Search Engine Optimization
Optimize Your Site
Improve Your Importance on Search Engines and Reach a Wider Audience
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an effective strategy to increase your website’s visibility and importance on search engines—and reach a wider audience. By optimizing your site’s content, page titles, metatags and links, you can significantly improve your site’s relevancy—and your site’s performance on the algorithmic formulas search engines use to determine page ranking. Unlike Pay-Per-Click advertising, there is no ongoing fee for SEO, which makes it a cost-effective way to improve your exposure on search engines and drive more qualified traffic to your site.
Why is SEO important? Let’s imagine for a moment that your website is equal to your competitor’s in design and content. All other things being equal, if you optimize these elements and your competition does not, your website will rank higher than your competition’s on major search engines.
Talking with Search Engines
Basically optimizing a site means telling the search engine what each page is about—by using key words and other strategies that search engines can understand.
At the heart of SEO is selecting relevant keywords and repeating those key words throughout the following elements on your site:
- Name of document
- Title tag
- Metatags and descriptions
- Internal Link
- Content
By selecting relevant keywords and repeating them throughout these elements, you are communicating clearly to the search engine what each page of your site is about. All of these elements have some weight in the search engine’s algorithmic formula for determining page ranking.
At MedBanner, we help you select the key words that draw the most traffic on search engine searches and optimize their use throughout each of these elements, placing your pages higher and making your website easily visible to your targeted customer base.
Title of page
Of all the elements in SEO, the page title is the most defining factor. The title (the link to each site listed on search engine results pages, underlined in blue) is the most important indicator of what your web page is about (Example: Physician Jobs Nationwide). Within the title, certain key words may be set in bold, another indicator to the search engine that these words describe your page best (Example: Physician Jobs Nationwide).
This may sound simple, but many people make the mistake of repeating the same name for every page of their site rather than using the most important key word for that particular page. Remember that the key word unlocks each page to your site. So on your Physician Jobs site, use Internist Jobs as the title for a page on employment opportunities for internists, but Pediatrician Jobs for the page that lists jobs for pediatricians. This makes it easy for the search engine to determine what the page is about.
Name of page
You’ll want the name of your site, which is your URL, to include a top key word. For your physician job site, you might include the key word “physician jobs,” for example: physicanjobs.com.
You’ll also want to use key words for the name of each page in the site, which appears in the last part of the URL. For instance, if a page of your site advertises jobs for anesthesiologists, you’ll want to use something like “anesthesiologist jobs,” as the name of the page (Example: physicianjobs.com/anesthesiologistjobs.html).
Metatags and Descriptions
Metatags describe your website pages, and are generally seen by search engines but not customers. Customers do see metadescriptions that appear on search engine results pages underneath the underlined title for each website. Metadescriptions give a one-sentence description of your website. You could think of it as a free ad—your chance to catch a customer’s eye as they scan the results page after typing in a key word query.
Example:
Physician Jobs Nationwide (title, underlined in blue, key words in bold)
Physician jobs for all specialties in North America (metadescription)
At MedBanner, we take care in writing metatags and descriptions that use relevant key words to accurately describe each page of your site for search engines. We also make your metadescriptions appealing and informative to potential customers who view them on search engine results pages.
Internal Links
The internal links used to connect pages within your site should also contain relevant key words. If you use the key word anesthesiologist jobs as a link to a page on your site, that key word in the link gives the search engine another clue, another way to know what that page is about. This repetition of relevant key words gives added weight to your site’s importance in the eyes of the search engine. Then when someone types in “anesthesiologist jobs,” the search engine has several ways of knowing that your page is about employment opportunities for anesthesiologists.
Content
You want the content of your site to be unique and relevant to the key words you are using to describe it. In other words, if your page title and metatags use “physician jobs” as your key word phrase, your page must actually be about physician jobs.
In addition, the material needs to be well-organized and the writing dynamic and fresh, whether you are communicating with your customers or with search engines. Well-written conten is the icing on the cake—the element that may set you apart from other sites that repeat key words often but are not well written. In fact, search engines are continually improving their ability to measure quality content vs. contrived repetition of key words. Sites that mindlessly repeat key words are actually penalized on search engines and receive a lower ranking.
At MedBanner, we help you improve your content to be appealing to both search engines and customers, raising your ranking and conversion to sales.
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