Search Engine Optimization

SEO is included in all of our website packages.

Basic SEO

We will optimize your page titles, meta tags, internal navigation links, html file names, image file names, alt tags and key text elements throughout your website to make your website more findable with the keywords your potential clients are most likely to use.

These are the most powerful on-page optimizations, and we include this at no extra charge with all of the websites we build.

About Keyword Tweaking

Some people feel compelled to take SEO beyond this by doing keyword research and tweaking keyword counts in their body text. We don't recommend this for therapists. Here's why.

It is far better to spend your time and effort adding new pages over time than fiddling with the keywords on your existing pages. You can easily add pages yourself if you have our website editing tools. Alternately you could maintain a blog on the same domain and hosting account as your website.
Our clients do well in search engines without fussing over keyword counts.
The most important keywords are the ones that relate to your specialty areas. They will occur quite naturally when you write authentically.
It is easy to turn off visitors by making your text sound like it was written for search engines rather than people.
It is easy to inadvertantly make search engines think your text was written for "SEO" rather than people! Search engines today are very sophisticated and will downrank a website that looks "too SEO'd"!!
If you hire an expert (including ourselves) to do this level of SEO for you it will be quite expensive. It generally takes a large company with a very large website and an expensive product to justify that cost.
The SEO we include at no extra charge with all of the websites we build gives you the lion's share of the possible ranking power that can be squeezed out of your website!

That said, if you are still determined to tweak the keywords in your body text, your best bet is to do it yourself using our website editing tools. Here is an article that will get you started.

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/11577.asp

Yes, the Gail Parker featured in that article is our own founding director!

About Incoming Links

Do make sure you get some high-quality therapy-related websites to link to your website. Search engines definitely like to see that other websites consider your website worthy of linking to! One-way links are much better than "reciprocal" links.

About Outgoing Links

Linking out to other websites from yours will not help your SEO, but as long as your outgoing links are to quality websites (and you don't have too many of them) they won't hurt you.

Services

Don't miss our excellent educational section: Effective Website 101