Medical Marketing Enterprises, L.L.C.
Website Optimization, SEO, Reputation Management for Medical Practices
Keeping your website and social media up to date can be a real time crunch. Here are a few ways to do it easily and efficiently.
Do you know you are able to auto post directly from your website to many of your social media accounts? There are plugins which can allow you to auto post via the RSS feed of your site.
Consider, too, a social media dashboard such as Hootsuite, a platform that keeps all your social media platforms organized and open in one window.
If you have a social media account, there is likely a WordPress plugin allowing you to auto post from your WordPress site to the social media account of your choice.
Every time you publish a new post or article from your website, it automatically posts to your social media account! It’s an easy way to keep your website, and your social media account up to date! You can even “customize” the post after the RSS has been received.
For example, this plugin allows you to auto post to your Facebook account or page as soon as you hit the publish button on your website!
Facebook Auto Post WordPress Plugin – AccessPress Facebook Auto Post
And here’s a similar plugin for LinkedIn.
It’s difficult to manage multiple social media accounts, but Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple accounts with same dashboard and with a single browser window! Logging in separately to each individual account becomes obsolete.
Login to your Hootsuite account and you have instant access to ALL your social media accounts. You can manage posting efficiently and effectively.
If nothing else, platforms such as Hootsuite reduce the drudgery of logging in separately to each and every account you maintain. With a single login, you have access to all your accounts (and only one password to remember, too!).
Hootsuite offers some awesome upgrades, such as the ability to add polls or quizzes to your posts. This is a great way to engage your audience.
All the best,
Randy
Search engines rank individual web pages wherever and whenever possible. This means each of your web pages might rank well for a particular keyword given the assumption you’ve paid attention to SEO.
Understanding that search engines rank individual web pages focused on keywords will help you avoid a common SEO blunder.
Each of your providers should have their own “About” page, and here’s why.
Keywords are pretty tricky to understand, but for our purposes are synonymous with topic or subject. Each or your articles must be focused around 1 (or possibly 2) keyword or topic.
The topic of your article should be the keyword for which you want to rank.
Best practices dictate that the keyword should appear in certain locations of your article: the title, subheaders and comprise no more than 2.5% of the total words of the page.
This is the probably the best SEO plugin around. The free version is terrific and I have been using it for years after letting go of a paid optimization service.
YOAST will walk you through the process of optimizing each of your articles so that you may maximize your opportunity for high rankings.
Each of your providers should have a separate “About” page. Cramming all providers onto the same page gives you only one page to rank for the services your provide.
Chances are that your providers each specialize in one facet of your practice. This should be your keyword. For instance, as a retina specialist, my about page should be focused on the keyword “retina specialist.” (Admittedly, it’s two words, but one keyphrase.)
If all your specialists are grouped on the same page, it becomes very difficult for that one page to rank any specialty. A single webpage can realistically rank well for only one or two keywords.
By creating separate pages, you now have multiple opportunities to rank!
All of us hate to write. Written text articles, however, are the best for our website search engine optimization (SEO) and rankings.
There are alternatives to producing content without the standard rigors of creating original content on a routine basis.
PowerPoint presentations are popular amongst physicians because all of us like to talk and we have all given lectures to a town hall, rotary club or church group to market ourselves.
PowerPoint lectures are great for your SEO for two reasons; 1) PowerPoint presentations are considered “text” files for the search engines and 2) you can create narratives of the actual presentation.
Uploading the actual .ppt file and posting on your site is perfect for your SEO. Search engines rank text files (i.e. written text articles) the best. A PowerPoint presentation can be indexed just like your written article.
You might also consider writing down the narrative of your presentation and posting as well!
Video is also a nice alternative to writing. Video by itself does not have the same impact on your SEO as a published article, but publishing the narrative of the video is an excellent alternative for your SEO.
This is a great model as you are able to post on two different types of platforms (video/audio and text).
I produce a weekly podcast with my co-host Russell Faust, M.D. Our website, RussandRandy.com, a website on Healthcare and Medical Internet Marketing, was created to run parallel to our podcast.
After each podcast episode, we post an article to our website featuring the same topic as the episode. It’s an easy option to creating original content on a weekly basis.
All the best!
Randy
Web hosting plans differ in the level of service provided to maintain the servers needed to keep you website up and running and secure. There are various levels of security, IT support and monitoring each company (such as GoDaddy, Bluehost, Rackspace, Synthesis) will provide.
With respect to services provided, here is a list of various types of hosting you can obtain:
This is absolutely free, but not recommended.
Free hosting (Wix, SquareSpace, Blogger, WordPress.com) provides hosting of your website and maintenance of their servers. While attractive, you have no control over your files, have limited ability to rank your website (SEO) and are limited as to the functions you can install on your site.
This is probably the most common package and is what I actually use for most of our customers. It requires a limited of technical know-how, but does not require actual IT experience. You do not need to understand coding.
Every service you need such as monitoring, backup, malware protection, anti-virus scanning is available à la carte. This obviously adds to the cheap monthly fee.
Any website problems you detect will be assisted by customer support, requiring your precious time on the phone.
Managed hosting provides all the services you will need to;
For a slightly higher monthly fee, this may be the best value. In essence, all the worrying is taken out of your hands, thus allowing you to spend your time growing and developing your website.
For most of us, this is too much. Unless you are in a position to purchase or lease your own servers and provide IT support, this is an impractical hosting solution.