eHealth Articles & White Papers

Go Organic: Search Engine Optimization

Ben Dillon - Vice President & eHealth Evangelist

As we enter 2009, the challenges in the U.S. economy have caused many healthcare organizations to sharpen their focus when it comes to spending. As a result, we are seeing heightened interest in maximizing the impact and value of investments being made online.

To maximize the value of your site, you should begin by increasing site usage. With this in mind, we begin the year with a look at search engine optimization.

Why search engines?

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 80 percent of U.S. Internet Users (approximately 113 million people) use the Internet to search for health related information. In recent years, the importance of the Internet as a source of medical knowledge has grown to the point that several studies have placed the Internet on equal footing with the family physician as a health information resource.

And when these millions of people go online in search of health information, two-thirds begin with a search engine (again, according to Pew). In our work with clients, it is common for their sites to receive more than half of their traffic through search engine referrals.

In other words, a search engine strategy is essential to any Web traffic growth initiative.

There are two different ways to approach your search engine strategy:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - SEO uses tactics to make your pages more attractive to the search engines native ranking algorithms. This is sometimes known as organic search optimization.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) - SEM includes a variety of "pay-to-play" techniques for getting noticed and driving traffic.

In this article (and in our upcoming webinar this month), we are focusing on search engine optimization. Next month, our focus will be on search engine marketing.

Understanding the search engines

You can't talk about developing a SEO strategy without first understanding the way search engines work. So, let's take a look at Google. Google is not the only search engine used, but with over 60 percent of the search market today, it's the dominant player. It's important to note the recommendations we make about Google generally translate well to other search platforms.

So, with tens of billions of digital assets out there, how do search engines serve up a set of results?

There are two factors to think about as we answer that question: relevancy of page content and the credibility of the pages in the result set.

Relevancy

Google and other search engines spend a lot of time crawling around the Web. Automated programs, known as robots (or bots), look at every page they can find, index the content to make it searchable, and record the links on the page, which they then use to find more pages to evaluate.

When Google looks at a page on your site, it approaches that page somewhat differently than a human site visitor. Google doesn't look at design and can't interpret the information conveyed in graphic or video files. Instead, Google cares about how the page is structured as it indexes the content.

Search engines understand that all uses of a word are not equally important. A key word or phrase used in a page title, URL or inbound link to the page is a strong indicator that the page is related to that term. As a result, Google determines the relevance of a page to a set of words or phrases based on their appearance within the content, where they appear, how often they are repeated, and how they are used.

Unfortunately, any common phrase still produces millions of relevant pages in the result set. This is where page credibility comes in to play.

Credibility

Google uses a proprietary measure of page credibility known as PageRank. Each page that has been indexed by Google has a PageRank value.

To derive PageRank, Google looks at page credibility from the perspective of other Internet sites. Each time a site links to the page, it is in essence, a vote for that page. The vote itself is weighted based on the credibility (PageRank) of the source of the link as well as how many votes (links) that page is making.

The analysis can get very technical, but the key point is that getting links to your site from other high quality sites is an important component in your overall search ranking. When combined with the relevancy of the page for a particular keyword, the PageRank provides a final order for search results.

Developing an SEO strategy

Traffic is a critical component of site success. Since a significant volume of site traffic originates from search engines, you should be developing a strategy for how to improve search engine rankings.

To improve the placement of your site in search engines, you must first take a look at how to improve the relevancy and credibility of your site pages. Review your keywords, page titles, URL's and inbound links to make sure they are consistent with the content on the page.

Also, take a look at the number of links to your site from other sites and possibly develop a program to generate more links.