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 September 7th, 2011 by tasha
My last blogpost was specifically about how to use keywords for search optimization. In particular, I talked about picking words that people who are actively looking for services (service seekers) are likely to use.
What is interesting with search engine optimazation (SEO) is that specific language matters:
How to reach those people who need your service, but don’t know what the genre is called? I call this the “pre-seeker” audience. These are the folks who later say, “I wish we had known about you sooner.”
Here’s what I recommend:
Read the rest of this entry »
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 Read the rest of this entry »
Written on July 27th, 2011 by tasha
“Media advocacy” is the strategic engagement of the mass media to further a social or public policy initiative. A superb example of this was the On Our Own Terms documentary by Bill Moyers. When the series was aired on PBS, a companion website with Community Action pages was launched to support a media advocacy campaign to raise awareness concerning the need for increased public and private discussion of end-of-life care.
With promotion by the local media, many communities organized public showings and in the following months a movement began that resulted in over 360 end-of-life coalitions forming throughout the country. I remember my coalition in Eugene, Oregon identified transitions of care as our biggest issue and worked to create more connection and communication between providers. We were not alone. Across the country, other coalitions were also looking at the problem of continuity. Now, nearly 10 years later, improving care transitions is a top initiative for Medicare. I do not think that is coincidence.
In the next few months, I see several exciting opportunities for media advocacy around elder care issues. There are some special doorways open to us.
Written on July 12th, 2011 by tasha
“Location, location, location.” While most elder care providers do not seek to drive traffic to the office (you are a service not a place), your brick-and-mortar physical location is becoming a key factor in how high you place in “local search.” All three of the major search engines (Google, Bing and Yahoo!) now have some form of local search: the little square near the top of a results page that has pointers on a map and then a list of the businesses noted.
50% of people who get to a website from a search engine, get there because they clicked on a link in the map.
Businesses pay lots of money to get optimized so that their company website comes up on the first page of a search result, and preferably in the first 3 “organic” links. They also pay money to appear in sponsored links (which only 20% of searcher pay attention to.) IT’s difficult to get on the first page when you are competing with every U.S. business on the Web.
Know how much it costs to get listed in the map section? NOTHING! It’s free! And you are only competing locally, not with the thousands of others who offer services like yours across the nation.
In my last blogpost, I talked about the advantages of local search and where to sign your company up on the 3 main search engines. Not surprisingly, though, there are ways to register that will boost you to the top of the list by the map. (You guessed it. Everyone wants to be one of the first three listed in that portion of a search result.)
In this blogpost, I’ll be talking about how to register for local search in a way that is most likely to put you at the top.
Written on June 28th, 2011 by tasha
#3 in a (delayed) series.
I got so caught up with collaboration across the continuum, and then social media, I forgot I was in the process of a series on regular ol’ Web 1.0 search engine optimization. Well, here’s the latest scoop:
How to take advantage of local search
As a rule of thumb, only 50% of people will find your website because of a search, and they are a fickle 50% (leaving quickly). For the rest: 25% will find it through a link on another site, and 25% because they typed in the web address directly, usually as a result of your own brochures or marketing efforts. (These visitors are much higher quality, more likely to stick around and engage. Still, 50% from search is nothing to sneeze at.)
Search engine optimization can be a very elaborate process. Businesses pick strategic keywords, write their content to those keywords, tweek their websites weekly/daily. They then run tests to see where they rank relative to their competition. Based on where they stand, they start the cycle over again. All of this activity is an effort to be in the first few listings at the top of page one (which is jokingly referred to as the “Google sandbox” because the sands of “who is on top” are always shifting).
Is it worth it? Well, think about your own behavior. How often do you click to page 2 in a search result? Most of us click on the first three links, five if we’re intrepid.
I don’t have specific data for elder care in general, but I can tell you that family caregivers (the Boomer daughters and sons who are most likely to be cruising the Web for elder care resources) may scan the listings of a search result to evaluate for credibility before clicking. But if they are like most people, 20-30% will just click the first links at the top of the page, the paid links. The rest will start clicking at the first link in the organic search results (the results showing just below the paid links).
So how do you increase the chances that you will naturally place high (and more importantly, higher than your competition) without a lot of expense and effort?
