Optimized Website

Hi, this is Dave Kats for Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

Everybody knows that they should have a website and pretty much every therapist now has a website, but some therapist websites are what I call cyberspace junk. They're floating around in cyberspace and nobody ever sees them; nobody ever goes to your website unless you direct them. They aren't going to find it by searching on the Internet because your website is not optimized. It's important to have a website. It's important to have a nice design on your website. It is far more important to have your website optimized so that it shows up when people are searching for you. Now, how do you optimize your website? One of the things you do to optimize your website is to make sure that your titles and subtitles on each page say something about counseling in your area, or your areas of expertise, and the area that you practice in. Let me give you an example. I used to put together a website that I thought was a nice website, and the subtitle of the homepage would be this, "Welcome to our website. I think you're going to like what you see". I thought that sounded friendly; or "Welcome to our office. I think you're going to like what you see". That sounded nice and friendly, but it was absolutely worthless as far as website optimization is concerned. When the web crawlers, the search engines like Google, Bing, Yelp, and Yahoo, look for you, they need to see that you are a therapist, that you do therapy, and where you work. Instead of saying ‘Welcome to our office; I think you're going to like what you see’, which is worthless, say something like this: "Providing marriage counseling in Denton, Texas for the last 13 years". It tells them you're a marriage counselor, you're in Denton, Texas, and immediately you rise up in the search engine. The first thing you have to do to optimize your website is just rewrite your script so your titles and subtitles and the script has information that identifies you as a therapist and identifies what area of the United States you practice. The second thing that you need to do to optimize your website is make sure that you have pictures. Pictures should have titles on them, and I don't mean titles on the page. I mean that your website person should put a title on the picture that tells what the picture is about for optimization. Then another good thing to do to optimize your website is to have videos on your website. You can do a video of yourself; it doesn't have to be long. It can be 45 to 90 seconds long. A long video would be two and a half minutes. The iPhone right now, or any other smartphone will work. In good light you can record your own video, edit it, and put it on your website. If you don't want to go through that work, I would suggest you contact some medium-sized church. They will all have a videographer that does videography for their church. Just ask them if they'll come out and for a $100 or $200, shoot two or three 45-second segments for you. They'll come out, they'll set it up, they'll set the segments for you. Then you can give them to your website person and he or she can put the videos on your website. Those are some of the ways that you really improve your website. Another way is by putting articles and blogs on your website. Make sure that you're not only having a website, but that it's optimized, and you're getting the most potential out of it.

This is Dave Kats, thanks for listening.