Getting Your Veterinary Hospital Website On Top Of Google

Your veterinary hospital website needs to be listed high on Google – Part 1

Your veterinary hospital website needs to be listed high on Google and other search engines. No matter how good your veterinary hospital website is, if it’s not optimized for Google and other search engines, you may never be found. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving traffic to your website as a result of having a high listing (or ranking) on Google, Bing, AOL, Yahoo, and other major search engines. Since there are billions of webpages on the internet, unless your veterinary hospital website is ranked high, you are like a grain of sand in an enormous desert.

Most internet visitors use Google to search the web. Since Google is the dominant player in the industry and many other popular directories use Google to perform their web searches, my article is going to focus on Google’s requirements for high rankings.

The listing of webpages returned by Google is in response to the user’s keyword query. The results normally include a list of webpages with titles, links to the webpages, and short descriptions showing where the keywords have matched content within each webpage. Typically, the higher a website appears in the search results (also called rankings), the more visitors the website is going to receive. Therefore, it is in your best interest for your website to appear as high as possible in Google’s search results.

Search engines analyze websites on the basis of keywords or a combination of words that are present in different websites. They maintain a database of words that help them easily locate a website. Google has developed an algorithm that classifies and ranks websites according to several criteria. These criteria include:

• Content – In previous articles, I have mentioned that content is king. In order to receive high rankings by Google, your websites needs to be filled with lots of great content. Content not only refers to text; it also refers to photos, videos, and links to other relevant websites.
• Updates – The more you update your website (add new content and remove old content), the more favorably you are regarded by Google. Maintaining a Blog is the easiest and most efficient method for updating the content in your website.
• Social Media – Your presence on social media (Facebook) is important for increasing your veterinary hospital’s Google rankings.
• Keywords – You need to include your keywords in your webpage titles, sub-titles and sprinkled appropriately throughout the text.
• Popularity of your Website – This refers to the number of visitors coming to your website. You need to drive visitors to your website. For information, visit our previous blog on Making Your Website An Effective Marketing Tool.
• Template vs. Custom Websites – Google frowns on template-designed websites and does not like listing them. Google feels that template websites do nothing more than clog up their directories. Google very often regards template websites as spam.
• Links to your Website – Google favors websites that have links coming in from other relevant and popular sites.
• Programming and Website Code – Your website code needs to be up-to-date and high quality. If your website is built using tables (or as a template), your hospital’s website rankings may be poor.

But how does Google obtain this information to classify and rank your website? Google has developed various applications (called spiders) that travel throughout the internet, gathering the information that they need. After the information is retrieved by its spiders, Google’s algorithm classifies and ranks your website within the appropriate categories. Google sends it’s spiders through most websites on a fairly regular basis.

The next blog in the series – Getting Your Veterinary Hospital Website On Top Of Google And Other Search Engines – focuses on the practical and applied methods for increasing your veterinary hospital’s Google rankings. You can’t afford to miss any of our award-winning articles. Bookmark our blog, request our blog feed and follow us on Twitter. The creative staff at VetNetwork has solutions to help you with all aspects of your veterinary hospital’s marketing program. For more information, check us out at www.vetnetwork.com.

Written and Copyright ©
Mark Feltz, DVM
VetNetwork, LLC 2010
www.vetnetwork.com