Explore ways to effectively use your current content assets as well as have a better understanding of how to develop new content that’s relevant to your audiences.

In this webinar you’ll learn how to:

• Implement a quantitative content inventory
• Employ popular and effective methods for evaluating your content quality
• Use your current content assets more effectively
• Achieve a laser-like focus in developing new content that’s useful and relevant to your audiences
• Create a basic content governance structure to help manage online content assets for the long-term

You know content is king. But without useful tips for improving content, that knowledge doesn’t really help. Stop talking about how important content is and actually develop better content!

In this webinar learn how to:

• Establish a content marketing program
• Use content marketing to build service line volume
• Create content that is valuable and gets shared
• Go beyond social media as a content marketing strategy

hat’s the great thing about CRM systems today – they can easily be customized to your organization’s business model. However, along with the positives of easy point-and-click customizations, such as new data fields, also comes the increased risk of creating useless and unreliable data. In a recent article I read The Five Data Management Practices B2B Marketers Are Overlooking, author Derek Slayton cites research from the Aberdeen Group that says companies that actively manage their marketing data for hygiene and improved segmentation require just 64 marketing responses to generate a customer. Those that do not require 329 (industry average) or 622 (laggards) touches!

The purpose of data fields in your CRM is to store data on CRM objects (leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities, etc.) that are important to successful lead generation and tracking of your organization’s success. As Derek Slayton stated, “Consider data the fuel of your marketing engine.” They are used to track sales opportunities and potential revenue for the upcoming year, won and lost sales from the prior year, estimated timelines for converting a prospect into a client through the sales pipeline, influencers in a buying decision and numerous other things.

When creating a new data field in CRM, here are a few things to consider:

• Team Consensus: Make sure your team agrees with the data field being created and the purpose behind it. Ask your team, “How will this data benefit in our lead generation activities?” and “How will this help in generating revenue for the company?” Continually adding new data fields without planning or consensus can result in unused or redundant fields and a system so complex no one knows how to use it.
• Usage Guidelines: Have your team set rules and guidelines behind the data field. Make sure you agree on things such as data type, business rules, naming convention, usage, quality, etc. When guidelines are not tied to a new data field from the beginning, every individual using the field will create their own personal guidelines and processes. This creates inconsistent data. A great tip from the article is to establish standards and work with your marketing and sales teams to ensure that all constituents have the same expectations for data quality. Clarity for what is expected and agreement on goals as an organization are critical to your go-forward strategy.
• Permissions: Custom data fields that may contain sensitive information should have permissions set. Using a type of role-based security, you typically have the option and ability to choose whether to make the field visible to certain user roles and restrict edibility of the field. Each CRM varies with their security features, but this is always a vital step.

Data fields are important to the evaluation of aggregate data as well as the ease-of-use of your CRM system. It’s important to not get carried away and create data fields for every bit of information you would like to gather. Put emphasis on evaluating the necessity of each data field and the quality of data being entered. Derek Slayton’s article tells us to remember to establish a process to assess, cleanse, and enrich your data regularly throughout the year. Their research shows that marketing data decays at approximately 3% per month—and your inbound channels introduce hundreds (or thousands) of new records over the same time frame. This is similar to having a governance process for content on your website, you want to make sure it’s always displaying up-to-date and valuable information to your users.

Few things connect verticals like well-kept CRM systems. Whether you’re a local brick-and-mortar shop, a B2B business, or even a healthcare organization, at the end of the day effective customer relationship management is likely an important part of your marketing and sales strategy.

In Understanding Broken Links and 404s, we explored the differences between internal links, outbound links, and inbound links. Now that you have a working understanding of what these are and how they are different, we’ll cover some easy techniques you can use to be proactive about identifying them. For broken links that require 301 redirects to fix, we’ll even show you how you can use VitalSite’s redirect manager to add redirects.

Identifying Broken Internal and Outbound Links

Broken internal and outbound links are usually the easiest ones for you to find and identify. In addition to free and paid tools that crawl your site looking for broken links, you may be able to identify some of these in Google Analytics. Google Search Console records broken internal and outbound links in its Crawl Errors report. While useful, understand that this report provides only a snapshot view of broken links it has crawled recently.

If you’re a Geonetric client, you may have an additional resource at your disposal: your quarterly Stat report. As part of these conversations about your website performance, we’ll share with you a list of broken internal and outbound links on your website. This is a great way for you to stay on top of things without having to invest time in learning a new tool or deciphering the results.

Identifying Broken Inbound Links

Identifying broken inbound links is a bit trickier than identifying internal and outbound links. If you wanted to use an on-demand site crawling tool to find these, you’d essentially have to crawl the entire internet looking for broken links pointing to your website. That’s something that’s probably not going to happen any time soon.

Fortunately, Google does this for us and provides a convenient report for us to use. The Google Search Console Crawl Errors report identifies all links it has crawled recently that appear to be broken. This includes inbound links.

Be aware that Google’s Crawl Errors report can help identify broken links, but may also report a fair number of noise/false positives (as is the case with the second link reported above).

The reason for this is that Google is continually testing its algorithm and attempting to crawl links contained in JavaScript. It’s far from perfect, though. Sometimes it incorrectly interprets as a link some standard JavaScript code or another artifact in a page’s HTML. If you see a large number of odd broken links in the Crawl Errors report, and they don’t correspond to actual links on pages, you can ignore these.

As with internal and outbound links, many Geonetric clients have an additional advantage with Stat. As part of this quarterly review, we share with you any broken inbound links we have identified. If you’re not yet ready to dive in and start investigating yourself, this can be an invaluable resource to help you keep on top of inbound links that are broken and need attention.

Options for Fixing Broken Inbound Links

If you identify a broken external link pointing to your site (otherwise known as an “inbound” link), you have two ways to try to fix it. The first is to contact the webmaster of the external site and request that they fix or change the link to your site.

This is usually a slow and painful task.

The other (and usually more efficient) way is to create a 301 redirect so that your site redirects traffic from the broken link to a page you specify. It’s worth understanding that 301 redirects pass on SEO benefits to the destination page. This means that quality backlinks you earn over time can continue to pass PageRank on to the destination page. In other words, it helps with your SEO… provided that you redirect broken inbound links instead of letting them linger as 404 errors when your site’s URL structure changes.

Redirecting in the Page Editor

Administrators with the appropriate permission can access the VitalSite redirect manager in the Navigation tab when editing pages. To use this redirect manager, simply add the “broken” URL to the destination page you want to redirect visitors to.

Once added and the page is saved, visitors following the broken link will be redirected to the current page.

In addition to adding redirects, administrators may also use VitalSite’s on-page redirect editor to remove existing redirects.

Advanced Redirect Rules and Other Redirects

From time to time, some clients may have more complex redirect needs than can be accommodated through the redirect manager. Some common examples of this include the need to redirect page types that aren’t supported in the redirect manager, and the need to redirect many pages based on regular expression rules. If you’re a VitalSite client and you’re unsure of how to go about redirecting something that seems a bit more advanced than what you should be using the built-in redirect manager for, contact your client advisor. They will work closely with you to make sure your redirects are implemented appropriately.

Pulling It All Together

Broken links have been beguiling webmasters since the early days of the internet. They result in 404 errors on your site, and provide a poor user experience to your visitors. Fixing them (either by correcting the link, or using VitalSite’s redirect manager to redirect them) is part of the standard website hygiene regimen for any webmaster. Fortunately, today there are more ways than ever to help us proactively identify and fix them. A myriad of tools exist that crawl and flag broken internal and outbound links on your website, and Google Search Console and advanced Google Analytics views can reveal broken inbound links. If you don’t have time for the data mining and working with these tools, our quarterly Stat calls provide you with a great starting point.

Internal Links

Internal links are links that you (or your staff) placed on your pages and that link to other pages on your website. When they are broken, users see 404 errors on your site instead of the content they expect to see when they follow a (broken) link.

Don’t think this matters? Reflect on this question: how many broken links does a visitor need to encounter on your website before they begin to associate your brand with difficulty, error and failure?

Not many. And whatever the number, it’s probably not the emotion you want visitors to associate with your brand.

The good news is that you can avoid this. Since internal links are, by definition, links that you’ve made… they are also links that you can easily fix when broken. Once you discover such a link, edit the page (or panel) that contains it and fix the link so that it points to the correct destination.

If the destination no longer exists and there is no equivalent destination to direct visitors to, then you’ll probably want to remove the hyperlink altogether. If you do this, make sure to review the surrounding content in its entirety. Often the context of the content will suggest a hyperlink. If you remove a hyperlink without revising the content around it, your readers will likely be confused.

Outbound Links

Outbound links are hyperlinks you (or someone in your organization) placed on your website that link to destinations off your website. For example, your cardiac care pages may link to some authoritative resources on the American Heart Association’s (AHA) website. If those resources are removed by the AHA (or their URLs change), your links will be broken, and users clicking them will experience a 404.

Like broken internal links, broken outbound links reflect poorly on your brand. A profusion of them suggest that the basic principles of website hygiene are being ignored, and visitors may lose trust in your site. And even though the resulting 404 error appears on the destination website and not on your own, it’s your hyperlink that is broken and site visitors will blame your site when the link you provide serves them an error message instead of the content they were looking for.

The unfortunate thing with outbound links is that even if you’re a very conscientious webmaster, you have little control over the external resources you link to. Links will break without warning, and you may not even know it. Fortunately there are ways you can stay ahead of such problems. We’ll cover strategies for identifying these in our next post, Finding Broken Links and Fixing Them With VitalSite Redirects.

Inbound Links

Our last category of links are those that you have little control over. If you’re doing your job right and your hospital website is a trusted and authoritative resource on the web (and in your community), you’re going to have external people linking to your website. Chances are, you may even have a great many of these inbound links.

These inbound links represent external people recommending your brand, and these are obviously important to most marketers. In addition, inbound links also influence how your web pages perform in search (for most search engines). Pages on your website that are frequently linked to with similar anchor text will tend to perform better in search results for queries containing terms used in that anchor text.

Unfortunately, as you curate your website content… or even go through Web redesigns and updated site launches, you run the risk of breaking all these “earned” inbound links. As a marketer, you should be loath to throw away any quality backlink that you’ve earned.

Because of this, it is important to fix broken inbound links whenever possible. Not only does this maintain the SEO benefit, but it’s important that visitors arriving on your website from external sources are met with the type of content they expected to find.

With internal and outbound links, the fix is relatively easy: find the content on your website containing the problematic link, and fix it.

With inbound links, the work can be more difficult. To fix a broken inbound link, you either have to contact the webmaster of the external site and ask them to update their hyperlink, or you have to redirect visitors who follow that broken link to a relevant resource on your website.

Most webmasters find it a more economical use of their time to use redirects to address broken inbound links than to reach out to webmasters every time they identify a problem with an external website linking to their site.

In tomorrow’s post, Finding Broken Links and Fixing Them with VitalSite Redirects, you’ll learn several easy ways to identify broken links on your hospital website. We’ll also cover the best ways to fix them you retain the best SEO benefit while providing your site visitors with the best user experience possible.

At one point in time the advice about 404 errors was clear: you fix broken links (which result in 404 errors) because it’s a bad user experience to have them on your website.

In the last few years, however, Google has muddied the waters.

It has begun saying things like, “404s are a natural part of the web. We won’t penalize you for them.” And while 404s are indeed a natural part of the Web (the 404 error message is part of the HTTP protocol, after all), it’s dangerous to assume that you can ignore them.

Dismissing 404s as a natural part of the Web does nothing to address the poor user experience and site quality issues (which we know DO affect search rankings) engendered by a proliferation of errors, nor does it provide your marketing team with the opportunity to capture valuable inbound traffic from existing links to your site. Lastly, broken links leak PageRank, since URLs returning a 404 are eventually deindexed (source).

If this all sounds like geek speak, let’s distill down to the essence: marketers and webmasters of hospital websites need to stay on top of their 404s. It’s that simple.

404s: A Closer Look

A 404 error is a special server response code that a web server sends when a visitor tries to open a page (or other resource) that doesn’t exist. Typically via a link that was incorrectly typed, or one that points to a page that has been moved, deleted or whose URL has changed. Collectively, we refer to these as “broken links.”

If you follow a broken link to a page on our website that doesn’t exist, you’ll see something like the following:

The text of the page indicates to the visitor that the resource they were looking for could not be found.

Behind the scenes and invisible to you, the server returned a special 404 error message in the HTTP header.

If we use special software to view these HTTP headers, we see that the 404 response looks something like this:

As Google maintains, this is indeed the “correct” response to provide when a visitor tries to navigate to a page that doesn’t exist. And therein lies the rub.

The fact that it is technically “correct” can lead you to logically conclude that it’s OK to have a slew of 404s on your website.

Such conclusions are dangerous.

Out of control 404s can result in big problems for websites. Most Web marketers intent on driving and maintaining business value from their websites invest in understanding their 404 profile and keep it as clean as possible. Think of it as a standard component of your website hygiene program, one that is no different than hand washing is to your hospital’s hygiene program.

Unfortunately, not all broken links are the same. Some you’ll want to monitor and live with, others you’ll want to identify and fix on a regular basis.

Not sure how to tell the difference between a broken link worth fixing, and one you should just leave alone? We’ll cover this in our next post, Understanding Broken Links and 404s.

Treat questions like currency.

A great channel for figuring out what kind of content your audience wants to consume is right in front of you: your patients. They have questions. Lots of questions. I’m a mom of two boys and I can easily think back to a few questions I’ve had lately….

• “How do I tell if it’s a cold of the flu?”
• “Fevers: when do I take my child to the ER?”
• “Why antibiotics aren’t always the answer.”
• “Five myths about flu shots.”

Figure out a way to capture the questions your patients ask. You could collect them from social media accounts, ask nurses at your clinics to share frequently asked questions, or internvew atual patients. Then, develop content that answers those questions.

This positions your hospital as an expert and a resource, and developing content that many people would like to consum will add to its shareability factor.

More Content Marketing Tips

The thing about content marketing is – it sounds new and time consuming. But chances are, you’re already doing a lot of content marketing at your hospital. Creating useful content is something you’ve likely been doing for years. This new emphasis on content marketing should help you think about your efforts in new ways and hopefully keep it top of mind.

For more tips on content marketing, be sure to check out this webinar.

What’s a gTLD?

gTLDs (often referred to as just “top-level domains” or “TLDs”) are generic Top-Level Domains. If that doesn’t ring a bell, think of them this way: you probably currently know them as the familiar three-letter extensions to domains you use all the time. For example: “com” is a top-level domain in www.geonetric.com. You already know many of the others: .edu, .org, .net, .gov, .mil. Perhaps you’ve even dabbled in .co, .tv, .mobi, .info, .me or some of the others floating around the Web.

Well, there’s a host of new ones coming that you need to be aware of…

New top-level domains for healthcare marketers, hospitals, practices, and systems

The list of new TLDs being introduced in the coming days, weeks and months is quite large. Certainly you should familiarize yourself with the scope of what’s on the way, as there may be interesting business opportunities for you in a changing and disrupted landscape. To help get you started, I’ve compiled a list of interesting new TLD applications that, if approved, will be relevant for hospitals, practices and healthcare systems:

.care

I imagine this will be a popular one, especially amongst brands and hospitals that have “care” in their name (especially at the end).

.clinic

Does your organization have branded clinics? There may be opportunities here. Also, don’t be afraid to think about non-branded opportunities. What would owning something like www.weightloss.clinic mean for your organization?

.dental

This will undoubtedly be a popular choice for dentists and dental practices.

.dentist

Again, I expect there are opportunities here for dentists and practices. Perhaps there are even opportunities to use personal names:

• www.bobsmith.dentist
• www.drsmith.dentist

.diet

Does your healthcare organization offer a branded diet? Do your market your nutritionists and dietitians? This may be a smart choice for a number of reasons. Is your organization a center of excellence for diabetes care? What about heart health? If so, would it make sense to try to obtain these:

• www.diabetes.diet
• www.cardiac.diet

.docs

If docs is regional shorthand for “doctors” in your geography, perhaps it would make sense to list your providers here. If you’re in a competitive locale, perhaps owning the [cityname].docs domain would be a natural way to get a leg up?

.doctor

This is a lot like .dentist, in my opinion. While there may be opportunities for the healthcare organization (www.heart.doctor anyone?), it seems like there is also ample opportunity for promoting individual physicians, or for claiming region or specialties:

• www.dolittle.doctor
• www.johnsmith.doctor
• www.heart.doctor
• www.boston.doctor

.health

If your brand name ends in “health”, this is likely the one for you. Also, if you have centers of excellence or clinics around specific conditions, you might find opportunities. As always, opportunities abound if you’re in a competitive geography:

• www.diabetes.health
• www.heart.heath
• www.boston-heart.health
• boston.heart.health

.healthcare

Again, if “healthcare” is part of your brand or organization’s name, it will probably make sense to claim some space in this TLD. Also look for location-based and condition-based opportunities:

• www.boston.healthcare
• www.diabetes.healthcare

.hiv

It will be interesting to see how this domain plays out. Probably a great opportunity for patient education with www.information.hiv. I expect www.treatment.hiv will go quickly too.

.hospital

If there’s a new TLD that everyone is going to want a piece of, this is probably going to be it. Watch out for competition amongst similarly-named hospitals in different geographies. For specialty hospitals, this might be a win. Also, look for opportunities to own the hospital brand for a given location:

• www.boston.hospital
• www.cardiac.hospital

.med

I’m interested to see how healthcare marketers use this one. There are certainly opportunities, but I wonder if it will effectively compete with the other new TLDs.

.medical

If I were forced to pick between this or .med, I’d likely go for .medical. I can see the appeal for healthcare, hospital and health system brands to stake out a space on this TLD as well.

.pharmacy

Pharmacies are often overlooked marketing opportunities, and organizations interested in promoting their pharmacies might be interested in this TLD. Also, brands interested in vying for dominance in specific locations might utilize this:

• www.boston.pharmacy

.physio

Have established physiotherapy clinics? If so, this is an obvious choice. Perhaps even your organization’s sports health clinics can find a home in this TLD.

.rehab

A clear win for any healthcare organization offering all manner of rehabilitation services.

.support

Does your organization sponsor or host support groups in your community? This could be a perfect fit.

.surgery

If “surgery” is in your brand, this might be a clear fit. Other opportunities include weight loss, reconstructive, cardiac and other surgical specialties. Consider this: Would any of the following be assets to your brand?

• www.weightloss.surgery
• www.cardiac.surgery
• www.bariatric.surgery
• www.cosmetic.surgery

.insurance

Does your brand have a page dedicated to the various insurance programs you participate in? If so, this might be a great way to connect patients and prospects with the information they need.

And then there are some corner cases you could have some fun with:

.careers

Chances are your employment pages are among the most popular on your site…and there may be opportunities for you if this becomes the ubiquitous TLD for people to find employment information for organizations.

.claims

Perhaps your organization has online bill pay? Would it make sense to host it here, or redirect from here?

.delivery

There’s got to be an opportunity here for mommies-to-be who are deciding where to have their babies…

.events

Your health, education and conferences can easily be promoted here.

.insure

Is your organization involved in educating the community about the new insurance options available to people under new state and federal legislation? If so, perhaps a branded .insure domain is an opportunity for you.

.life

Brands with strong wellness initiatives may choose to claim some space under the .life TLD. Of course, brands with “life” in their names will want to look carefully at this as well.

.partners

A perfect opportunity for practices and organizations with “partners” in the name.

How soon do I need to act?

You need to consider your strategy. Today.

Remember that while registering your hospital brand on upcoming TLDs is likely an unwelcome expense and distraction, it’s often far cheaper than litigating for it later. So be smart and start the discussion now…not just with your marketing group, but with the CIO of your organization and your executive leadership. If you already retain legal counsel to advise you on brand protection, query them to see if they are up to speed and can advise you on the new TLDs and what you need to do to prepare. You may discover that others in your organization have already started the ball rolling…or that you have allies nearby that can help you chart a course through this.

You still have time… As of today, none of the top-level domains listed above have registry agreements behind them, but they are coming in the coming days, weeks and months. It’s important to identify your strategy as quickly as possible so that when TLDs are announced, you can move on the ones you are interested in.

How do I stay informed when TLDs become available?

There are no shortage of existing domain name registrars who will be competing for the business of public domain name registrations. But if you already know that you’ll be making acquisitions for your trademarked brand identities, you will need to keep track of things before they are open for public consumption.

The best resource I’ve found is ICANN’s Registry Agreements list. Every TLD domain ICANN awards to a registrar is listed here. So you’ll want to keep your eye on it for domains for your brand.

Once ICANN enters into an agreement with a registrar, the registrar needs to open what’s called a “sunrise” window. This is a 30-day slot for trademark holders to register their brand domains under the new TLDs. Once this window closes, it’s open season…and anyone can purchase any domain name (for the most part).

Be aware that in order to use the sunrise window, you’ll have to register your trademarked name in the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH).

Of course, if you have the desire to move on a non-trademarked domain, you’ll have to wait until the sunrise period ends and the public can start purchasing domains. If you’ve been seeing a lot of noise from your normal domain registrars, understand that chances are they are offering to sell you domain names once the sunset period has expired and the public can start. If you want to give them business at this stage through their various pre-registration programs, please take the time to understand what they are actually selling you.

Is doing nothing an option for us?

It is likely that you’ll need to include multiple groups in your organization in this conversation. Right off the bat, I’d suggest checking with your CIO and determining if they already have a strategy defined for acquiring new domain names for the organization.

You may decide that this is not something you need to or want to target, but if you’re a regional brand with a common name and you want to own that for the .hospital or .healthcare domain, you need to be ready to act.

It’s also important to note that just as with our current crop of domains, registering your brand on the new TLDs…while an unwelcome budget impingement, is likely far cheaper than litigating.

What do healthcare trademark owners need to know?

The “sunrise” period began October 23, 2013 for some domains. This 30-day window is set aside for trademark owners to register their second level domains on the new TLDs. This means, if you own the trademark to “Benefit Health,” you can register it under the new TLDs. This would guarantee you, for example, registration of www.benefithealth.hospital.

Be aware that in order for you to participate in sunrise registration, you must have your trademark registered in the Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH): “The Trademark Clearinghouse (TMCH) is the most important rights protection mechanism built into ICANN’s new TLD program. It allows brand owners to submit their trademark data into one centralized database, prior to and during the launch of new TLDs. Simply put: The TMCH is a one-stop-solution for protecting your brand in the new TLD era” (source).

You’ll need to read and understand how the Trademark Clearinghouse will help you protect your brand, but in short, it functions as a central repository for brand claims, provides you with the opportunity to participate in sunrise registrations, and can notify you when your brand is registered on any new TLD. See the Trademark Clearinghouse website for more information.

How much will the new TLDs cost?

Right now that’s anyone’s guess. The price for registering domains under the new TLDs will be determined by the registrars to which they are awarded. They could be in line with current rates, or they could be much higher. Time will tell…

Can we buy our own branded TLD?

Applications for TLDs are currently closed, and I’m unaware of any hospitals or health systems who applied in the first round. If you browse the list, you will notice that there are many insurance organizations and pharmaceutical companies represented. I may have missed a hospital or healthcare system in the noise.

When applications open up again, there’s nothing stopping you from applying. But be prepared to shell out some major budget (in the hundreds of thousands of dollars), and be ready to prove that your organization has the wherewithal to operate as a domain registrar. In most cases, this is not currently an option.

Still, if this is something you believe your organization would be interested in, Section 2 of ICANN’s FAQwill be a good place to get started. You’ll also want to check out this guide. While dated, it does a good job laying out the hurdles you’ll face.

Updates

Since originally published, ICANN has delegated a number of the healthcare-related top-level domains mentioned above. If you’d like to stay up to date, see ICANN’s list of delegated top-level domains.

Google Authorship provides a unique way for your healthcare organization to differentiate its brand in Google search engine results pages (SERPs) with visual attributes that encourage readers to click and explore.

Whether it’s a blog, press releases, news stories or health library content, Google Authorship can showcase links to your properties in the increasingly competitive scramble to the top of Google’s search engine results pages.

To see how easy it is to implement Google Authorship in VitalSite, we’ve put together a short video that walks through the process from start to finish, all in just a few minutes!

If you have questions about what Google Authorship is, why you should consider implementing it, and how to get started, consult the Geonetric Google Authorship FAQ or contact your client advisors.

Last week our engineering team released VitalSite 6.7. It contains a slew of new features, fixes and enhancements focused on helping consumers find your site and the content within it. This release includes enhancement to site search, schema.org support, and a range of tools for webmasters.

Site Search Enhancements and Schema.org Support

Your content is important to your bottom line, as ultimately it’s what converts (or fails to convert) a site visitor to revenue on your balance sheet. The numbers are quite staggering: Provider Detail pages accounted for about 6.25 million views on our client sites last year. That’s over 17,000 views of providers each day across healthcare organizations! And some of these views convert directly to appointments with your physicians, visits to your facilities, and inquiries about your services.

With numbers like these, we want to make it as easy as possible for site visitors to find your doctors, locations, and services. One way to do this is to ensure your content is optimized for search engines and is structured using schema.org semantic markup.

VitalSite has a long history of supporting SEO best practices, and with this release, we begin supporting schema.org semantic markup in your provider directory. While search engine optimization aims to improve the rankings of your content in search engine result pages (SERPS), the goal of semantic markup is to help search engines (and other services) better understand your content so that they can provide more accurate results and incorporate your content into new apps, like Knowledge Graph.

Better rankings in external search engines. More accurate results in search engines. These are both important, but we also know from site analytics that external search is frequently just the beginning of the visitor’s journey. Visitors continue refining their search once they arrive at your site. This means your site’s internal search engine has to perform as well as – or better – than the third-party search engines site visitors are familiar with.

For this reason, we’ve made significant improvements to your website’s internal search for providers, locations, and services. First, we’ve enhanced the advanced search algorithms used to determine which content is displayed in VitalSite search results. Second, we’ve built in sophisticated mechanisms to help shape and customize the search experience based on your organization’s unique needs.

VitalSite Webmaster Tools

In addition to search enhancements and schema.org support, VitalSite 6.7 has a lot that hospital webmasters will love. It includes more ways to shape the SEO strategy of your websites, and even tools that can help split test your content to optimize performance. In support of these objectives, this release includes:

• Robots.txt Editing – From time to time, webmasters need to tweak their robots.txt files to support custom directives that help determine how search engines index their sites. With VitalSite 6.7 this is easier than ever. Now you can edit the robots.txt file for your site from within the VitalSite administration interface.
• Noindex Robots Metatags – In addition to robots.txt, the noindex robots metatag is essential for telling search engines not to index your content. With this release of VitalSite, you can add this metatag on a page-by-page basis.
• Sitemap.xml Inclusion/Exclusion Control – Your site’s sitemap.xml files are an important way of promoting your content to search engines. With VitalSite 6.7, you have fine-grain control over which pages do and do not show up in this file.
• Custom HTML on Pages – Whether you’re optimizing content with split tests or using special analytics services to understand how site visitors interact with your pages, many advanced tools require webmasters to add special code to the HTML source of their pages. A new feature in VitalSite 6.7 allows you to add custom HTML to the head section and bottom of pages, all from within the VitalSite administration interface.

Release Schedule

Excited about trying out VitalSite 6.7? Geonetric clients will be hearing from their client advisors soon regarding the deployment schedule. If you’re not yet a client but would like to learn more about how VitalSite can help your organization lead in your market, contact a Geonetric consultant to schedule a demo.