Written on March 18th, 2010 by tasha
Search engine optimization for hospice and other elder care professionals.
How can you increase your chances of “being found” without having to pay for a Google ad?
This is one of three topics I’ll be covering in a Webinar sponsored by NHPCO, March 23 from 11:00 – 12:30 Pacific.
Marketing Hospice in the Digital Age. In this webinar we’ll be talking about the three top vehicles for making better use of the Internet:
- Blogging
- E-newsletters and
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
I don’t get paid to do this. I do it because I love to teach and see it simply as part of my mission to help elder care professionals connect with the families that need their services. (I can’t fix the Middle East or global warming, but I can do my part to improve accessibility by helping hospices and other providers more effectively leverage the Internet!)
You don’t have to be an NHPCO member to sign up. And even though the focus will be on hospice, if you are targeting Boomer daughters and sons, or if you want to network with professionals using online resources, this workshop will definitely be relevant.
To give you a sense of the kinds of things we’ll be talking about at the Webinar, here’s a preview post about search engine optimization and how you can, very simply, improve your rankings:
There are so many factors involved in your ranking, who is on top of a search engine result varies from hour to hour. They don’t call it the “Google sandbox” for nothing!
For many years, the lead search engines in the U.S. were Google, Yahoo! and MSN. In June 2009, Microsoft launched “Bing,” and has now cut a deal with Yahoo! Still, as of August 2009, 65% of all searches occurred on Google, so it is clearly the big gorilla, at least for now. (Yahoo! accounted for 16% of the searches and Bing 11%. The balance was spread across lots of much smaller search engines.)
How Google, or other search engines rank their results is something of a trade secret. However, enough is known that one can safely say each page is catalogued and given a score based on 5 basic factors:
- Relevance to the keyword being searched: Is this word the main topic of the page, or a tangential reference?
- Credibility of the site: Does the publisher seem to know what he/she is talking about?
- Longevity: Is this a fly-by-night page or has it been around for a while?
- Currency: How often is the page updated?
- Geo-proximity: How close is the page’s publisher to the location where the viewer is searching?
The pages listed in a search engine result are given priority placement based on their scores in these 5 domains.
If you’d like to learn more about search engine optimization, sign up for the Webinar on March 23.
If you’re interested in social networking (Facebook, Twitter, Blogging and YouTube) and how they can promote your ranking in the search engines, please consider joining me and my co-presenters at the NHPCO Preconference: Social Marketing and Hospice (PC05), Wednesday, April 21, in Washington, DC.
Tags: classic, search engine optimization, webinar
Posted in GCM Marketing, Home Health Marketing, Hospice Marketing, Internet Marketing, Private Duty Marketing
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