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SEO Medical Knowledge Center

What is Medical SEO

It’s a question you’re probably asking as you search for options to market your medical practice, hospital or clinic. What is this thing called SEO and how can it help me bring in more site traffic and patients?

SEO is short for search engine optimization and can be defined as the practice of publishing and editing website content, HTML, and other coding to increase relevance to specific keywords and remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Or, SEO can be defined as the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines.

When we say search engines, we’re talking primarily about Google who far outpaces their two closest competitors Yahoo! and Bing (formerly Windows Live Search). In September, 2009, nearly 2/3 of searches on the Internet were through Google.

So is Medical SEO basically the process of building my medical website’s search engine rankings?

Correct, medical SEO is simply the process of building “organic” search engine rankings for websites in the healthcare industry – by organic, we mean non-paid listings found in a search engine’s main search results.

These are different than “sponsored listings” you see on Google, Yahoo! and Bing where website owners pay the search engines to list their sites as advertisements – which coincidentally is how the search engines earn a lot of their revenues.

While you don’t see results as quickly, free organic listings in Google and so forth can bring more long-term benefits to your website’s traffic and conversions. A lot of the secret to medical SEO is generating unique content that your site’s visitors and potential clients will find relevant. Search engine spiders, which are really just computer programs, will crawl and index sites on the Internet and reward sites with highly relevant and unique content with higher search engine rankings.

Prospective patients will go to Google and enter keywords specific to your industry. Those sites with high rankings (page 1 or 2) will get the bulk of the traffic from these searches since most people rarely go beyond page 1 in a search engine results page.

Another way search engines determine the importance of your site is through links…specifically, links not paid for and voluntary placed on another site signals to Google that your site is important. Sites with a lot of these voluntary links see higher search engine rankings as well.

Of course, medical SEO is a very technical subject that’s constantly changing. It would be impossible to tell you everything about it in just one short article.

That’s why we’ve created this physician Internet marketing resource – to educate you about medical SEO and all of the things that go into growing revenues and reaching more customers online.

Bookmark this site and check back often for new ideas and tips into marketing your medical practice online. And check out our medical SEO blog as well for quick tips, tricks and musings.

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