SEO Medical Knowledge Center
Physician Marketing and Medical SEO Keyword Placement Goes Hand in Hand, Part 2
Where you place your medical SEO keywords is as important a component of marketing your medical practice online as the keywords themselves. In part 1 of our article series on the topic, we examined the place your keywords will have the most impact, the title tag.
But there are other places on your website medical SEO keywords should go in order to maximize your medical online marketing efforts. Continue reading to learn more, in their order of importance, about the places in your website medical SEO keywords should go.
Header Tags
After the title tag, header tags are the second most important location to place medical SEO keywords. Also known as headlines, these are generally the title of your webpage or article that everyone sees.
When we’re talking about header tags, we mean text that’s within the HTML <h1> tag in your page’s code. There are 6 header tags in all: <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5> and <h6>.
Generally speaking, <h1> tags are the most important because they’re typically a larger font than the others. An <h2> tag is more important than an <h3> one and so on.
It is important headlines look natural and appeal to the reader – i.e. they’re not simply stuffed with keywords to draw the search engine’s attention. (Besides, this will get you in trouble with the engines anyway)
Here’s an example of a good keyword-rich header tag that looks natural to the reader while accomplishing the goal of strong medical SEO keyword placement.
<h1>Your Premier Atlanta Chiropractor Practice</h1>
Body Text/Site Copy
After the header tag, the visible text is another impactful place for your medical SEO keywords. Think of this as your webpage’s general content that site visitors will see.
In HTML terms, this is the content found within the <body> tag. A webpage should focus on no more than two or three medical SEO keyword phrases. Optimizing a webpage for too many keywords will dilute the focus of that page.
Medical SEO keywords placed higher up on the page are better. Search engines index your page’s content in linear order. They place a higher premium on medical SEO keywords found closest to the top. This means strong keywords you’re trying to target should go in the headers and the first paragraph. Avoid placing images and JavaScript before your keyword rich text.
Search engines respond more favorably toward medical SEO keywords within the <body> tag that are in bold, italic font or in bullet points as well. Examples of different formatting tags you can use include:
- <b> bold tag begins boldface text, </b> ends it
- <ul> bullet tag begins section of bullet points </ul> ends them
- <li> bullet tag begins individual bullet point </li> ends it
- <i> italic tag begins italicized text, </i> ends it
(Alter the standard appearance of tags by using Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). This means you can have copy appear as boldfaced for example to the search engines, but standard to the reader. You can assign styles to your tags in your page’s stylesheet.css file. Check back soon for more information on CSS.)
Link Anchor Text
The other place – really it’s in the site content as well but deserves its own section – medical SEO keywords can go is in the link anchor text when you’re linking within your own site. Anchor text is basically the words used in a link.
For example: read part I of our article on medical SEO keyword placement. The text you click to go to that page is the link anchor text.
Google and other search engines look for keywords within link anchor text when they rank web pages in search results.
Let’s say one of your major keywords is “Miami cardiology clinic” and you link to a landing page in different places on your site using that term. The more anchor text links to a web page, the more important it appears to the search engines and thus, the higher the rankings.
This goes for external sites that link to you as well – try to influence the keywords the other site uses to point to your site. The more quality anchor text links you have, the better.
Simply developing a list of strong medical SEO keywords isn’t enough. They need to be strategically placed on your site in order to maximize search engine rankings. But you can’t just stuff your copy with keywords and expect everything to work out.
Medical SEO keywords must appear naturally to the reader – if someone comes to your site and sees every other word is a keyword and nothing makes sense, they will leave. Worse, you may be penalized or even banned by the search engines!
Bookmark and check back soon with the medical Internet marketing knowledge center for tips on how you can maximize the number of keywords in your copy without destroying its flow for the reader.