will need a Google Webmaster Tools account to submit your site-map.

Google Webmaster Tools (GWMT)

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by AdminPosted on Posted in social

Concise “need to know” for your dental marketing plans

facebook and twitter iconsA couple of recent announcements from Twitter and Facebook detailed some fairly significant changes. These updates are worth understanding as they may be useful in your dental practice marketing initiatives.

Here’s a quick run down:

Twitter layout change

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Copywriting

Why a professional copywriter will help you stand out from the crowd

All websites and blogs need great content. Your users deserve it and now Google is putting more emphasis on it too. So whilst DIY text is commendable, often it’s not of a sufficient standard to really help your website stand out from all of the rest.

Engaging content, including website text, is essential to hold the users attention and encourage contact. Unless you are an experienced writer, it may well be worth considering the services of a professional copywriter to really help elevate your practice website to the next level.

The history of dental website text – what to look out for and avoid

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Linking to other sites from your dental website? Points to consider.

In recent blog posts we’ve explained the function of links to your website from third party sources and also links between between pages within your site. In this article we will give a quick overview of the third type of web link; the outbound or off-site link.

You may wonder why we need to consider such links? Surely they are just ‘standard’ web links to other sites and don’t need any special attention? Well that’s not quite correct and, particularly from a search engine optimisation perspective, how we handle outbound links is actually quite important. To understand why a little better, we need to understand something called “page rank”.

Page rank – what is it?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in email

Dramatically improve e-newsletter conversion rates with responsive design.

The advantages of responsively designed websites for optimised display on all types of platforms are clear, but have you also considered how well your html newsletters perform on the same range of platforms?

With dental e-newsletters typically delivering excellent conversion rates (current stats. suggest four fold better than social media campaigns) every dental practice can realise quick wins by implementing professional email campaigns as a key component of their practice marketing initiatives.

Setting up an e-newsletter system is actually quite straightforward but there is one key element that is frequently neglected. Well over 40% of all e-newsletters are opened on mobile devices and yet the vast majority of them are not mobile optimised. Just like with websites which are not mobile optimised, users who are viewing your mail-shot and struggle to read the contents will likely just close it and move on. So what should you do to address this problem?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Announcements

Two exciting new website projects underway.

The team at Dental Media are pleased to announce two significant new website projects for prominent dental societies.

The Association of Consultants and Specialists in Restorative Dentistry and The American Dental Society of London have commissioned Dental Media to upgrade and manage their websites.

Each website will incorporate the latest design features including a full content management system, responsive design for mobile and tablet optimisation and secure areas where users can sign in to view information reserved for those with member privileges. In addition, Dental Media will provide professional web hosting and email facilities based on their business-class server network in the UK, together with technical and administrative support.

Another big step forward for Dental Media……

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Why a content spring-clean is useful for users and for SEO

Re-designing a dental website is not simply about an aesthetic face-lift and transferring stale old content. If done well, a re-design will not only improve user experience but also help your search ranking.

These are two great reasons for taking the time to do some thorough planning before jumping into the re-design proper. It’s also well worthwhile making sure that you dental web designer has all of the bases covered, so here are a few key elements to address before starting to push the pixels around.

Content

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by AdminPosted on Posted in seo

Why you may need an off-site SEO campaign to boost your search engine presence.

Following on from our last blog where we discussed on-site SEO, here we will take a quick look at the other main factor which helps websites rank in search engines, namely off-site SEO.

So what is off-site SEO exactly?

Off-site or off-page SEO is pretty much what you might expect, i.e. factors which are not incorporated within your website structure but still affect how you rank in search results. These factors include the following main elements:

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Website

Baking in website SEO during the design process

Following on in our series of articles aimed at clarifying basic web design and marketing principles, today we will take a quick look at on-site SEO, including what it actually means and why it’s important to get it right from the beginning of the web design process.

As with other recent blog posts, this one was stimulated by a recent project where we were approached to assess a dental website with a view to a complete overhaul of the on-site SEO. In principle this seemed straightforward until we were given access to a the website content management system to start the work.

This is where the problems started – the site was built on a WordPress template which had been configured with scant regard to some of the key on-page components needed for effective SEO. A project that should have cost a few hundred pounds actually cost considerably more because of significant coding changes that were required to bring the WordPress template to an acceptable standard. We see this too many times i.e. SEO being badly neglected in the initial design process.

So what is on-site SEO exactly?

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by AdminPosted on Posted in Advice

Back to basics – a look at in-bound and out-bound links to your dental website

It’s sometimes easy to forget that dentists who are new to web marketing or completely outsource it, may be unfamiliar with relatively simple concepts which we, as dental web marketers, take for granted. I was reminded of this in a discussion at the recent Dentistry Show when I was talking to a practice owner about websites and factors which affect SEO i.e. how a website can be moved up the Google search rankings.

The gentleman had obviously heard about “links” but believed that links from his site to other sites was a major factor in determining search ranking position. He was also looking at “hits” (not visits) to his website and consequently was under the impression that his site was way more popular than it actually was. Rather disturbingly, the poor guy was paying a well-known dental design company large monthly fees  to look after his interests but was blissfully unaware what was actually going on. His ranking positions were also rather dire.

To avoid this type of scenario, it’s important for website owners to build a working knowledge of basic web marketing concepts – simply so that they can understand how their website is faring and if the techniques being used to promote it are valid.

So let’s make a start by looking at the different types of website “links” and how they actually contribute to you where your dental website ranks in the search engines….

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