eHealth Articles & White Papers

How to Make 2009 the Year of SEO

Angie Toomsen - Senior Content Strategist

If you manage a hospital website, January is probably a busy month for you. After the epidemic December traffic slump for non-retail sites, your consumers will be back (good thing, yes) and looking to fulfill their personal health resolutions with your calendar of wellness events.

But an increase in traffic isn't the only reason you'll be busier in January. You'll also be responding to New Year updates and changes from across your organization. And most importantly, you and your team will likely be reviewing 2008 numbers and setting Web goals and initiatives for the coming year.

This is the time to start thinking about search engine optimization. (When isn't it the time, I know.) Fresh year, fresh start. You have twelve months of pure potential and, if you have an effective plan in place, you can make this year your site's "year of SEO."

To make things a little easier for you, I have written your New Year's resolutions. (It doesn't involve calories or treadmills, by the way):

1. Engage stakeholders

You know SEO is important, but your managers want to see the numbers to back up your budget. Help all of your stakeholders understand that SEO takes time and resources - be it homegrown or by hired hand.

Ask your team these questions: What kind of commitment can we make this year? What are our priorities for building site traffic? How will we measure our success so that we can leverage our numbers? Are we going to hire an outside expert to help?

2. Establish specific, measurable goals

You can't execute on your actions if you haven't decided how you will measure success. Measurable goals allow for better tracking and keep your team focused on the tactics that will make your SEO push successful.

Don't set the goal to be number one on Google, because it might not happen. Instead, set smaller goals, such as getting listed on the first results page or growing search engine traffic by 15 percent on a specific section of your site. Set the goals, track your progress, and improve on them.

3. Create an SEO plan and action steps

This is where best intentions often go the way of thwarted diet plans. SEO takes time, care, and above all, preparation. Make sure you know exactly what you need to do. Having an intern add keywords to your CMS pages isn't necessarily effective, and neither are a lot of other tactics. SEO is not just one thing - it's a comprehensive initiative.

Keep two words in mind as you create your plan - incremental and iterative. Attempting to make all of the changes across the site in a single, large project isn't the best idea. Not only is it overwhelming, but it also makes it difficult to track the value from those changes, and you run the risk of making ineffective changes site-wide.

Instead, attack the process in pieces, and make adjustments to improve the results in one area before applying those techniques in another.

4. Implement a tracking system

You can never go back and recover historical rankings. Even if rankings on specific keywords aren't identified as key success criteria, implement a process or tool to capture snapshots of rankings by keyword.

You'll find that such tools are invaluable as you're implementing your plans - they give you a clear picture of the impact of your changes.

5. Determine where you're going to shine

Good techniques can improve your rankings site-wide, but achieving significant search result improvements requires more focus and energy. For most organizations, that means being selective about the areas that receive attention. It's best to use established strategic priorities and stakeholder input in your decision-making process.

6. Train and mentor content contributors

The best way to implement SEO-friendly content is to get it right the first time. There is always a significant investment of resources to massage existing site content to improve rankings, but much of this can be avoided for new content by implementing good habits at the start.

7. Reach out for better rankings

One important factor for improving rankings is to increase the number of links to your site from other sites. Don't buy links to your site strictly for search engine placement purposes, as this can get your site blacklisted by the search engines.

It is perfectly legitimate, however, to increase links by encouraging community groups, media, and bloggers to link to information contained on your site.