Information about Google and Search Engine Rankings

You can have the best designed website in the world, but if it's not optimized for search engines and directories, you might as well be a speck of sand in the middle of a desert.

Since people use Search Engines in order to find websites, having a "top listing" is very desirable.

Who would use the Internet to find a veterinarian?

• Families that have recently moved into the area and want to take a quick look at the various local veterinary hospitals.
• Families that are planning to move to the area in the near future—They can get a quick look at the local veterinarians.
• Pet owners who are dissatisfied with their present veterinary hospital—They can get quite a bit of information from a veterinary hospital's website.
• Pet owners who are looking for good veterinary information on the web—The website that we have created for you has good, accurate and informative information on pet diseases. All these articles are up to date and have been written by experienced veterinarians. Local pet owners would probably prefer taking their animals to a veterinary hospital that provides them with a website offering 24-hour pet care articles.

Here's the scoop. It's very straightforward. Google is the issue. Few web visitors search with anything but Google.

There are lots of companies out there that promise you high search engine rankings. About 99.9% of these companies are scams and total rip-offs. Beware of false claims and techniques that seem too good to be true. One in particular is submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These automated submission programs that "submit your website to 100,000 search engines!" are frowned upon by Google and are in direct violation of Google's Quality Guidelines. The companies that charge $5000 or $500 for this service don't give you anything more than the companies that charge $5. All these companies that advertise on the web or that send you email give the same results ...zero. In fact, most are not legitimate companies. Companies that advertise to increase your rankings can only help if they can provide good links from reputable websites to your website and if they can change the actual text of your website (and none can actually do this).

Two Suggestions for Increasing your Google Ranking:

1. Create a links page and exchange links with other reputable business that have good, professional-looking websites. Before you ask these businesses to exchange links, look over their websites and make sure that they are respectable and professional-looking. Google can lower your rankings if your website is linked from poor quality websites. Also, if you are exchanging links with breeders, groomers and/or pet shop owners, make sure that their philosophy of pet care is the same or very similar to your practice philosophy.

If you are planning to have a "business links" page, we can create this for you. Most of the businesses that you are going to contact require you to have links back to them. Reciprocal linking is very common and is called "link exchange." Finding good websites for link exchanges takes time, but the dividends definitely pay off.

2. Edit the text in your website to include your visitors' Google search terms as often as possible without undermining the text of your site. The more these search terms appear in the text of your website, the higher Google may rank your site. Include the name of your town or city as often as possible (as well as the surrounding towns) plus words such as veterinary, animal, hospital, pet, etc. These are the words that visitors would type into the Google search box in order to find your website. After you change and add the additional text to your website, the newly revised text still needs to sound normal. If it's obvious that you have tried to trick the search engines, Google can look at this as "spamming" and may lower your site ranking. Don't forget, your text still needs to impress your visitors, so don't overdo it.

VetNetwork Offers Google and Search Engine Optimization

The staff at VetNetwork keeps on top of existing and emerging techniques required to successfully market and optimize veterinary hospital website. We embrace change, knowing that the internet is a continuously evolving medium. Please review our Search Engine Optimization Plan for more information, or contact us anytime to discuss your options.