Search Engine Optimization

Hi, this is Dave Katz with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you. You know, what we hear all the time about the internet is that you have to have good SEO, which is search engine optimization.

All that means is you have to create a website where when Google is looking for someone like you, they find you and not someone else. Now, how do you have good SEO? Well, the, the web developers will tell you there's all kinds of ways to do it, but I'll tell you the things that make the most difference. First, you have to have something that's important to the web crawlers. In other words, to the software that look goes out and look at the web, you have to have something important in your titles and subtitles.

A long time ago, I used to do websites just as a hobby, and I would create one for a therapist that would say something like this., “Welcome to our page, I think you're gonna like what you see now." That sounded like something nice and warm and fuzzy. "Welcome to our website. I think you're gonna like what you see." Sounds good. Sounds inviting, but really, as far as search engine is concerned, it was worthless. See if I would've said "providing marriage counseling to the Denton, Texas area for 12 years," that's a title that'll stick with them. Now, it doesn't have to be the one on your homepage, it can be on any pages because they look all through your website to find the information. But you have to have information rich titles in both your titles and your subtitles and even a little bit in the script, and you'll find out that you get linked a lot higher. That's the first thing with SEO.

The next thing I think you should do with SEO is make sure you have some links that come into you and some links that go from you. Now it's easy to get links to go out. You just type in a link to American Psychiatric Association or something like that, and you'll have a web link that goes out. But it's hard to get people to send a link to you. And so with your colleagues that are outside your drawing area, make sure that you get them to work with you. So you link to them and they link to you because search engines like to see websites that have links on them, both links in and links out because they're very important to build your search engine optimization.

And then the last thing I think I would tell you to do is to tie everything to social media. So make sure that whatever social media sites you're on, you have a tie with those or a link with those so they can get right to your social media sites, not because they need to go to your social media sites, but because it improves your SEO. So those are some quick ideas. Make sure that you do good titles and subtitles. Make sure that you have links in and out, and make sure that you have good social media, uh, links and you'll be go a long ways toward improving your search engine optimization.