July 1st, 2014 – Active MD Medical Marketing & Patient Education, Corporate offices in Tampa, Florida – The creation of effective medical content used to be based on “how much” versus “how good”. Companies are still generating massive amounts of information across the internet in the form of blogs and PR websites or article repositories. Is that information useful? Does it tell a story that will engage your audience and get them interested in your medical practice? At Active MD, we strive to deliver high-quality content that will both engage and motivate your potential clients into scheduling a consultation or booking an appointment. Here are some common errors in writing medical content that reduce quality and could possibly have your website flagged and blacklisted by search engines like Google.
Article Spinning
So your specialty is plastic surgery and you want visitors to book a consultation for a breast augmentation procedure? You know that Google now checks for duplicate content and lowers the rank of content based on how much of it has been duplicated from other sources. One of the common practices in medical marketers that produce content was Article Spinning. This practice involves writing an article once and then basically saying the exact same thing but using slightly different words.
For example:
“Breast augmentation is a very common plastic surgery procedure to improve the look of female breasts by increasing their size or changing their shape.”
could be spun to read
“Breast augmentation is an extremely frequent plastic surgery operation to better the aesthetic qualities of women breasts by making them larger or adjusting their contour”.
In these two sentences, the same thing was said using different words. This is commonly done using simple tools like a thesaurus, but these types of articles will quickly get indexed by search engines and may result in both of them being blacklisted for duplicate content. Any quality article written will automatically be written uniquely from other content, since the time and effort to create it included research of the topic and intelligent writing methods. Most articles created by article spinning can usually be identified by their improper usage of grammar and punctuation.
Hidden Content
Search engines use robots (also called “bots”) to read internet content to figure out where it should be placed in search engine rankings. The text on a page can be hidden from people looking at a page using clever styling options. Sometimes medical content creators will run out of places to put their keyword phrase, so to fool the reader but still have that keyword read by Google they hide it using several different techniques. Styling options can include making the font size so small that it cannot be read by a human or perhaps the text is the exact same color as the background of the page. In both cases, the human reader wouldn’t notice that the words “breast augmentation” have been placed 10 extra times on the page, but a search engine will read them and count them as being more relevant for that keyword. The updates to the search engines have made these practices obsolete and even dangerous for medical content creators. More websites are being blacklisted due to the use of these techniques. Our strategies at Active MD, however, are to make sure that the medical content we create for you is unique quality content and
Over Optimization
When dealing with the structure of a website, there are many ways to include content that will be read by search engines that is not visible to the human reader. Some of these techniques were explained previously in the Hidden Content section, but there are other ways that pages can be optimized, or, in this case, over-optimized for a particular keyword phrase. It is possible that your keyword appears too many times in your copy text, so search engines now know to pick up on this and call it “spammy”. Natural medical content creation will automatically have the right amount of keyword density, since the flow of the copy text will be completely organic. Efforts to hit a specific keyword density usually result in an article not reading correctly. Both search engine bots and users are catching on to this trend and bounce rates go up when that happens. The medical content that is written at Active MD takes careful planning, research, and consideration.
If you would like to learn more about medical content creation services offered by Active MD Medical Marketing & Patient Education, please call us today at 1-877-267-4111 or you can also use the form on our corporate website.
