At least 90% of Health Professional websites that I come across are static, go nowhere fast, boring brochure sites. Excuse me if you site falls into this category! Here are some reasons why Blogs and Newsfeeds work…

1. It Keeps Your Visitors Interested

You want people to have a reason to come back to your website. If your website content is static, visitors can just browse your site once and they’re done. But if you’re putting out new content all the time, they have reason to come back. And if your content is truly interesting, they’ll even subscribe to your updates via e-mail.

2. More Pages = More SEO Juice

Each blog post is a new page that search engines see, and therefore a new opportunity to get found online. Packing as much content as possible into a few pages is not an effective search engine optimization strategy.

3. Incentive to Create More Content

After companies pack their websites with useful content, they often avoid adding new content to their sites. If you don’t have a blog, adding more content means redesigning the site and complicating the layout. All good websites should have something that is updated on a regular basis.

I hope this article encourages you to provide more useful information to your site visitors on at least a weekly basis. Saying that I am remiss in my duties. As a website designer I am often guilty of neglecting my site in favor of my clients sites. Sorry! :)

Setting up a website via a blog is a simple way to get your business online.

You go to Hostmonster and get a domain name and also their hosting package as they use cPanel and Simple Scripts, and you can set up a WordPress blog in just a few minutes. Why use WordPress when Blogger is available? you ask. Well, WordPress is the darling of the search engines. The RSS feed is easy to spider because it’s all text. There’s no code to hinder their progress. Plus, WordPress is very user friendly and there are many, many excellent themes (paid and free) that you can use to customize your blog any way you want. You can also gain search engine optimization advantage by using some of many available plugins. This means more traffic because your blog will show up in the search engine results pages pretty quickly.

But you can also use your new website for list building. How? By putting an opt-in box in the top widget of its sidebar. You want it high on the page so that people can easily find it and subscribe to your list. You’ll notice that we have a widget for our opt-in box in our sidebar, and it works to get new subscribers for us every time we post.

Then, just drive traffic to your blog to attract opt-ins, and there are many ways to do this. Try uploading your videos to places like YouTube.com or Google Video and to your blog at the same time, giving you advertising and content all at once. Do an audio recording and turn it into a podcast. You can advertise in ezines or write some articles and place them in article directories. It’s all up to you.

Blogging via WordPress also has the benefit of the continual use of Web 2.0. If you bookmark every post you make in places like Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon, you’ll get traffic from people who see each story and are interested in reading more. When they come to your blog, enjoy your information, and see the opt-in box at the top of your sidebar, you may have a new subscrber, as well. Or, go make friends with people on Twitter or Facebook, and start a group for your clinic or services. Make the URL to your blog part of your signature. You’ll be amazed at how well this works. You can do this when posting in forums, too.

Keep readers coming back to your blog by giving them valuable content, and always be sure to place the opt-in box where readers can see it. Your list will be growing in no time.

I’ve had lots of questions about this post, so decided to do a series on SEO just for you!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. Briefly, it’s an acronym that is used to group a number of techniques to improve a site’s position within search engine (think Google, Yahoo, Bing) results. As a developer of an open source content management system and author of several blogs, I’ve made the effort to learn a lot about SEO while never claiming to be a specialist, let alone an expert. So I do know a thing or two – such as when SEO is being overused, or when poor techniques are implemented. This post lists some common SEO mistakes that may harm your blog… so don’t do them.

Allowing User Experience To Suffer

I’ve seen far too many sites that think they can do some SEO and it’ll automatically give them great results on search engines. Well the number one thing that gets you ranked well is to have great content that’s unique and designed for your user group. If the user experience sucks, SEO won’t bring it up to scratch. Site design is key and it must be an awesome experience for the user. Big call I know, but I’m sure you’re up to it!

Make sure your site has a strong call to action with clear goals and a well-defined user journey. Make it easy for users to get around your site.

SEO can be done at the same time, but it shouldn’t take precedence over user experience.

Bloated Content Due To SEO Techniques

Right, so you’ve got some content on your site, but it’s a bit too brief, and doesn’t mention any of your keywords. Instead of writing the content to include keywords in a subtle way, an alarming number of sites throw masses of keywords into the content – or they put a long list of keywords at the end of the page. This looks incredibly ugly and spammy and is a major turn-off. Not to mention, you may incur a search engine penalty.

Using Every Possible Technique

Have you seen articles and ebooks called “The 101 SEO Techniques You MUST Use!” or similar? As if you are going to do all they suggest. You’ll be at it for 101 years and not to mention that you won’t EVER want to get on the internet again. The answer is not to work through the list, ticking off the ones you’ve done, and noting the ones you haven’t. It’s not a contest to see who can implement every technique first.

Try doing the top 5 recommended techniques first and see where that takes you. If you cope OK with that, then do another 5 and so on. I outsource my SEO for WAY less than a small fortune to the Philippines. I might even write a series about how to do this.

Most importantly don’t subscribe to “link farming”. Poor quality links can actually take your site SEO backwards.

Using The “alt” Attribute

The alt attribute on an image allows you to include alternative text in case the image doesn’t show up. People… it’s not an SEO playground where you stuff a zillion keywords. Google in particular will penalise you for doing this.

Link Overkill

Navigational links, tag clouds, related posts and the like can enhance the user experience for visitors, when used appropriately. However, if these links just take you on a merry-go-round with a wide range of different link text taking you to the same six pages, it’s going to seriously piss people off. Seriously.

Social Media Madness

Want people to share a post or link to the site? Yeah, we’ll have a Twitter link, and a StumbleUpon link, Digg, Reddit, Facebook… hmm what else is there? Oh stuff it, let’s add them all – and why not add a “recent tweets” widget too…   You must be joking. With so much third party crap on a site, you are guaranteed that they can easily bounce away from your site, or it becomes ugly. We don’t want the ugly factor. Just use the most popular. In other words lose the junk and keep it clean.

Putting Everything On The Homepage

Why not put everything on the homepage? Your website only has a few pages right? Hey, what if someone only visits the homepage? We should tell them everything in case they don’t think to click anywhere else – right? Wrong. This strategy just looks downright ugly and get this… some people may not even start at the homepage. Yes, your other pages can show up in search engines too! Keep the navigation simple and the content organised nicely, instead of dumping the whole lot on the homepage and hoping it’ll make your homepage rank for lots of keywords.

Failing To Set Boundaries

If you don’t know the niche you want to target, you may as well give up now. You have to start by targeting certain keywords – more on this later. You’re not going to rank for every possible keyword. So don’t try to. Target a few – and consider adding a blog to your site if you want to target a few more. That said, you shouldn’t post about anything and everything – much like using every possible SEO technique, having too broad a focus for a blog means you’ll be a jack of all trades – and a master of none.

Spending More Time On SEO Than Anything Else

Yes this is my “issue” that I almost need psychological help for. There comes a time when the time spent on optimisation far outweights the benefits. An SEO expert can make great inroads for your site if there are major issues to sort out, or missed opportunities that could yield great results without sacrificing the quality of the site. But endlessly tinkering with a site for negligible gain isn’t a worthwhile use of anyone’s time. One word… outsource!

This is really important stuff for any health practitioner with a website. If you know of at least one who could benefit, please feel free to forward this post to them.

Here are 5 reasons why posting too frequently may not be such a good idea.

1. It lessens the impact of your best posts. If you’ve just spent ages perfecting a really great post, keeping it at the top of your front page will draw attention to it. But if you write another post too soon after the last, the impact of that really good post may decrease. Subscribers may read everything, but new readers will usually see the latest post first. Don’t be trigger-happy with your next post if you just put up something great. Leave it up for a bit.

2. Readers may feel overwhelmed. This is a biggie for me. I feel harassed if someone posts (or even worse – autoresponds) too often. Some blogs just post too much, too often (yes that’s you Duct Tape Marketing!). Even if the content is always really good, you may overwhelm your readers if you post too often.

3. A greater risk of writers cramp or blogger burnout (whichever comes first). If you’re not used to blogging and you start out by posting far too often, you may burn out before you even get to the end of your first month. You’ll end up hating/resenting it and that’ll be the end of your website venture. Boo hoo. If you are a health practitioner type that has staff, get them to write a guest post. Credit the post to them, they’ll love you for it.

4. Sometimes it’s better to keep a stock of posts. Bulk writing is a handy way to “stock up” on posts at times when you’re keen to write. You can then publish them over a few days or weeks, perhaps saving some for days when you “need” a post but you don’t particularly want to write on that day. I love saving posts like this and auto-publishing them (thank you WordPress). If you write lots of posts in quick succession, resist the urge to publish them too quickly – even if they’re really good! (Which, of course, they should be.) If you want to know how to auto-publish using WordPress just leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

5. Sleep on it, and you may get new ideas. I often find that if I write a great post and sleep on it I’ll come up with a number of new post ideas that link to the post I’ve already written. Nice for SEO. Spending that extra time could lead you to a great follow-up post, or a spin-off post based on what you last wrote. Don’t be impatient!

Health practitioners, save yourselves! Slow down, pace yourself, and you may find that things start to fall into place.

SEOmoz’s biennial Search Engine Ranking Factors has finally launched. This is something that few in the online health industry eagerly await. How many of your fellow health practitioners do you think keep on top of search engine optimisation for their site? Not many. None of my clients have ever had an SEO plan before they came to see me. Yep that’s right… NONE!

SEOmoz knows how to do search engine ranking. This latest article was link-baited to bits. Speaking of link-baiting (look it up) this URL had squillions (the actual numbers change all the time) of Inlinks according to Yahoo Site Explorer. This page actually ranks second to their blog page. Nice!

Take notes. This is how the SEO experts do it. Read the report and then print it and paste it to your wall. Don’t forget to upgrade it when they put a new report out as the Google algorithm changes. The new Link Building effectiveness section of this report is fantastic. In fact the whole thing is great. Consider it the SEO cheat sheet or an excellent quick reference guide (pasting to wall now).

The thing I like most about it is that I don’t need to spend hours trawling between different SEO resources trying to determine best practice – the collation of opinion has already been done, so this resource gives me a major shortcut. More and more we are finding that quality back links are key. Get your V.A. (ask me how) to work now!