One of my clients asked me to participate in a phone conference last night for a group of chiropractors and speak about search engine optimization. She has a practice on the Upper East Side that offers chiropractic care for pregnant women. She contacted me over the summer to optimize her existing site and was thrilled with the results so she wanted to introduce me to other chiropractors with the intention of explaining how SEO can help drive new customers to their websites.
My spot was only ten minutes long so I touched on the SEO basics of what will help their websites in the search engines and what will hurt them.
I told them the first thing to do was see if their website was listed at dmoz.org and if it wasn’t, they should submit it. Google’s directory comes right from the DMOZ directory so it’s very important for their websites to be listed. Another free and easy thing they should do is create a sitemap of their website and submit it to Google.
One major problem I keep seeing on websites is text as graphics though in all fairness to the website owners, this isn’t their fault. Whenever I’ve come across this with a client, 9 out of 10 times their website designer wasn’t a website designer at all but a graphic artist who designs for print and not the Internet. I explain to the website owners that if the text on their website is a jpeg or a gif the search engines
will not be able to read or index that copy. Usually this is a conscious choice of the designer who wants absolute control over their design and the client has no idea it’s hurting them.
Another problem I see is web pages that don’t have relevant page titles or worse, no page titles at all. Pages titled “Home,” “Untitled,” or ”Index” have absolutely no relevance in the search engines. I suggested their home page title include the name of their business, the word chiropractor, and their neighborhood, for example, Upper East Side or Financial District. This logic applies to any business. If I’m looking for a tattoo parlor in the East Village I am going to type “tattoo parlor” and “east village” into Google, not “home” or “untitled” or ”index.”
I ended the call by telling them a good website designer will cover the basics of SEO by making sure pages are titled properly, files have relevant naming conventions and images have alt tags. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. An SEO expert will work with them to target the keywords and keyword phrases they want to focus on and optimize their website accordingly. Writing website copy, developing specific content, and making sure they have the proper meta tags to support the website will have a huge impact on its success in the search engines.
I design websites, blogs, and develop social media campaigns for creative professionals who want increase their online visibility, promote their latest projects, and attract new creative opportunities.