Secrets of an Effective Website - Page 2

 

The first step is getting your site listed in the huge, international databases of Google and Yahoo. Listing may be handled automatically by the company that hosts your website on the Internet; if not, you can do it manually by going to www.google.com/addurl and http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit.

However, just being listed in these databases is akin to being listed in a worldwide Yellow Pages phonebook with no categories or identifying information that would lead people in your community to find you. So you need to tell the search engines three more things: (1) the location of your office, (2) what services you offer, and (3) what types of problems you work with. You can accomplish the first two by submitting your site to Google and Yahoo local (www.google.com/accounts and listings.local.yahoo.com). These are free directories that display local business listings in your immediate community, in a specific category that describes your services (such as www.google.com/Top/Health/Mental_Health/Counseling_Services/). The great thing about these local listings is that your website, office address, and phone number will usually show up at the top of page 1 of the search-engine results page, for free.

To address the third issue—the clinical problems you work with—you have to tell the search engines to associate your site with the specific words that people search for when they seek out someone in your area of specialization. A common way to search for a therapist is to combine a presenting problem followed by a city: "anxiety New York" or "marriage counseling Los Angeles." Every month or two, the search engines review all the websites in their database, looking for specific words, called keywords, to associate with websites for these local searches. They look for keywords in two specific places on your website: (1) the text of your pages and (2) internal, hidden computer-programming codes called meta tags.

Regarding the text on your website pages, you want to be sure to include the top keywords that relate to your areas of specialization (e.g., anxiety, depression, AD/HD) on each page of your site. The same keywords are good candidates for the internal meta tags. If you're unsure where to find these codes or how to change them, your web programmer can help you identify and change them.

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