What you need to know about online marketing

Part 3 - Anatomy of a website as it relates to SEO

Instructors:

Peter Boulden, DMD

Peter Boulden, DMD

Dr. Peter Boulden graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Dentistry and practices in Atlanta, GA. Dr. Boulden has experience lecturing locally and nationally.

Dr. Boulden breaks down what parts of your website that the search engines are looking at that will affect your page rank.

The second thing that's kind of overlook is called the permalink structure or the linkage structure. So here you have the Houston dentist which is just the root domain. Okay. As you into a page the permalink structure, we use the dental sealants again. See how it's very very clean in the architecture of the linkage structure. It's the Houston dentist/dentalsealants. Also note see there' a hyphen and not underscore. Don't use underscores in your link structure or anything for that matter because an underscore is not a word separator. Google looks as it like one big word. So it would be one big dentalsealants. Dental_sealant will be the word. Hyphen they look at is a word separator. Dental sealants in the search term. So see how the very clean link structure dental-sealants. Here we're talking about dental sealants. It's not trying to capture dental sealant and veneers and whatever. It's just talking about dental sealants. Very specific, very clean and it probably ranks very well. The next thing that is important to talk about is the H1 tags and this is probably the third thing that I think Google will look at in their algorithm of ranking sites, and look at how sites check in with things is see how it has again kind of repeating the same verbiage from the other two things we talk about. So now we have dental sealants from the Houston dentist so that has the big keyword that we're trying to optimize this page for, dental sealants of Houston. It has them all in the H1 tag. So Google is now going through the algorithm. They're saying check, check, check. Good these people obviously know what they're doing. We're going to reward them by putting them up higher. The last thing that I think is important to talk about on a general on page optimization is what's called internal linking. And these are links that you build in through your site for a number a reasons. And when I say the links that you build in. So here we have an internal link here and an internal link here. Okay. And the purpose of this is no. 1 to make your site easier to navigate around. The idea is you want to trap people in your site. You want to get them on to the homepage and you want to kind of jump around and go through different layers of your site. The idea being that you can keep people on your site longer and that's a metric called time on site. And Google is going to measure that. They measure it behind their scenes whether you know it or not. And that's an important matrix for them to kind of look at and say who's the authority in the area of Houston dentist or dental sealants. So they measure that. So the longer you can keep someone on your site the better. It's going to play into play in your favor. So internal linking will actually help you keep people on site because they maybe reading about sealant but in the text that what you're talking about, it will actually say well you know what I want to learn more about cavity prevention. Let's talk about cavity prevention. I didn't even know those two were related. And that cavity prevention page will maybe put them into veneers or crowns or whatever. So the idea again just keeping people through many levels of your site. The second reason I think it's really important is because the internal linking can actually count for a link into your site. And as it turn [0:24:49][inaudible] which is called link tubes. And basically that means and you can think of link tubes as almost like a currency from Google, right. So it's a link from an outside source into your site. And the more of those that you have from other sources, you have more juice to your site. So the more juice is almost like the currency. You have more money, Google says oh you're a big player. You have a lot of links coming in. An internal link although not exceedingly powerful has one from say Wikipedia or maybe a referring website. It still does count as a link for your structures. So right here you can see here's the link. Houston dentist. It's just an internal link called the Houston dentist and it goes back to their main page I'm sure. So that helps them rank for keywords Houston dentist. That's the anchor text. Another topic we want to discuss and this is kind of behind the scenes thing and it's really just a check off to make sure that it's done adequately is something called meta-tagging. And it's been around for you probably remember if you're familiar with HTML meta tagging was done around all over the place. I don't think it's quite as important as some of the things we've already discussed, but I do think it's something to look at behind the scenes and that's not something that shows up. So you need to be able to find what's called the page source of your website. And I'll pull up something that looks kind of like this. Lot's of graphics. Cause this is how search engine read your site. They don't see anything else other than text. No matter how pretty your site is. So search engine will go through, Google will come through and read text. Okay. That's all they read. So the spiders will go through and look at some of the things we have. So some of the meta tags that I think are important to kind of look at on every page on your site again is the key words and make it very very specific just like you did your title tag, make it very specific to what that page is talking about. Okay. And it's my recommendation to customize it. Don't just use a template for every page on your site. Customize it a little bit, tweak it a little bit for every page. I know it takes time but I promise you that it will pay off in the long run. So here you want to talk about, here it is the meta name keywords. So this is the meta tagging part of the page. Here you can see that Houston dentist, cosmetic dentist, Houston just the things they're talking about. This is just for this site the homepage. Here the description is talked about, right. And sometimes Google whenever they're ranking your site, when it comes up and someone is typing I'm looking for Houston dentist. So sometimes it will say Houston dentist and then the description. The metal description will be after that listing when it comes up all the 1 through 10 of Google. So the description is important as well. So you know I'm a not a huge proponent of wasting a ton of time on meta tagging your site behind the scenes because it does take some coding knowledge if you're not using word press or have extensive knowledge of HTML. It takes a lot of time and there's different camps that think meta tagging is not really look up by Google. But I do think that until that's proven you kind of need to invest some time on it if you can. Especially like I said if you're using a WordPress, game site or another content management site software. So something I was guilty of not doing on my previous websites and I just kind of learn this recently is making sure I have a call to action on every page. Cause the idea is you want someone to read the site say wow Dr. X, Y, Z is a perfect perfect doctor for me to do the dental sealants. He knows what he's talking about. I feel comfortable with him. I read all his stuff. He's the authority. What's next? What's next? I want these dental sealants. What's next? Make it very easy for them to get. So the call to action is hey now that you're ready for dental sealant, call us today for consultations, free consultation, whatever it is. Here's a name. Make sure the number is printed up here. Here you can have the phone number. So it's very easy for someone to be emotionally engaged in the page to go ahead and call or go ahead and submit because people as we know are very in the moment. Oh dental sealants are hot on my mind what's next. So make sure there's always a call action. Make sure there's always a message at the end of the page and saying okay now that you know about sealant let's get dental sealants or whatever it may be. Now that you know Invisalign let's take it to the next step. Let's move into now that we've done all the on page optimization and we're about to do about some of the other things we're about to talk about later on in this presentation.