The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on August 9th, 2011 by tasha
Many of you have been asking me privately for more information about how to increase the chances you will come up high on a search engine result. Happy to oblige!
As we described in a past post about how to increase your search engine ranking, the first criteria for getting listed in a search result is that the content on your page seems to be about the keyword or phrase that the searcher typed in. To deliver relevant results, Google and the other search engines look at all the words on each of your pages (the home page and pages deeper in your site), and for each word on each page they assign what might be called a “relevance score.”
No one knows exactly the formula for weighting keywords, but search optimization professionals have observed that words in special positions get stronger results. For instance, the search engines seem to assign points based on
Each word on each page is given a relevance score based on these types of factors. They do the same type of cataloguing for phrases that they do for individual words. When a searcher types in a word, or phrase, Google sorts through to find the pages with the highest relevance score for that word or phrase. (There are many other factors that get applied after that, but right now we’re just talking about keywords.)
How does this translate to your website?
If you are a hospice, or a geriatric care manager, or a home care or home health agency, you want to be sure that keywords associated with your industry appear often on your pages, and in key positions (page titles, the web address, links TO the page…). That way when someone does a search for those keywords, your page will have a high relevance score and so rise to the top of the search result.
Most web professionals recommend that you choose a set of keywords for each page. Then you write the content for that page incorporating those keywords into strategic positions. Make sure that your content flows nicely. Don’t bend a sentence into a pretzel, just to get one more occurrence of a keyword or phrase! But in the natural order of things, if you can, weave your keywords into the text strategically.
Specific language matters. For instance, a review of Google’s monthly search statistics reveals interesting preferences:
Looking at these data, I would tend to use the phrase “hospice care” more often and in more strategic positions than I would use “hospice service.” And I would probably never say “hospice program.” Who would have guessed that “hospice program” would be searched 30 times less than “hospice care”?
Think in terms of the language your clients will use (including misspellings!) rather than the terms we as professionals might tend to use. For instance, below are monthly statistics for words that a private duty company might employ. (Note, I would change my company name and text so I never used the phrase “private duty”):
For some, like “geriatric care management,” there aren’t enough searches each month to even register on the Google tally. Instead, you might want to emphasize the keywords below:
Using the plural or singular form of a word can make a big difference. Here the plural is more frequently entered as a search term. (I’m guessing the search is for “Hospice services in [your community]“).
But I’ve seen many situations where the singular is more popular.
If you are wondering what keywords or phrases would make the most sense for your business, check out the Google External Keyword Tool. That’s where I found these summary statistics.
Careful. It’s addictive!
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