Tips to Increase your Medical Practice Web Site's Exposure

From MGMA Blog
Posted by Caren Baginski on Mon, May 04, 2009

Ideally, your medical group practice's Web site would be the first thing patients see when they search online for your practice's name. But that's not always the case, especially if your site is relatively new or isn't optimized for search engines. This means keeping your site current and making sure search engines know about it.

First, it's important to understand how search engines like Google work. All search engines have automatic scripts, commonly called "robots" or "spiders," that crawl the pages of your site, scanning for terms to learn what your site is about. What you write on your Web site, who links to you, whom you link to and even how your Web site is designed can affect where it's displayed on a search results page.

With so many factors, where do you start?

The Web is a big place, so make sure you're included by freely submitting your site's URL to the three biggest search engines:

• Submit your site to Google
• Submit your site to Yahoo
• Submit your site to MSN Live Search

If your medical practice's Web site is already in the search engines, but not showing up on the first page of results, you'll have to do a little work. You have a number of options – paid and unpaid – to get your page to appear higher. Here are some free things to get started:

• Talk to your Web site manager to ensure your site is optimized. Larger medical practices tend to have more resources to devote to their Web site, so they are most likely designed with search engines in mind. If you're the owner and maintainer of your Web site, you can use the free Website Grader by inbound marketing company HubSpot to see if your page is search-engine friendly.
• Make sure every page of your medical practice's Web site includes your organization's name in text, whether it's in the footer, at the top of the page or as part of an "alt tag" - the text behind an image on your site. To change or add alt tags, you need access to the HTML of your site.
• Sites that are made up entirely of images have a hard time ranking in search engines because search engines can't "read" them. If you use lots of images with text in them, talk to your Web site designer about converting images to text.
• On your medical practice's home page, ensure the name of your organization shows up at the top of the browser itself. This is called the "meta title," and it's one of the first things a search engine looks at when indexing your site. If you don't know how to change the meta title, this tutorial will get you started.

Once you make changes to your practice's Web site, it can take as much as three months to see a difference in search results, so be patient. While you wait, don't forget to try out these social networking techniques which also can boost your practice's visibility on the Web.