Optimizing your website

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

We hear so much about optimizing your website. What does optimizing your website actually mean? There's a lot of things you can do to optimize your website, but I'm going to concentrate on just one today, and that is, make sure that your titles and your subtitles have substantive information. In other words, tell the search engines in your titles and subtitles who you are, what you do and where you're at. I used to put together websites for my clients and I started out early in the early days and I'd write something that sounded nice for a therapist. I'd say something like this, "Welcome to our website. I think you're going to like what you see." That sounds nice and warm and inviting, but it was absolutely worthless as far as the search engines were concerned. They didn't get any information from that. Let's say that instead, I would have said, "Providing marriage counseling to Denton, Texas for over 12 years." Now it tells them that I'm in Denton, Texas. It tells them that I do marriage counseling, and it tells them I've been in practice for a period of time. So that is much more information-rich for the search engine. Search engines have software that's called webcrawlers. Sometimes they call them spiders and these spiders crawl through the web, the worldwide web, the Internet, and they look for information about you and about your business. If they see that you're a marriage counselor and if they see that you're in Denton, Texas, and if they see you've been doing it for 12 years, they'll rate you higher than if you say something benign like, "I think you're going to like what you see on this website." So here's your assignment for today. Go through your website and look at every title and subtitle and make sure that it says something about you and what you provide, where you're at, how long you've been doing it, your specialties, what conditions you treat, and things like that. Make them information-rich so the search engines will pull you up higher in front of other therapists that may be your competition.

This is Dave Kats. Thanks for listening.