This is another popular question we encounter when embarking on the planning phase for a new dental website project. So just how big should your website be and how will this contribute to its success?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As a general principle, bigger websites fare better in the Google search rankings. This is particularly so more recently as Google has clearly been favouring information that is categorised and differentiated within the structure of a site. It used to be the case that you could compress quite a lot of information into a couple of pages and still establish good search engine positions, particularly when supported by some creative off-site SEO (back-links). However, with Google now placing more emphasis on the ‘on-page’ quality of a website, clearly categorised and separated information is now very important.<\/p>\n
An example of this is with dental treatment text – historically you could create three pages e.g. restorative, preventative and cosmetic and add text about the various treatment options to those pages. Today it is much better to create individual treatment pages in order to secure better search ranking positions<\/a> – this is because Google is looking for clear, unambiguous information. It is also much easier to perform optimisation for discrete pages e.g. keyword optimisation, internal site links from blog posts and external linking.<\/p>\n A unique treatment page also offers clear advantages if you run a PPC (Adwords) campaign in that it provides a relevant landing page to help your quality score and reduce your click costs.<\/p>\n The key here is to consider what your website user would want when first landing on your site. Great ‘useability’ is a primary consideration and if it works well for your user, more often than not it will work equally well for Google. So you may wish to use a headline page e.g. “Dental Treatments” which summarises your services and then branch this out to the individual treatment pages.<\/p>\n It may still be appropriate to use the “restorative, preventative, cosmetic” summary pages as long as your key treatments have their own unique pages as sub-sets of these. When planning any navigation structure, the ease-of-use is critical, so it must be clear how a user gets to the information they need in a logical way and with as few clicks as possible. This is also true for the search engine “spiders” that crawl websites to capture the content i.e. pages must be clearly linked and easy to find.<\/p>\nHow should the pages be configured within my website navigation structure?<\/h3>\n