SEO Tips for Doctors: Part Two

The second installment of our series focuses on off page SEO for doctors. At its core off page SEO is centered around getting links to your site published elsewhere on the web. There are a variety of ways that you can do this yourself:

• Comment on other healthcare blogs and include a link to your site
• Participate in forum posts on medical or doctor websites and include a link in your signature
• Submit articles to "article directories" like Ezine and include a link to your site

These methods are among the oldest SEO strategies. That said nowadays certain forums and blogs prohibit links to weed out spammers. Article directories are also bloated with poor content so they don't have the SEO muscle they did five years ago. The old school methods are still worth the effort but you may get a higher return by placing links on social media portals like Twitter and YouTube.

Self-Promotion Has its Limits

By far the best back links are that ones that are intentionally placed by the site administrators of reputable, high-traffic sites. Unless you happen to know important people in important places the best way to do this is by creating content they feel compelled to link to. In healthcare circles for instance a link on www.mayoclinic.com would give your site a big boost in traffic and search engine ranking. Not to mention reputation!

Make Sure Your Links are Relevant

The anchor text (word or phrase readers click) should include one of your keywords or terms. At the start of this article we linked to 'off page SEO' which is optimized to be relevant to that particular site/subject. If you are doing a link exchange ask the website owner to link to your site using specific anchor text (e.g. cosmetic surgeon in Santa Monica.) It is a common request and one that you should reciprocate.

Quality is the Best Strategy for New Medical Practice Websites

Do a quick search and you will find forums discussing the best way to rank a medical practice for specific geographic locations. Although everyone has tweaks and tricks to offer about off page medical SEO strategies, everyone agrees that the foundation of any campaign is quality content. Back links and appropriate anchor text are important, but without quality content on your site visitors will not come back for more.