This section covers some of the central aspects of marketing your private practice via the internet, from the perspective of keywords, content, and related ideas.
Choosing the right keywords, optimizing pages for search engine consumption, and other quite technical topics get quite a bit of attention. But almost everything you need to know about search engine positioning can be summed up in one word: content. If you have content which is useful to visitors, you’re already 90% there, and all the rest is fine tuning. If you don’t have worthwhile content, all the keyword optimization in the world won’t get you very far.
Staying with the idea that content is king, blogging provides one of the most convenient ways to deliver your content to users — and it brings some additional benefits in terms of attracting traffic.
A little quantitative keyword research can help you to understand what keywords web users are actually searching for (as distinct from what you think they might search for); choosing keywords sensibly and empirically can make the difference between a successful keyword marketing strategy and a huge waste of time.
Unlike search engines, which rely on indexes of web page content built by automated crawlers, directories are edited by real live human beings, who exercise some editorial control over which sites will appear in the directory. Several, both paid and free, are available and can help market your practice.
