How Do I Choose My Plastic Surgeon?
How Do I Choose My Plastic Surgeon?
Let me tell you the secrets in finding the finest one for you and what I tell my family and friends.
Look for the following:
* Board certification
* Report card on high quality
* Licensing / public reporting
I know numerous doctors who have fantastic bedside manner but aren't especially reliable in acquiring the proper medical care you deserve and these traits separate the so-so doctors from the really outstanding ones.
If you've discovered one that meets all of the criteria and you know is in your insurance plan, has convenient office hours and simple access, then I'll give some suggestions on what to look for to figure out if she has outstanding bedside manner.
Importance of Board Certification
Your Plastic Surgeon should be board certified in his field of expertise. Think of it as the distinction between hiring a certified public accountant (CPA) and an individual who just files taxes for you. While you may well get the identical result, if tough issues come up, you might not get the very best advice. Given how much we are all paying for medical care, why would you opt for somebody who wasn't board certified?
To carry this distinction, your physician should have graduated from an accredited residency program as well as passed the governing board's certification exam. The examination may well be a 1-day or two-day written test. Depending on the medical specialty, test takers could also need to have to take an oral examination.
To preserve their board certification, physicians are required to devote a particular number of hours per year to additional medical education. Doctors typically fulfill this requirement by attending conferences and seminars. In addition, doctors ought to re-certify with a repeat examination every couple of years to continue their status. Given all of these requirements, a board-certified doctor will typically provide the most up-to-date medical care. Make sure that your physician is board certified. As a recent article noted, doctors most likely to provide the wrong medical care for colon cancer screening were doctors who were NOT board certified.
Your physician could display his board certificate in the office. Some certificates may possibly not have an expiration date due to the fact in the past, physicians were only required to take the exam once. It was excellent for life. This is no longer true. Current graduates can expect to retake the exam each and every seven to ten years.
Discover a lot more and research your physician at the American Board of Medical Specialties.
Report Card on High quality.
Come across out if your doctor is practicing the newest most up to date medical care by checking out his report card on high quality. Is he doing the proper issues to maintain you healthy?
For example, sadly in the United States patients who have suffered a heart attack get drastically diverse care and several don't get the life saving medication they will need to prevent a future event. Much less than 50 percent of heart attack patients in Mississippi obtain this medication recognized as a beta blocker. Yet in Massachusetts, nearly each heart attack patient is taking it. This failure to prescribe the medication simply was regardless of whether the physician consistently followed the guidelines established by the American Heart Association. It wasn't regardless of whether the patient could afford the medication since all the patients received the exact same insurance, Medicare.
A review of 20,000 patients from 12 metropolitan areas showed that 24 percent of breast cancer patients, 27 percent of pre-natal patients, 31 percent of low back pain patients, 32 percent of coronary heart disease patients, and 35 percent of high blood pressure patients did NOT receive the suggested care developed by expert medical committees.
If your physician isn't performing the proper issues that professionals recommend, then what else is he performing wrong?
Licensing / public reporting
Although your physician does not require to be board certified to practice medicine, he does and will need to be licensed. Find your own state medical board by going to the Federation of State Medical Boards or merely Google your state and medical board.
Each state provides diverse public facts about its doctors. This generally consists of the name of the physician, his license number, when the license was issued, and when it expires. Other states present extra data like history of malpractice suits, felony convictions, or disciplinary action by the medical board. Some states split up the licensing and disciplinary functions into two diverse departments or web sites. Whilst at the state site, look for a link either for physician profile or credential search.
The very first 3 items, board-certification, report card on top quality, and licensing / public reporting I know is unlikely issues you would have come up with.
Bedside Manner
So now that you've found doctors that fulfill these fundamental requirements, what actually is essential for all of us is our doctors' bedside manner. If you have pals who are medical assistants, nurses, or other people in health care, ask for recommendations. Frequently they see us when we are the most stressed. If they like working with us, then it is likely that they will suggest us.
Not positive you got the best? Here is how you know.
Does he or she...
* Sit down?
* Listen?
* Know your medical history?
* Involve you in the decision making procedure or get your perspective?
* Ask you - do you have any other questions?
* Finally, most importantly, does she generally wash her hands?
Follow this guidance and feel extremely confident that you have a excellent Plastic Surgeon!
7 Pitfalls that Will Devastate Your Website Conversion Rate
Is there any more common, sad experience than a business owner or marketing executive rolling out a new website with great expectations only to see its performance fall flat?
If you find yourself in this leaky boat, here are some possible reasons your website is missing the mark with your target audience:
1. Your Website is a “Me Monster”
This is perhaps the most common error, and it’s probably not your designer’s fault (unless you’re the designer). The big mistake that leads to this is assuming that your audience is just like you. It’s not.
Look at the copy on your site – does it make you sound like a “Me-monster”? Your copy should be speaking to your audience, addressing their needs, engaging them in an organized conversation. Narcissistic copy is death to conversion.
2. You Won’t Shut Up.
Your product is the greatest thing since Easy Cheese. You’ve articulated every single reason, often in true “Me-monster” fashion. The problem is, your visitors won’t read long, verbose paragraphs. It takes too much mental exertion.
Get to the point. You can provide more info further down the page for the detail-obsessive, but most visitors want to be able to scan your page to easily figure out what’s in it for them and if it’s worth the cost. Be quick about it.
3. You Chose Form Over Substance
Did your designer talk you into a shiny designy navigation that follows a crazy curvy line around the middle of the page? Or using only symbols and pictures instead of text? Those are SO cool … but regular people can’t figure them out.
It’s OK to be innovative, but not at the cost of clarity and usability. Make sure your site adheres to commonly accepted conventions of website design. Put the navigation in a familiar place, make it look like navigation, make links look like links, etc.
4. You Jumped the Gun with Your Offer
Some Web marketing wannabe masquerading as an expert told you: “Every time you ask for a click, you lose 50% of your visitors.” Thus, you put your form at the top of your homepage, before visitors get to read anything about your offer. If your visitors don’t know what they’re signing up for, you don’t stand a chance of converting them.
Organize the sequence of information on your website. Make it convenient to buy/register/whatever, but don’t preempt your visitors’ ability to learn what they’re getting into. You’re not worth a leap of faith to them.
5. You Leave Visitors Hanging
Every page on your website should have a purpose, should be driving towards a next step. Your visitors expect this. They expect to be held by the hand, guided towards the ultimate outcome on the site. Not forced, not manipulated or restricted, but guided.
What they don’t expect is to be left at a dead end. They’ve read your copy and are ready to either learn more or engage you more intently, but your page has no call to action. Don’t do this to them.
There’s always a next step (even after they buy, but that’s another post), so make sure that every page on your site tells visitors what’s next and provides a way to move in that direction.
6. Your Product/Business Doesn’t Provide Value
It sounds like a throwaway list item, but it’s still happening – people are treating the Internet like a shortcut to making money. Never has that been less true than now.
If your product doesn’t fill a unique need in the marketplace, you won’t be able to persuade people to buy from you. The modern consumer can sniff out a pretender like a rotten egg.
7. You Aren’t Split Testing
Split testing elements or pages of your website is the only reliable way to improve your website’s ability to convert visitors to buyers. Guessing at improvements might work some of the time, but you’ll never be able to quantify the effect of your changes.
By employing valid split testing processes and embracing a long-term commitment to the effort, you will be able to compound incremental increases in your website conversion rate into something remarkable and meaningful for your business. Either you’ll do it, or your competitors will. Your choice.
Quit Screwing Around, Punch Your Website Visitors in the Face
4 commonsense ways to sell or get your service or product to someone finding your website8
When people come to your site, they are looking for one thing, and one thing only.
For us, our visitors are looking for one product: Search Engine Rankings. That’s really it.
Sure, they might want top rankings to get more traffic, sales, or to be above their hated competitors, whatever. But, regardless of why, when they come to us it boils down to rankings.
They wouldn’t search “SEO” or “SEO company” in Google then click to our site hoping to find a creative advertising agency. They usually don’t initially come to our site for social media or PPC or website conversion or whatever (although those are great supplemental services for a complete search marketing strategy). And just like our visitors, your visitors are similarly looking for just one thing.
So, what’s my point?
Address the main point.
Don’t mess around.
Make it simple.
Here are 4 commonsense ways how NOT to mess around so you can sell more stuff:
1. Directly punch your visitors in the face with what they have come to see
That’s right. Hit ‘em where it counts. Make sure your site has a clear, powerful, influencing message — which should include points 2-4 below.
2. Show why you’re really good at it
Whether you have proprietary technology, proven strategies, superb quality products, awards, third-party validation, etc., show that quickly. And remember to SHOW why you are awesome, don’t just TELL us you’re awesome. There’s a big difference.
3. Show how you’ve successfully done it for someone else
This kind of merges into the previous point. Testimonials, case studies, stats, etc., show that you’ve done it for someone else and that you can do it for the visitor.
4. And most importantly, give them an easy way to buy it
Sometimes, it really is this simple.
Blogging For SEO: Plan For Success
Blogging For SEO: Plan For Success
Creating a blog can be a fantastic way to do a lot of great things for your site- increase rankings and traffic, spark visitor interest and engagement, and generally enhance the usefulness of your site to users, which can lead to gains both in terms of lead volume and visitor loyalty. It has the potential to be a very powerful interactive tool. But: blogging isn’t going to do any of these things if you don’t do it correctly, and its power as an interactive tool also creates the potential to do damage to your creditability and likability, and brand if you don’t develop and follow a well-considered strategy. With that in mind, here are a few important points to keep in mind when developing and executing an SEO Blogging strategy for your own site or a client’s.
1. You don’t have to be your brand, but you have to respect your brand.
Blogging in a cold corporate voice isn’t fun- for you, or for your readers. There’s a reason people like blogs, and it’s because at their best, they’re both interesting and informative. They connect us on a level that feels more personal than your average professional interaction. But we can’t all just be exactly who we are when we’re on the couch in sweatpants when writing for a professional blog. When writing for your own company, or writing for another company blog, there’s an appropriate balance of personality and professionalism that you need to strike. Where that balance falls is going to depend on the company’s culture and corporate personality and your own, but ideally the person who writes for a blog needs to have a solid grasp of the company’s ideals and voice and needs to be able to translate that voice into writing. If you’re not doing that, you run the risk of either losing your audience because you’re boring them, or because you’re offending them.
2. Keyword research
We are blogging for SEO, right? Not for fun to share our mom’s recipes with our neighbors. An important goal is to rank for keywords that will bring relevant traffic to your site; so identify rankable, reasonably high-traffic keywords for topic areas you’re writing about, and use them wisely in your posts. No keyword stuffing necessary: just use smart keywords instead of any old phrase when writing.
3. Link your stuff.
One of the nicest things about blogging, from a strictly SEO perspective, is that it gives you lots of great keyword-optimized content to link to other great keyword-optimized content. Link articles within the same content category/topic area, and you’re demonstrating to search engines that you have expertise in that area. Very good. Don’t forget to use anchor text that contains the keywords you’re targeting, of course.
4. Know your audience.
You already have some idea where your customers’ interests lie. What questions do they ask you via email? What problems have they been using your product or service to solve? What industries are you targeting? Why do people choose you over your competitors? The answers to these questions can help determine appropriate content to write about. To offer the most value for your site, your blog should both be keyword optimized and linked up, and: helpful to your customers. It makes people happy when the answer is waiting there for them as soon as the question pops into their head. Use your understanding about what your clients want and need to know to develop useful content.
5. And then know them better.
It’s the age of analytics. There are so many tools you can use (including Google Analytics, cost: zero) to determine how people arrive on your site and what they do when they get there that there’s really no excuse to not use them to determine areas in which you’re meeting visitor needs, and areas in which you could add content or improve navigation to clear their path to the information you want them to see.
6. If you’re an expert, great. If you’re not, you’re not.
This is especially important if you’re writing for a company that is not your own. You have to be aware of what you know and what you don’t. You want to avoid saying something completely incorrect or that just sounds “off” to anyone knowledgeable about the industry, both so you don’t cause legal problems for your company and so you don’t lose trustworthiness with potential clients by sounding silly. Focus on what you know and can demonstrate expertise in. If you’re blogging for another industry, you can use your contact in that industry to fact check and edit your blog posts to ensure accuracy and appropriateness, and to help with topic development.
7. Host your blog on your site.
In addition to the PageRank the blog can collect and distribute, it’s nice to have people who visit the blog right there in with your conversion-generating pages, and the most important info you’ve decided to focus on with your main content pages. You lose an important connection (and make Analytics tracking more complicated) if you host your blog off-site.
8. Write regularly.
Having an outdated blog with three posts is going to make your site look poorly-maintained to a site visitor, no matter how often you update your main pages’ content, so creating a blog without committing to continuing to use it has the potential to create more harm than good.
Before creating a blog, develop a strategy and make sure you’re committed to sticking to it. It’s a great tool if well-managed, but as with so many of our activities in SEO, it can’t be done haphazardly, or you’ll end up punishing your site’s rankings and your ROI.
Make the Social Media Expansion in Search Engines Work for You
Make the Social Media Expansion in Search Engines Work for You
Facebook is indexed in Google, so are Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. Gmail now has Google Buzz included, ensuring ways to efficiently search through the social networks you are in. Many people initially wondered what the point of social media was. As with almost everything, wherever the people go, the advertising follows. Search engine optimization (SEO) has dealt with some user-generated content in the past and most in the industry understand the value of user-generated content, but the SEO community has not had to manage with user-generated content on this large of a scale before. Although SEO is more client-content and social is more user-content, we have to use similar tactics to harness its marketing power.
Pick the Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords can go a few different ways depending if you want to associate with trends or establish your own trend. Riding a trend will involve knowing what is currently being talked about. If it is a close association with your business, it’ll be easy. If there is no association, good luck. Chances are including your business name with nothing it pertains to will look spammy and deceiving. Establishing your own trend takes time, a lot of social footwork, and the opportunity for your trend to catch on. As above, don’t stretch the association or it won’t work. See other interesting ways to make Twitter work for you.
Include the Right links
As with SEO, you’ll want to send them somewhere that pertains to whatever information the post is about so the user won’t immediately leave. You’ll also want that page to also convert well, having a call to action, providing balance of information and opportunity for the user.
Get the Right followers
Just because a user clicked your post or profile and has reached your site means their social media experience with you should be over. Give them the opportunity to share the information they found through their social network of choice. Let them follow you, add you as a friend, become a fan, or recommend your business. They’re more likely to either eventually become a customer or become repeat customers through continued contact.
Repeat Your Message…Not Your Actions
Being in just one of the major social networks could be cause for confusion among your followers or random visitors. Why one and not the other? Some businesses won’t find a need to be in all, but it is easier than ever to have your messaging repeated in other networks without having to repost. Show your followers that your business has continuity while making sure your message gets through to them.
Practice Management Tip of the Day
Practice Management Tip of the Day
4 Ways Any Business Can Benefit From Social Media
Social media is all the rage right now. You see it in blog posts everywhere. You see Twitter feeds on news shows. In the last month my mother and several uncles joined Facebook! Simply put, social media is all over the place. But is it useful for the average business?
While not all businesses will use social media the same way, I am convinced that all businesses can make good use of social media. Here are 4 ways any business can benefit from using social media.
1- Get to Know Your Audience
About a year ago I went to Blog World Expo, and one of the points that really stuck with me from that conference is this: use social media to find your audience and then hang out with them. Social media is full of groups, fan pages, and other things that make it relatively easy to find an audience that is already interested in your topic or industry.
But with all of the different social media sites, how do you find out where your audience is hanging out? Here are a couple of resources you can use:
Use search.twitter.com to see what people are talking about that relates to your topic/industry. See what they’re linking to and mentioning. This can lead you in the right direction.
Get a Facebook account if you don’t have one already and look for relevant groups and fan pages. Watch for multiple groups/fan pages for the same topic, and also watch to see how engaged the members are.
Forums are more old school, but they can be great for finding other sites that people are using to hang out. In the end it may be the forum itself is the hangout, or they may direct you to other places.
Once you’re confident that you’ve found the popular hangouts for your industry start engaging with your audience. For many businesses Twitter and Facebook are great places to start since they are so universal, but you’ll also want to look for the niche hangouts.
2- Managing Your Reputation
Social media is a great way to keep an eye on the conversations that are happening online and respond to them. In fact, many companies have employees dedicated to watching the online conversations about their company and addressing them.
Here are a few tools you can use to monitor your reputation online so you can take any appropriate action:
Once again, you can use search.twitter.com to keep an eye on any conversations going on in the world of Twitter that relate to your brand.
For general monitoring of sites, news, and blogs you can always set up Google Alerts for your brand and main keywords to see what is happening online.
For monitoring blogs specifically, you can use Technorati or Google Blog Search. Both can help you monitor what bloggers are saying about your brand or industry.
If you’re really serious about tracking your reputation you could get an account at Trackur. Their pricing isn’t bad and it can be a great solution for companies looking to check in on the conversations happening online in a quick and easy way.
Watching and managing your company’s reputation is one way that every company can and should use social media. If you notice negative conversations happening you can respond and put out any fires before they get out of control.
A great example of this is Comcast’s use of Twitter. They have turned their Twitter account into another extension of their customer service division. For some great stories about this just do a Google search for ‘Comcast twitter’.
3- Promotions
Promotion is nothing new to the internet, but it hits new levels with social media. If you push the right message through the right channels you can reach a lot of people.
The key here is that you have to already have a lot of connections, especially with people that are willing to push the information to their followers as well. Twitter’s Retweet (RT) feature is very useful for this. If someone finds a story, blog post, or promotion interesting, they can just pass it on by doing a simple Retweet.
To be successful in promoting things through social media you have to have a plan and connections. Just sending out a tweet to your 30 followers won’t cut it.
Here’s another great article about using Twitter for advertising: Is Twitter Really an Effective Internet Marketing Tool?
4- SEO and Traffic Benefits
Being that we’re an SEO Company I naturally have to talk about the SEO and traffic benefits of being involved in social media. Social media can be a great traffic generator. Admittedly, it doesn’t always generate the kind of traffic that will convert into a lot of sales but it does increase buzz, recognition, and authority for your site.
Social media is also a great way to have a lot of links built to your site. As a page is promoted on different networks people are going to be linking to it. These links will include tweets, bookmarks, and even blogs. All of these links can help improve the authority of your site and lead to higher rankings in the search results.
Putting it All Together
As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, not all businesses will use social media the same. But the fact is that all businesses can take advantage of social media in one way or another. Here are a few places to start:
If your site doesn’t have a blog, you should start one. Blogs are where you’ll generate the content to be promoted on the social media networks. It is also a great way to interact with your customers.
Start a Twitter account. Having a Twitter account will give you a place to interact with your audience and also promote the articles from your blog and from other sources that you find interesting. You don’t want to be a Twitter Spammer just pushing your own stuff. Show that you can be part of the community.
Create a Facebook fan page. Facebook is one of the giants in the social media sphere, so you need to have a company presence there as another way to promote your content and interact with your audience.
Set up profile pages on a few social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious. This will give you a place to create links to your content. Make sure you also bookmark other content from your industry. Also make sure to create links back to your site in your profile.
There is always more that can be done, but these are four places to get started. For additional reading, here’s a great case study from Business.com on how they have been using social media: B2B Social Media – The Business.com Case Study
Jim Vincent
jim@web7media.net
www.Web7Media.net
What Are They Saying About Your Website?
Your Website Visitors Are Talking to You
Continuously improving your Web presence to increase ROI should be the goal, right? OK, but how do you get your potential customers to talk to you so you know what to improve? If you are willing to dig into a little data, you can find out how people interact with your site and where the problems are that need attention. Here are a few pieces of Google Analytics data that you can use to interpret what your visitors are trying to tell you.
Bounce Rate
With a high bounce rate, the visitor is saying, “This site isn’t relevant to me – I’m outta here.” The bounce rate number is just the percentage of single page visits, meaning that all those people left your site without looking past the page they landed on. It’s possible that this means your landing page just isn’t interesting. More likely, it means the people landing on your site were led to believe they would find something different when they clicked on your paid advertisement or organic search listing. If you are getting a high bounce rate, look at what your ads are promising. Make sure your landing page fulfills the promise in the ad.
New vs. Returning Visitors
A high number of returning visitors says, “Your site is engaging enough that I think I’ll come back for more.” New visitors are a good indicator that more people are finding your site, but getting them to return is the part that takes work. Ask yourself what you are putting out there that will bring people back again and again. A really good blog is one great way to do this.
Time on Site
A higher time on site tells you your site keeps visitors from leaving. This could mean you offer plenty of things to explore. But be careful. When I logged into analytics on one of my sites this morning, I found most people were staying for three minutes or so. Then there was this one visit that lasted for three hours. I’m guessing that somebody left their browser open on my site while they left the house for a while. So I obviously didn’t give that visit much attention.
Pages Per Visit
This says, “The first point of contact was interesting enough to make me want to look around.” If you have high average page views, you have done a good job of sending the right people to the site and presenting the information in an interesting way. It might also mean you have created a page structure conducive to further exploration.
Traffic Sources
This is very valuable because it shows you the ways customers come to your site. If they are all coming from Google, then your Search Engine Optimization campaign is working. If you see a huge influx of WebsiteTraffic from a partner site, you could look into ways to increase your visibility on that partner site.
Content
This is where your visitors tell you which content they like best. You are also able to see how they interact with their favorite content by looking at bounce rate, how many of them left the site from that page, etc. If you notice a certain topic always trends to the top, it should probably be a main focus of your content.
The best companies are those that listen to the customer. Google Analytics provides all this wonderful data to help companies do just that. We just have to be willing to dig in a little.
Jim Vincent
Web 7 Media.net
801.554.1620
What Does Google Social Search mean for SEO?
What Does Google Social Search Mean for SEO?
Surprise, surprise, they've done it again. That's right, the genius minds over at Google have come out with an interesting service called Social Search.
In a nutshell, it takes a logged in user's personal connections and searches through them to find whatever they're looking for. The results are incorporated right into the results of a normal Web search in the way universal search incorporates images, videos, and other content.
This is Google's response to the hyped vertical of social search, already started by companies like Aardvark (which is now owned by Google). The idea behind social search is basically to get the input of your friends, rather than anonymous Web sites. This tends to fit into certain types of searches, such as "What's a good restaurant to take my wife for our anniversary?" rather than "How many light years away is Alpha Centauri?"
Google can search through several social areas, including Gmail accounts, Google Talk transcripts, subscribed RSS feeds, Picasa, Flickr, FriendFeed, and Twitter profiles you follow.
Social Search essentially ramps up the impact that personalized search or search wiki has had. Like those services, results are tailored to your specific profile. However, unlike those services, one can likely expect this to have a bigger impact on search listings.
There may be a sizable number of users who see social results above your top 10 listing. Social Search results are usually placed toward the bottom of page one, but that will probably depend on relevance.
For SEO, consider implementing the following to expand your real estate in search results:
- As if you hadn't heard about it enough, you need to have your Twitter account actively posting updates. Use keywords just like on your site, and boost your subscribers as much as possible.
- Your company's other social profiles also need to be highly subscribed, actively updated sites with good content. Long-term, consider everything from Google Buzz to Facebook.
- With the inclusion of Gmail, it makes sense to start thinking about optimizing e-mail newsletters. Newsletters can be posted online, or found through desktop search, so optimizing them has multiple benefits. This means no more newsletters that are one giant image.
- Here's another case for full-text RSS feeds: a subscribed feed containing just the first paragraph or so of complete articles will have fewer opportunities to rank and drive traffic.
Not to sound like a spokesperson for Google, but you can sign up for this experiment in Google Labs and start trying it out today. It's simple to use, which means this service should take off.
There's no need to tell Google anything if you use Google Reader, Gmail, Profiles or other Google services. Also, there's no need to use a separate search service to do social searches – the results will simply start showing up one day in your old standby Google. With a little effort, hopefully some of these results will belong to your sites.
Powerful SEO Content: Understanding Breadth of Coverage
Powerful SEO Content: Understanding Breadth of Coverage
Nearly every SEO has been on this end of a conversation: "The keyword we really want to rank number one for is [enter impossible keyword here]."
I often tell people they need two things to achieve these impossibly unrealistic rankings:
- Proper breadth of coverage (BOC).
- A time machine set to 1996.
Since the time machine requires a hefty retainer most clients are unwilling to pay, I often set my sights on obtaining BOC that will enable realistic rankings now, with the possibility of long-term growth in the future.
What is BOC?
The term "breadth of coverage" originally stems from Google patents filed in 2003. In the patent, the search giant claims that BOC is one of the factors used to heuristically solve for the most qualified news article. However, the notion of BOC extends far beyond the news algorithm and consistently impacts site rankings in the organic algorithm.
BOC is the total number of qualified web pages in a domain that are thematically/semantically relevant. More credible pages means more authority. More authority means there's a greater opportunity to rank for competitive "head" terms.
Here are four ways of demonstrating BOC to search engines:
1. Create a Logical Keyword Hierarchy
This is especially important if your website attacks multiple themes. Typically, the most general and competitive head terms used within a site should be reserved for the home page. This should make sense, as the home page is likely to have the most inbound links, making it the strongest page. Because inbound links pass rank, think of a hierarchy as a way to trickle down PageRank in a focused, keyword relevant manner.
2. Internal Linking
This is crucial in connecting the dots for Google. If your website has 50 pages of content about the Super Bowl but is unlinked, how does this benefit the user? Simply having the content under the hood of your website isn't enough; however, interconnecting that content creates a web of authority that can be easily understood by both users and search engines.
Be sure to assign each subpage a maximum of one or two keyphrases. Every time this phrase is used sitewide, send a link to that corresponding page using varied and keyword rich anchor text. Remember, the most valuable links are within the body of the text and above the fold. Footer links (especially sitewide) are frequently de-weighted.
If each page serves as a keyword representative, make sure it's reflected in the title tag, H1 tags, anchor text, alt text, and content (and yes, the meta keyword tag is dead).
3. Avoid the Need to Create a New Domain for Every Product/Service
I once worked with a Fortune 500 client that had a penchant for creating brand new domains instead of building within their massively powerful infrastructure. The reason was simple: the content publishers took their awesome domain authority for granted and figured it would magically extend to a new domain. There are perfectly rational motives for starting a new domain; it just means starting the arduous authority building process from scratch.
Working within the infrastructure of your most powerful domain can greatly expedite the ranking process while eliminating the time and resources it might normally take to rank. This is also a more preferable long-term strategy as brand favoritism is a continued trend in algorithmic tweaks. Your website doesn't have to be exclusively dedicated to patio furniture to rank number one on Google, but it needs domain authority and breadth of coverage.
4. Create Powerful Content
This entire exercise is relatively moot if you stuff pages with low quality content. Authority documents tend to fare much better in search engines because they provide a full picture of a subject matter. Detailed, well-linked content is one reason Wikipedia thrives in search engines. Whenever you create content for a targeted keyword, focus on dwarfing your competitor in quality, depth, and scope.
Wikipedia sets a high bar in demonstrating breadth of coverage
The most robust content contains powerful text, images, and video -- all working in unison. When writing, be sure that content:
- Has keyword rich headlines.
- Is at least 250 words.
- Is logically chunked out with headers and bullet points (wink wink).
- Has links to other relevant content.
Make sure each piece of content has enough beef to be authoritative and link worthy. Writing content takes time, effort, and willingness to fail, but it can generate relevant traffic for years.