Feb 28th, 2014 – Active MD Medical Marketing & Patient Education, Corporate offices in Tampa, Florida – Medical SEO is an ever-changing thing, which is dictated by tech-savvy search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. As a search engine releases an update, the way to rank your website changes with it. We take a look at some of the myths about SEO and what you will find is not really that important in 2014.
Myth #1: Search Engines have to be told about your website to be ranked
As most search engines allow you to tell them that your site is created and up and running, it’s not really necessary. Google will find your site without your help and index its contents on its own.
Myth #2: Search Engine optimization is all about getting a better page rank
Now we aren’t saying that ranking is not a goal, but not the most important goal. The placement of your medical website has something to do with your getting traffic to it, but things like rich-text microtagging and authorship tags are what search engines now value more to get those important top 3 spots right underneath the sponsored listings.
Myth #3: I can just let my IT guys handle SEO
While there might be some parts of medical SEO that require technical expertise, it is not the skillset that matters most here. Your IT professionals might take care of the details like setting up redirects, robots.txt files, and XML sitemaps, but when it comes to SEO best practices, they may fall short where it matters the most.
Myth #4: Content is more important than Medical SEO
Yes. Content is important, but content without purpose or taking into account the weight of your keywords definitely won’t get you as far. When writing content, who is your audience? You also must what keywords are important based on a careful analysis of your competition.
Myth #5: Keywords need to match exactly
There’s nothing more annoying when you’re reading content on a website and the same exact keyword phrases have been repeated throughout the page. Sometimes the context doesn’t match or the words just sound like they were forced into the page without any thought behind it. Write how it makes sense and don’t be afraid to use derivatives to your keywords and end the monotonous repetition.
Myth #6: Keyword density is not a magic number
When giving your keywords weight in a page, there is no magical number that will make this correct. There are musts for your keyword locations, such as in the title and headline. It also should probably appear at least once in your content, or at least some variation of it. The object of the game is to be able to provide content to users that are searching for it. If they have found your page, we don’t want to over-optimize the content and turn them away.
Myth #7: Links back to my site from other sites that I own helps
A great analogy for this concept would be like someone voting for themselves in an election. Search engines are smart enough to know who owns the domains with those links and will take this into account. Now, you may be thinking “well I’ll just change my registration information then”. How about instead of this, you put as much time into SEO on your site and not worry about the others. The more time and care you put into the site, the better your results will be.
Myth #8: Google will never find out if I have bad sites linking to me
If you had to look at the internet as having a “big brother”, Google is exactly that. Google knows quite a bit about the pages that get indexed an will know everything you might be attempting to keep secret. Trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Google, especially after the Panda and Penguin updates.
To give your website a Medical SEO makeover and start ranking for the things that will bring traffic not only to your website, but to your medical practice, contact ActiveMD Patient Education and Medical Marketing today. You can use this convenient form or call us directly at 1-877-267-4111.
