Dental Web Marketing

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2011-03-25T10:16:00.002-06:00

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Why Add More Content Regualarly To Your Dental Website

2010-06-14T16:43:00.002-06:00

We've all heard the excerpt from the movie, Field of Dreams, "Build it and they will come." Today, you must "keep building it," if you want online consumers to find your website on the organic listings of search engines, like Google. No longer is having a dental website enough.

"Why does Google care if I add new information to my website?"

Simple: Google wants to give its users credible, high-quality and the most accurate information.

As a dentist, you need to continually take dental education courses in order to maintain your license to practice. Why? Because things change; new technology, new treatment philosophies, new studies continually change dental protocols and what is in the patients best interest.

The programmers at Google understands this concept. Websites that have more updated, fresher, more timely information are likely to be seen as more credible in the eyes of search engines.

If you have not added information or updated the quality and quantity of your website content in the last few months, it's time to revisit your Web and search engine marketing strategy.

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2010-06-07T17:35:00.001-06:00

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Calling All Dental Consultants

2010-06-02T10:39:00.006-06:00

Do you have a particular Cosmetic Dentist client who's not getting enough NEW business?

When's the last time you've had their website evaluated for performance and optimization abilities?

When you do a search for "Cosmetic Dentistry", "Veneers", "Teeth Whitening", etc, does your client show up on the first page of Internet Search results?

If not, then there may be a connection with their website and a lack of new business.

This may be seriously hindering their marketing efforts and increasing their costs per lead.

Page 1 Solutions could help you help your client with some insightful website discoveries and analysis.

We'd be happy to offer a FREE review of their website and give you the results.

Get A Step Up On Your Competition

2010-05-18T14:57:00.001-06:00

My Search Spy is a new free tool to help you with your Web marketing

Have you ever heard that "knowledge is half the battle?" You can get detailed information on not just how your website ranks on the search engines, but also how your competitors' websites are ranked on the search engines. How does your website measure up? You need to know where your website is winning and where it's losing out to your competitors. You can't fix a problem if you don't know it exists. Check it out now. It's totally free. Run as many reports as you would like.

http://www.mysearchspy.com

Rising To The Top (of search engines)

2010-05-18T09:27:00.003-06:00

An important question many dentists ask me regarding search engine optimization is, “how long does it take to see results on Google?” Unfortunately, the answer is “it depends.”

There are a number of variables that influence how quickly your website rises on target search engines. The following are just some:

1- Age of your domain – The longer it has been continuously indexed, the more credibility it has with the search engines.

2- Competition – Competitors in your market area and target services determine the amount of work and effort it will take to leap over them.

3- Website assets – The more assets (pages, images, original content, etc.) that a website has can significantly impact how quickly we can start securing top results.

4- Aggressive on-site optimization - Optimizing your website is more than just adding meta tags. How aggressive we are at continually adding new keyword-rich pages, blog entries and optimizing them for your most important phrases will impact your pace up the search engines.

5- Aggressive off-site optimization – Aggressively building incoming-links to your website from other websites (such as registering your website with various directories, using existing client websites, blogs, profiles, social media sites, etc.), will accelerate your results.

In the end, how quickly (or how high) we rise to the top of important search results is determined largely by how aggressive you choose, or allow us, to be. So when comparing various SEO firms and their relative costs, remember only custom, researched quotes (as opposed to cookie-cutter quotes from a price list) takes this into account.

Facebook - Four Things to Keep in Mind

2010-05-07T15:13:00.005-06:00

There is no doubt about it. Social media is here to stay. It's becoming more and more ingrained into our everyday lives. Not only do we see it when we're surfing the Web, but now we see it when we watch TV and when we visit stores and restaurants. We're surrounded by it. But, how can it help a dental practice?

Many dentists don't know how social media can work for them. Facebook is by far the most important social media site for doctors. The first thing you'll want to do is set up a fan page for your practice, but here are a few quick things to keep in mind when assessing your Facebook strategies:

1. Understand the purpose of social media. Social media is a way for people to connect and share their thoughts and ideas among friends. It is the perfect place for you to connect with current and past patients, as well as potential patients, and build relationships with your online community.

2. Don't expect to get a flood of new patients from your social media efforts. I'm not saying you won't receive new patients from Facebook, as there is a chance you will. But, don't expect it to be an automatic source of new business for you. Try not to view your fan page as a patient source, but rather a place where you can build your credibility and online reputation. Once you have done that, and people begin to recognize your name and become comfortable with you, they will be more likely to think of you when they are in the market for a dentist or cosmetic dentistry procedures.

3. Encourage your current patients to join you on Facebook. In order to build a strong rapport with new patients, you need to leverage your current patients. People LOVE to hear great testimonials about a service or product. What better person to be an advocate for your expertise and service than a patient who is thrilled with their results? By encouraging your current patients to become a fan of you on Facebook and post their comments, you will allow potential patients to read these wonderful things about your practice.

4. Post relevant and interesting information and post regularly, but not too often. Facebook is a great way to drive people to your blog, to mention awards or certifications you may have received, new equipment or services you now offer, etc. Strive to post something once per day. If it's timely information, more than one time a day is fine, but you want to avoid bombarding your fans with so many posts that you clog up their "walls." You also don't want to post so infrequently that they forget who you are. Try to maintain that delicate balance.

These are just a few of the things that you should keep in mind when thinking about how to incorporate Facebook into your online marketing. Each practice is different, so if you need help developing a social media strategy, please contact us today.

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2010-04-27T09:26:00.001-06:00

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Cosmetic Dentists Who Are Coming of Age

2010-04-21T16:08:00.008-06:00

Take a guess as to what these five Cosmetic Dentists have in common...

Gateway Dental Arts (Salt Lake City)

Terry Bass, DDS (Oklahoma City)

Joseph W Worthington, DDS, PC (Fairfield, CT)

More Smiles Dental Spa (Covington, LA)

James Loye, DDS (San Diego)

Answer: Each has "come of age" by asking Page 1 Solutions to develop their Facebook Fan Page. They have chosen to give Social Media Marketing a chance.

But why?

Social Media Marketing the newest frontier for the Internet. By creating and maintaining a fan page on Facebook, friends of friends can easily get to know your business easier than before for a fraction of any advertising cost. Ultimately, if down with a little effort and an open mind, you can pick up additional clients through social media marketing without damaging your checkbook.

Word of Mouth is considered the greatest form of advertising. But just imagine if one of your clients loves their new smile so much they become a fan of your practice's Facebook profile. They may go so far as to post before and after pictures on their Facebook profile page.

Guess who will see these before and after pictures?....

Answer... Their best friends and acquaintances from their hometown, college, relationships and past.

Chances are, your client's Facebook friends live within your market. Consider the phrase: Birds of a Feather flock together. All it takes is for one friend of a friend to see your client's smile and they might consider taking this friendly endorsement to heart and contact your office.

Does this sort of thing actually happen? Of course it does. Getting business from friends of friends via social media is easier than you might think. Don't be skeptical.

Check out this video from www.socialnomics.com for some encouragement and ask yourself if you are "coming of age"?

Three Tips to a Successful Online Dental Gallery

2010-03-31T10:12:00.008-06:00

Your online dental gallery is one of the most important things your website can tell your visitors about your work. Many people visiting a cosmetic dentist's website won't contact the office unless there are before and after photos of their procedure available. Dr. Babak Firouzi, DMD, has a great example before and after gallery on his website. We'll use this as a guide to give you three great tips for a successful online dental gallery!

1. Clear organization is a must. It is important that your website visitors know where to find the before and after images they are interested in. Having clear navigational buttons, either on the side or top of your website will help navigate your visitors to the images they want to see. Dr. Firouzi's site has a clear button on the left hand side that says, "Gallery of Smiles". You can also name this button "Smile Before and Afters" or something similar.

2. Show them only the images that they want to see. It is also good to separate out before and afters for different procedures, that way visitors aren't bombarded with images that they don't want to see. Dental before and after photos can be a bit graphic, and visitors will appreciate not having to wade through images for procedures they aren't interested in. Dr. Babak Firouzi's site offers images for these procedures, separated into three separate pages:

3. Organize the images on the page. This one seems pretty basic, but it is important that your online visitors know which two images of teeth belong to the same person. Dr. Firouzi's site handles this by simply placing the dental procedure images very close to each other, within the same border, so it is apparent that they belong to the same person.

Dental Marketing Questions that Google Analytics Can Answer

2010-02-09T12:36:00.002-07:00

It takes a lot of time, energy and money to really successfully run and maintain an internet marketing campaign. Thankfully, there are some great tools out there to help you keep an eye on your efforts! Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that shows you in a clean format exactly where your visitors came from, what they're looking for, and how they navigate around your site. This is a great tool for answering many of your internet marketing questions! Here are some questions dentists may ask themselves that Google Analytics can answer.

How do I know if a paid online service is worth the cost?
When trying to evaluate an online service such as Press Releases or Ad Campaigns, try to integrate them as much as you can with Google Analytics. With Google AdWords, integrating with Google Analytics is a snap, just make sure that you set up both your AdWords and your Analytics account with the same email address, and follow Google's instructions. You can also use Google's URL Builder to create a custom URL to use in press releases and banner ads that will track clicks on the URL in Google Analytics.

By tracking clicks and ad campaigns in Google Analytics, you can easily compare your different online investments and see which ones are sending the most valuable traffic to your website. This integrates well with external campaigns such as radio ads - if you purchase radio advertisements, ask to also get a link from their website using a custom URL. You might be surprised at how much traffic that link will send!

How can I measure my website's performance?
While your website's positioning in search engine result pages (SERPs) may be entirely up to your internet marketing company, you can control how well your online visitors convert into patients by tracking their movements through your website.

One great basic way you can do this is by setting up Goals and Goal Funnels. A "goal" on your website is a specific page that you want your future patients to land on; for most websites, it is the "Thank You" page that visitors get after they've filled out a contact form. A "funnel" is an ideal path that your patients might take through your website. One example of a funnel might be:

Home Page > About Dr. Dentist > Dental Financing Options > Contact Page > Thank You Page

By setting up a funnel, you can see where visitors on your website enter and exit an ideal path. It is not necessarily bad that visitors exit the funnel, so long as the page they go to next makes sense.

Another great way to track certain visitor actions is Event Tracking. You may want to work with your dental web marketing company on getting Event Tracking set up, as it is a little more complex than other tracking methods. Event Tracking allows you to track certain elements of your site that a visitor might interact with, such as a button, image or link. This is a great way to know which dental forms are downloaded, which dental coupons or promotions are more interesting, or even whether a top navigation link is more effective than a side navigation link.

How do I know whether or not my content is effective?

There are a ton of reports in the "Content" section of Google Analytics that are designed specifically to answer this question! Your "Top Landing Pages" report will show the pages that visitors "land" on the most, meaning that is the page they enter your website on. Some metrics you'll want to keep your eye on are "Time on Page" and "Bounce Rate".

Time on page is pretty self-explanatory; it's the average amount of time that visitors spend on that page. If this number is lower for some pages than others, you know your content is not very engaging.

Bounce Rate is the percent of people who land on that page and then leave without visiting anything else on your site. A high bounce rate is a big red flag for your pages - if you have a lot of visitors going to your tooth whitening page, but that page has a 100% bounce rate, you'll want to have the content for that page revised STAT!

Do you have any other questions that might be solved with web analytics? Please feel free to post them in our comments section!

Facebook Advertising for Dentists

2010-01-26T10:31:00.003-07:00

Facebook has quickly become a valuable dental web marketing tool. And while many practices have recognized the importance of having a fan page on the site, most are still neglecting the value of advertising on the social networking site. Facebook Advertising, which is essentially a pay-per-click platform, is easy, affordable, and a great tool for branding your practice.

Unlike Google Adwords, Facebook Advertising is not yet very competitive, so the cost-per-click is still very affordable (often times under a dollar). Facebook is also unique in it has a rather advanced targeting. While Google limits the advertiser to certain keywords and locations, Facebook can target by age, gender, location, interests, and more. This is not to say that it is a better option than Google, but rather to point out that it is different.

It is important to keep in mind that the main difference between a search engine’s sponsored listings and Facebook's, is that on a search engine, users are actually seeking out your service. They are searching for a “Cosmetic Dentist in Denver,” while on Facebook, you are seeking them out. This is why traffic to your website from a Facebook Advertising campaign will not necessarily convert in patients (right away). It may not even generate much traffic, but it is GREAT for branding. By having your practice's name and logo appear in front of your target demographic on a regular basis, you are implanting your brand into their minds. And when it comes time, they will already be familiar and feel connected with your practice.

Facebook offers a cost-per-impression option, but it is generally not the best option for a campaign. Although when compared side-by-side the cost-per-impression is cheaper than the cost-per-click, it is safe to assume that there will be exponentially more impressions of your ad, than actual clicks. Again, this is because Facebook Advertising is a much better tool for branding, than for generating traffic to your website.

If you are familiar with Facebook, then setting up and following a campaign is not hard. You can find step-by-step help here. If you are new to Facebook, enlist the help of your staff, your kids, your friends, anyone! Chances are that you know someone who is Facebook saavy.

And as always, please feel free to ask questions or leave comments!

Blogging to the Teeth - Dental Blogs

2009-12-22T10:01:00.002-07:00

So you're a dentist, and you have a blog. Now what? Many dentists may not realize it, but a blog has a lot of potential for not only bringing in new patients, but making them feel comfortable about your office before they walk through the door. Writing about the latest procedures, topics and success stories is a great way to connect with your audience! Here are some example blog entries from two of our favorite dentistry websites.

Dr. Josh Bernstein, DDS, in San Francisco, California.

Implants Then and Now Using Guided Implant Surgery. Dr. Bernstein explains in his own voice the difference between dental implant procedures of the past and those of today. We should be thankful for technological advancement!
Headaches, TMJ, Grinding Teeth, and Vertigo. Dr. Bernstein discusses the causes and symptoms of TMJ. Who knew that vertigo might be a sign of a dental problem?
Invisalign. Dr. Bernstein discusses the benefits of Invisalign. Did you know that Invisalign actually improves your smile faster than regular metal braces?

I Hate CPAP! in Chicago, Illinois.

I'm Interested in Alternatives to CPAP. Dr. Ira Shapira responds to an inquiry about a sleep study as opposed to CPAP machines.
Improving CPAP and Appliance Comfort With a PAP Pillow. Dr. Shapira talks about a sleep website that he loves, and recommends the PAP Pillow for those who are more comfortable sleeping on their side while using CPAP machines.
The Best Prices on CPAP Supplies and Equipment. Although Dr. Shapira's website is about alternatives to CPAP, he acknowledges that many people love and depend on their CPAP treatments. In this blog entry, Dr. Shapira aims to help those people find the best prices on their CPAP supplies!

Great Posts in Recent Dental News!

2009-12-15T16:30:00.002-07:00

There have been a ton of great topics circulating cosmetic dentistry news sources in the last week. Here are some of our favorite blog entries from dentists in North America!

Eat, Drink and Be Merry! (While Still Taking Care of Your Teeth) by Dr. J. Mulder Jr. in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This guide will tell you how you can enjoy those red wines and coffees for the holidays and still have a great smile!
Pre-Consultation Considerations by Cherry Creek Orthodontics in Denver, Colorado. Some things to consider before going in for your dental consultation.
Tooth Scaling and Root Planing by Aesthetic Dental Studio in Calgary, Alberta. Has a dentist ever said these terrifying words to you? Learn exactly what tooth scaling and root planing is and put those fears to rest!
The Advantages of Dental Implants by Joel L. Schaffer, DDS, in Boulder, Colorado. If you're considering dental implants, this guide might help show you if it will provide you with the advantages you're looking for.
How Invisalign Works by Laurel Lakes Cosmetic Dentistry in Laurel, Maryland. Everyone wants to get this amazing alternative to braces, but how exactly do they work? This blog entry answers your questions.

Dentalnomics

2009-12-09T14:16:00.003-07:00

Check out the new group we formed on LinkedIn! We are hoping that Dentalnomics will be a way to share ideas, network, and find resources within the dental community. If you are a dentist or related dental professional, this is the place on Linkedin for you to connect with one another and share ideas and best practices regarding marketing and managing your dentistry practice. Discussions will range from how to market your dental practice, retaining patients, lead conversions, web traffic, intake protocols, working with your dental team, to handling financing and insurance and more. We value your participation, and look forward to connecting with you!

The group is still in it's very early stages, but don't be afraid to help us get it rolling! The sooner you join, the sooner you can help mold the group into a useful dental web marketing tool!

Great Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry Blogs!

2009-11-28T15:37:00.002-07:00

The world of cosmetic dentistry has been filled with fascinating facts and topics. Here are some of our favorite blog entries from recent cosmetic dentistry blogs!

Dental Allergies by Colonial Dental Group in Glenview, Illinois. If you feel uncomfortable in the dentist's office, it may be that there is something in the office you are allergic to. This blog entry has a great list of items to consider if you have strong allergies.
Patient Testimony of Headache and TMD Relief by Advanced Smile Designs in Aptos, California. A woman named Denise shares her experience with migranes due to TMD and the relief she found at this California based dentistry office.
Getting a Good Night's Sleep by Dr. Jerry Mulder in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Many people suffer from sleep deprivation due to snoring and sleep apnea. Did you know that dentistry can alleviate that problem?
The Ins and Outs of Cosmetic Dentistry by Winterholler Dentistry in Phoenix, Arizona. What exactly is cosmetic dentistry all about? This blog entry gives a great overview of the practice and its goals.
Family Dentistry vs. Cosmetic Dentistry by Dr. Brian Hale, DDS, in San Antonio, Texas. So how is a cosmetic dentist different than your regular, family dentist? This blog entry explains it all!

Great Posts in Recent Dental News!

2009-11-12T11:20:00.001-07:00

There have been lots of exciting topics circulating the world of cosmetic dentistry lately. Here are some of our favorite blog entries on these topics from cosmetic dentists.

What is Full Mouth Reconstruction? by Willow Dental in Toronto, Canada. There are many people who have heard of full mouth reconstruction, but do not really know what is involved in this procedure. If this is you, you can find out all about full mouth reconstruction in this blog entry!
Options for Fixing Gaps in Your Teeth by Joel L. Schaffer, DDS, in Boulder, Colorado. If you have gaps in your teeth, you have plenty of different options for repair. Read this blog entry to find out which one is right for you!
The Advantages of Today's Dental Braces by Cherry Creek Orthodontics in Denver, Colorado. Braces have come a long way in the past few years, making them a much more appealing option for crooked teeth!
Raisin Eyebrows: Is Dried Fruit Good For Your Teeth? by Dr. Kevin Sands, DDS, in Beverly Hills, California. Dr. Kevin Sands discusses the effect of this healthy snack on our teeth.
New Orleans Saints Mouthguards by Advanced Smile Designs in Aptos, California. A mouthguard is more important to star football teams than you might think!

TweetBeep for Cosmetic Dentists

2009-11-10T09:53:00.002-07:00

Cosmetic dentists are still trying to figure out how they can best utilize Twitter as part of their Dental web marketing strategy. TweetBeep is a perfect tool for dental practices looking to generate patients from Twitter.

TweetBeep is an application that is similar to Google Alerts. It sends you free Twitter notifications anytime that a specific keyword or phrase (which can be tailored to fit your needs) is tweeted. It is a great tool for tracking site mentions, competitor mentions, managing your reputation, generating leads, and more.

The main reason that TweetBeep can be so effective is because you can include geographic locations in your search results. For example, you can set an alert for the keyword "veneers" that is tweeted within 25 miles of your practice. Therefore, if somebody in your city tweets that they want to get veneers, you will be notified. Then, you can send the person a message, introducing yourself, encouraging them to visit your web and inviting them to your office for a consultation.

Have questions? Feel free to leave a comment or contact us on Twitter!

Great Posts in Recent Dental News!

2009-11-06T17:25:00.002-07:00

Lots of exciting discussions have been happening in the world of dentistry! Here are some of our favorite blog entries, from dentists across the nation!

Our New Fish Tank by Joel L. Shaffer, DDS, in Boulder, Colorado. It's always nice to get a preview of a dentist's office - this dentist brings you into the office by showing you a video of their fish tank!
The Many Advantages of Dental Implants by Winterholler Dentistry in Phoenix, Arizona. A great outline of what dental implants can do for your smile by this office in Phoenix!
Choosing a Cosmetic Dentist by Laurel Lakes Cosmetic Dentistry in Laurel, Maryland. A great guide on how to find the cosmetic dentist that's right for you.
The Orthodontic Evaluation by Cherry Creek Orthodontics in Denver, Colorado. How exactly will your orthodontic evaluation go? This blog entry has the answers.
Dental Health: Canker Sores by Colonial Dental Group in Glenview, Illinois. What are canker sores, and how can you prevent them? This article answers your questions!

Page 1 Wins 2 LACP 2009 Spotlight Awards for Dental Websites!

2009-10-30T11:53:00.003-06:00

We are proud to announce that Page 1 Solutions has won two honors awards from the LACP 2009 Spotlight Awards, demonstrating once again that we are a premier Dental Web Marketing firm!

The website for Rochester, Michigan Cosmetic Dentists, Dr. Doolin and Dr. Haddad of Rochester Advanced Dentistry won the Honors Award with a score of 94/100. The judges noted that "the style and design of this website is very engaging, speaking to the organization's high level of passion and involvement."

Also a winner is the website we designed for San Diego Cosmetic Dentist, Dr. Mary Walch-Cole, DMD. Dr. Walsh-Cole's website also scored 94/100 and took home the Honors Award. The judges were also very complementive of this site, stating that the site had "outstanding production values: the top quality of this web site helps to enhance its compelling nature as well as underscore the strengths of the brand," adding that "this portal is a pure delight to review."

Congratulations and great job to everyone involved in building these sites. We are very proud of these accomplishments and look forward to more to come!

Great Blog Entries in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry News!

2009-10-13T10:10:00.003-06:00

It's that time again! Here are some of our favorite cosmetic dentistry blog entries from the past week. Enjoy!

Eye for an Eye, Tooth for a...? by Kenneth A. Mogell, DMD, in Boca Raton, Florida. Dr. Mogell discusses an interesting ophthalmologic procedure where a patient's tooth is implanted in the eye to help correct vision!
Working on my Cosmetic Dentistry Book by Scott Greenhalgh, DDS, in Lakewood, Colorado. A great idea by this Colorado based dentist: a book full of before and afters from patients, with stories! This really demonstrates how cosmetic dentistry can change lives.
Pierced Tongues by Exceptional Dentistry in Dubuque, Iowa. Learn how this fashion accessory can really damage your teeth!
Invisalign for Straight Teeth by Drs. Jamie and Kevin Sands in Valley Village, California. Some great before and afters that really demonstrate the difference Invisalign can make!
What is a Veneer? by Michael Bufo, DMD, in Portland, Maine. A thorough, easy-to-read overview of porcelain veneers.

Great Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry Blogs!

2009-09-30T22:03:00.003-06:00

There have been a ton of fantastic blog entries in recent cosmetic dentistry news! Here are some of our favorites.

Sleep Apnea by Laurel Lakes Cosmetic Dentistry in Laurel, Maryland. All about sleep apnea and what to do if you've got it.
How Do I Choose a Sedation Dentist? by Aesthetic Dental Studio in Calgary, Canada. Some important things to know about choosing your sedation dentist.
Sleep Apnea in Children by I Hate CPAP! in Chicago, Illinois. Children work in a very different way than adults. Learn about sleep apnea in children and what you as a parent can do to help your child cope.
Why See a Neuromuscular Dentist? by Colonial Dental Group in Glenview, Illinois. Learn about what makes neuromuscular dentistry such a fantastic specialization and how it can help you and your teeth.
Are You Apprehensive at the Dentist? by Dr. O'Neil in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. We all get nervous about that trip to the dentist. Here are some facts to help you overcome those fears!

Great Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry Blogs!

2009-09-18T10:00:00.002-06:00

There have been a lot of great topics circulating in cosmetic dentistry news lately. Here are some of our favorites, from cosmetic dentists across the nation!

Bad Breath??? What to do? by Kenneth A. Mogell, D.M.D., in Boca Raton, Florida. Here's some basic steps you can take to treat and prevent chronic bad breath.
Superdome Celebration for New Orleans Top Docs by More Smiles Dental Spa in Covington, Louisiana. Thanks to New Orleans Magazine and others, some of the top dentists in the New Orleans area held a celebratory event the Louisiana Superdome!
Teeth Whitening by Laurel Lakes Cosmetic Dentistry in Laurel, Maryland. Learn all about teeth whitening and how it can improve your smile!
Becky's All New Smile by Dr. Josh Bernstein in San Francisco, California. An amazing patient story, complete with before and after photos!
Who Says You Can't Wear White After Labor Day? by Sugar Fix Dental in Chicago, Illinois. This Chicago based dental office has come up with a fun promotion for their tooth whitening services.

LinkedIn Groups for Dentists

2009-09-16T15:37:00.004-06:00

LinkedIn can be a great place for dental professionals to connect with one another. The following is a short list of groups that I think are beneficial for cosmetic dentists to participate in:

Dentist Network - "The place for dentists to share ideas & best practices regarding clinical developments in dentistry and managing practices." (982 members)
Dental Implant Professionals - "Dedicated to networking and sharing information within the dental implant industry." (356 members)
Dental Geeks - "A place to discuss exciting projects, current trends, and network together to grow business." (421 members)
Dental Network Group - "An exclusive group for Dentists only." (71 members)
American Dental Association - "A group for members and colleagues of the American Dental Association, as well as members of the dental profession." (299 members)

Think I missed a good one? Let me know and I'll add it to the list!

How to Handle a Negative Review Online

2009-08-26T14:42:00.003-06:00

Social networking sites offer great marketing and branding opportunities. Not only can you showcase your practice and dentists, but satisfied patients can go online and tell the world how happy they are with their brand new smile. But what about the unhappy patients? Is it worth participating in social media if it means that you may be opening up yourself or your practice to negative reviews?

I believe that reputation management is a main reason for joining social networking sites, not against using them. First, unhappy patients can easily review your services on sites like Yelp.com, whether you are a member or not. And if they are talking about you on Facebook or Twitter, the only way you’ll know is if you’re on there too.

Don’t be afraid of negative reviews – face them. If handled properly, a less than flattering review from a past patient can help you more than it hurts. Use these types of comments to make your practice look even better by showing how much you care about patient satisfaction. Respond to the review (publicly or privately) in a manner that demonstrates your commitment to excellence. Apologize to the patient; offer a remedy to the situation; go above and beyond.

If you respond to the review in a professional, compelling manner, you will not only save your relationship with an existing client, but you may pick up some new ones.

Great Blog Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry News

2009-08-10T12:38:00.002-06:00

It's great to see more and more people in cosmetic dentistry creating and maintaining blogs about their field. Here are some great blog entries we've seen lately from cosmetic dentists across the nation!

Are You Eating What You Want, or What You Can? by the Coleman Center for Cosmetic Dentistry in Poway, California. If you're having difficulty eating all the foods that you enjoy, cosmetic dentistry might make a difference.
Sedation Dentistry: Don't Fear the Dentist by Discover Dental Care in Shawnee, Kansas. If you have a fear of dentistry, this blog entry will tell you all the different options for sedation and which one might be best for you.
Do You (Or Someone You Love) Snore? by Boulder General Dentistry in Boulder, Colorado. Learn about a dental appliance that might alleviate the embarrassment of snoring!
Rachel's All New Smile by Josh Bernstein, DDS in San Francisco, California. This is a great patient story about a woman whose bad bite was causing premature aging in her teeth. The before and after photos are amazing!
What Is Neuromuscular Dentistry? by Sean Michael Anderson, DDS, in San Ramon, California. This blog entry describes neuromuscular dentistry and how it can help with neuromuscular problems like TMD.

How to Set Up a Facebook Page For Your Practice

2009-07-31T14:39:00.005-06:00

Before getting started, make sure that you have a personal account - you cannot set up a fan page without it. Once you have a personal page set up, you will be able to create a page for your practice.

1.) Sign in to your account and scroll to the very bottom of the page. Click on the "Advertising" link that is shown in the image below:
2.) Click on the "Pages" link on the top of the Advertising page:
3.) Click on the green "Create a Page" button:4.) Create your page by filling out the appropriate information. Note that you cannot change your "company name" after set-up.

Once you have set-up your page, be sure to become a fan of your own page immediately - it makes it much easier to find your page later! Also, edit your page by using the "Edit Info" link in the photo below and be sure to include your website in a visible place, like the "write something about your company" box.

From here you can add photos, videos, posts and more. Just play with it for a little while, and you'll get the hang of it. And if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

Become a fan of Page 1 on Facebook!

Blogging for Dentists

2009-07-16T14:52:00.002-06:00

Blogging is a great way to improve your search engine rankings and enhance your dental website. It not only helps your positioning on search engines, but can also help you establish yourself as an industry expert and reach out to your patients.

At first it may seem like a lot of work, but blogging is actually very simple and doesn’t take much time at all. If done well, it can be a great resource for your existing and future patients, as well as other dental professionals. But keep a few things in mind:

Entries should be kept pretty short and sweet. Anything over 300 words becomes more like an article and less like a blog. If you find that you need more room, split the entry into two or three parts.
Always consider your audience. Blogs should be written with your target audience in mind. What kind of information are they interested in? What is their vocabulary? Try to use language and topics that your reader can relate to and understand.
Add photos and graphics if it helps convey your message. Blogs may be a great way to showcase before and after photos.
SPELL CHECK.

Sign up with a service like Blogge r (which is free and easy to use), and give it a shot. If you have any questions, let me know! I’d be glad to help.

LinkedIn for Medical Professionals

2009-06-23T10:44:00.002-06:00

LinkedIn is one of the top social networking sites, yet it often is overlooked by medical professionals.

It's an incredibly valuable tool for any professional and I recommend that everybody, even cosmetic dentists, take time to make his or her profile complete and up-to-date. Here are just a few reasons why:

• LinkedIn is a great place to establish yourself as an industry leader and expert. You can contribute to discussion groups (and maybe even take away some useful information as well).

• Prospective patients can see your impressive credentials—many of which would otherwise go unknown.

• Your profile is another place to show referrals and testimonials. An integral part of LinkedIn is the feature that allows people to recommend you or your service. Past patients, other doctors, and friends can write short recommendations that are then posted on to your profile.

• You can post links to your website or blog on your profile, which is great for driving traffic to your website and SEO.

You would be amazed how often patients research their doctors on LinkedIn before making a call to the office - I do it every time. Your profile (or lack thereof) may be their first impression. And nobody wants to use a cosmetic dentist who is out-of-touch or out-of-date.

Dental Website with Video

2009-06-09T12:34:00.001-06:00

Dr. Mary Walsh-Cole is a site that just went live. It shows great use of video. Also, it's very easy for the user to navigate through and get the information they need.

Guaranteed SEO - Does it Exist?

2009-06-02T15:07:00.003-06:00

Simply put: Yes it does. You can find SEO firms that offer guarantees, but you need to be careful about what it is that they are promising. Any firm can guarantee a first page listing, but is it for natural listings or the sponsored listings? If it’s sponsored listings, you could do it yourself by setting up a Google ad-word account and could be on the first page the next day. To me, that is not true SEO.

True SEO means that your website will appear in the natural listings. If a firm guarantees that they will help your website appear in the natural listings, make sure they have a reasonable time-table to get you there. If anyone says they can get you to page 1 in a month or two, be very wary. To make a website appear on the first page in such a short amount of time means that they are probably using "black hat" tactics to get you there. The worst thing you could do is upset the search engines with these tactics and have them ban your site. If this happens, it could take years for your site to show up again.

At Page 1 Solutions, we offer a very simple guarantee: We don’t charge upfront fees and you don’t start paying fees until you there are documented results on the search engines' natural listing. You can learn more here.

The most important thing is to do your homework when you are trying to choose a firm and if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.

Before & After Galleries: Including the Less Obvious

2009-05-20T12:52:00.006-06:00

“Before and After” galleries are essential elements to any effective c osmetic dentistry website. They are great tools for keeping visitors on your website, stimulating interest and desire for your dentistry services and converting visitors into new patients.

However, creating this showcase is not as simple as just pasting photos of your best work. You may be tempted to display only the most dramatic of cases, but try to remember that the main reason that prospective patients visit this section of your website is to see pictures of patients that had problems that resemble their own. They want to be able to relate to your past patients and see results that are similar to what they are hoping for. Be sure to showcase not only the full mouth restorations, but also the simpler, more subtle cases as well. For a great example, check out the photo gallery for Monterey cosmetic dentist, Dr. Terry W. Forsberg.

Social Media Marketing and the Economy

2009-05-08T11:55:00.006-06:00

Even in the toughest of times, people still care about their smile. While the recession has certainly taken its toll, a new web marketing strategy has emerged for cosmetic dentists.

Numerous reports are stating that the downturn of the economy is directly impacting the growth of social media marketing. More and more often, people are relying upon free websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook to help decide which dental practice is best for them. This, in turn, has led to a trend in utilizing these sites as a marketing tool.

Having profiles on various social sites allows potential patients to become familiar and comfortable with your practice and demonstrates that you have nothing to hide. It provides satisfied patients with the opportunity to express how pleased they are with their pearly whites, which undoubtedly resonates with potential patients considering your practice. Reviews and recommendations are an incredibly effective, and inexpensive, way to generate leads.

New Website

2009-03-03T16:09:00.002-07:00

Here's an example of a new cosmetic dentistry website. It's for a dentist in New Jersey, Aesthetic Dentistry of Bernardsville - www.proudtosmile.com.

Dental Patients ARE Online

2009-01-20T08:51:00.002-07:00

Don't think that dental patients go online much? Check out Twitter's search for "dentist". Twitter.com is a website where people post mini-blog entries about what they are doing (i.e. Drinking coffee with my mother). There are people practically every minute "tweeting" about being at or going to the dental office. Ask your patients to blog or Twitter about you to build your reputation online!

Flash Animation and Search Engines - Clearing Up Confusion

2009-01-19T15:01:00.004-07:00

Many dentists have heard mixed messages about the use of Flash animation in a website. Flash is a program that imports moving graphics, text, and even video into a website design.

There is some confusion about whether or not including Flash in a website hinders search engine optimization. The truth is very simple.

Until recently, Google and the other search engines couldn't read a Flash file at all. Their ability to do so is still very limited. The main issue is the content. Traditional websites are built in a programming language called HTML. The search engines are programmed to easily read HTML websites. The main benefit of an HTML website is that it can be built with separate pages that the search engines can index. This gives focused pages of content that Google can send its users to, which is Google's main goal in life.

Take this website as an example. Go to the site and look at the address bar (the place where you type to go to a website). You'll see www.domain.com. Now click on 'Services'. It seemingly takes you to a new page, but when you look up at the address bar, you'll see that the www. hasn't changed. This is because there's really only one page of the website, and all of the text and images reside in that single page.

Now go to www.drwendling.com. Note the address bar that says, "http://www.drwendling.com/". Now click on 'Cosmetic Dentistry'. Notice that the address bar now says, "http://www.drwendling.com/cosmetic-dentistry.html". It changed because we were actually directed to a new page of the website.

Multiple pages allows us, your search engine marketing company, to optimize your website's pages for different keywords instead of cramming a single page with 'Veneers', 'Teeth Whitening', 'Dental Implants' and on and on.

At Page 1 Solutions, we actually do not take on websites that are built entirely in Flash.

Now, here's the confusing part: having Flash element embedded within a website is not bad. You should have noticed on www.drwendling.com that there were pictures fading in and out, and that there was a video playing. Both of those features were built in Flash, but the actual text and navigation was built in HTML. That's the way to do it.

Need help discerning whether or not your website is ready to go for search engine optimization. Email me here.

Reliable Website Maintenance

2009-01-14T12:48:00.002-07:00

"It's hard to find good help these days..."

I hear from people all the time that are contacting me simply because their "web guy" is unresponsive or slow. Website updates are typically easy things and shouldn't take months or even weeks to accomplish (unless it's a complex update such as a full website redesign).

Still, when considering a new website maintenance provider, consider your overall dental Internet marketing strategy. If your web guy is simply hosting your site and dragging his/her feet on a simple update, they don't have your best interests at heart. They should be prompting you to be more active with your website, conducting search engine optimization, urging you to blog, etc.

Don't settle for sub-par service. In the end, it's not just an inconvenience. It's a sign that it's time to move on.

Selling through email

2008-08-28T10:04:00.001-06:00

Just a thought - When you build or update your dental website, you may want to make sure the pages you develop, not only help generate leads, but also help you close the deal by turning prospective patients into actual patients. Utilizing links to these important pages in your follow up to email leads can be an effective way to:

1. Get potential patients back to your site so they remember who you are and to brand your site/practice, and

2. Communicate a lot more detail to prospective patients, without having to compose or send bulky emails with large bodies of text.

Your dental website will almost always generate more email leads than telephone leads. Make sure you really think through how you can better leverage email-based communications and sales.

Bill
Page 1 Solutions

Common Website Writing Mistakes

2008-08-22T09:54:00.001-06:00

So, you're a cosmetic dentist. You've got a website but you’re not getting any leads. Your first thought should be to critically review your website content.

Your written content is probably the single most important key to generating business from the web. From a search engine perspective, search engines are trying to provide their users results (read listings of websites) that are most relevant to the user's query. So, search engines want to deliver listings of websites with rich and relevant content. That way, the user is more likely to trust the search engine's results and continue to use that particular search engine rather than another one.

From a dental consumer's perspective, they also want substantive relevant information. The potential dental patient wants to see that your practice has the specific expertise in the type of procedure they expect to undergo. Most important, however, the potential patient wants to see how your expertise will benefit him or her. Does your practice’s website explain that?

Here are some common mistakes we see when we review cosmetic dentists websites:

1. Lack of relevant content. Far too many dentists just list the types of procedures they perform without going into detail about each type of procedure or area of expertise. You should have a separate page for each type of procedure. Your website is not like a brochure. You don't have to pay to print each page. Yes, it is a little more work up front, but the resulting website will be far stronger.

2. Failure to focus on the benefits to your prospective patient. What is the goal here? You want to generate leads ... prospective patients who have important dental health concerns. Think of it from the prospective patient’s perspective. They assume that you graduated from medical school and have some experience. What they want to know is how you can help them. You have got to communicate that your focus is to help each patient get the treatment that best suits him or her. But it is more than a simple tagline. Your entire website has to speak to them. Sell your expertise and the benefits of becoming a patient with you.

3. Use Testimonials. This can be a challenge in some states because of laws limiting the use of testimonials, but if you are in a state that permits testimonials, use them. Use them throughout your site, not just on one page. Everywhere the prospective patient looks, a testimonial should be staring him or her in the face. A third party endorsement speaks far louder than you shouting how great you are.

4. Ask for the Business. I can't tell you how many websites we see that don't ask the prospective patient to take the next step by contacting the practice. If you don't ask, they may just look at your website as a good information source and move on. Each page should offer a free consultation. You have a great selling point in that you don't charge a fee to learn about your potential patient’s needs and expectations. Use a web form rather than just an email address as they tend to generate more information.

There is a lot more to effective website content development for a dental practice than what I have described above, but this is a start.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Flash Web Site Designs for Cosmetic Dentists

2008-07-24T09:48:00.002-06:00

A few years ago flash was all the rage. Every client I spoke to wanted a flash web site because it looked cool. There were two problems with this. First, flash can take a long time to load. This is less of a problem now because most web site design firms now build flash movies very efficiently minimizing load time. The second problem still exists - the search engines can't read the content within the flash movies.

Google and other search engines are developing new technology to allow them to read the content within flash movies. It's still not there yet, which means, you have to use flash carefully.
We have never been big believers in flash web sites for cosmetic dentists. First, we believe their web sites should be about communicating information, not about pretty pictures. If you are an ad agency or somebody in an industry that sells glitz and beauty, flash makes more sense. In general terms dental websites should not do this.

That doesn't mean there is not place for flash in a dental website. We often incorporate flash into portions of our dental website designs and still keep the sites content rich. Examples of this include Dr. Sue Wendling in Portland, Dr. Charley Varipapa's Center for Esthetic Dentistry in Virginia, and Nature's Design Dental Spa in Vancouver, B.C.

All of these dental websites do well on the search engines even though they use flash technology. The key with each is that they don't sacrifice delivering good information.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Dental Website Marketing

2008-07-23T09:16:00.004-06:00

Dental website marketing starts obviously with a website. There are thousands of website design companies out there, but how do you choose a website marketing company? Start with their philosophy of website design. Do they focus on making an online work of art, or are they more sales oriented, striking a balance between aesthetics and functionality? You really need the latter.

A website marketing firm should approach website design with the following in mind:

1) Function from a marketing perspective - Your website must use intelligent marketing strategies to move visitors through the buying cycle and ultimately prompt the visitor to contact you.
2) Search Engine Optimization - Your website is useless if it is built in a way that will thwart search engine optimization. If no one can find your website on the search engines, you're dead in the water.
3) Aesthetics - Professional design is a must. Your website's image must reflect the image of your dental office: high-end, professional, focused on great results.

Ask to see examples of their dental website design work. If they can't provide you with numerous examples of dental websites, then move along to the next firm on your list.

Remember, dentists need more than just a website, so look for a website design firm that also focuses on search engine optimization. In fact, look for a search engine optimization company that also offers award winning website design.

Of Phone Numbers and Calls to Action

2008-06-26T14:37:00.001-06:00

So why have a website anyway?

If you're a dentist, you may see all the other dentists’ websites out there and say - "I better get one too." And that wouldn't be such a bad idea. A website is pretty much a requirement for any business these days.

It may be that you have enough business already. Maybe you have too many dental patients and you don't want to get bigger. You get all your patients through referrals. If that’s the case, a website can serve as a good credibility reinforcement tool.

If that’s not the case, continue reading. Many dental practices want a website as a tool to generate more patients - patients they would not get through traditional referral sources. Some dentists don't want to advertise on radio or TV like some of their high profile competitors, but they still want to generate patients. Maybe you're a radio or TV advertiser yourself, but you want to appeal to prospective dental patients who are not likely to hear your radio ad or see you on TV. With the growth of the audience on the World Wide Web and the differences in the demographics between the typical TV generated patient and the typical internet surfer, you can appeal to a whole new group of prospective clients with an effective web presence.

So, if you want to generate new business directly off the web, why in the world would you make it hard for a prospective patient to contact you? You've got me. Then why do I see so many websites out there that hide their phone number or make you go through multiple steps to contact them? If you build a website so you can generate patients, make sure you prominently place your phone number at the top of every page. In addition, give the prospective patient easy access to an email inquiry - put a mini-contact form on every page - preferably near the top. And, finally, encourage them to call. Anybody who gets to your website found you. You didn't force them to go there. So tell them to take advantage of a free consultation with no obligation.

You will won't you? Make it easy to contact you and your website will work for you.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Design or Update Your Website

2008-06-19T14:48:00.001-06:00

If you are creating a new dental website, or making an update to a current one, be sure to get a search engine positioning expert early in the process, if getting it to show up high on the search engines is an important objective.

How a website performs on the search engines is directly tied to how a website is organized, written, programmed and optimized. This is magnified even more when you are in a large, highly competitive market area (such as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, etc.).

Unfortunately, most dental website design firms or independent website designers are not search engine optimization or positioning specialists. They simply design websites. Engaging a search engine positioning expert after a website is completed, may require you to redo elements of your website to make it more search engine-friendly. Involving a search engine positioning expert at an early stage will save you valuable time, money and frustration.

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

Do It Yourself SEO

2008-06-11T15:04:00.002-06:00

Many cosmetic dentists are interested getting their websites to show up on the top of Google and Yahoo for important search phrases. Only a few will succeed. The question is, should you do it yourself or hire a search engine optimization expert who specializes in dental website marketing.

Here are a few things to consider when evaluating that question:

Time vs. Expertise. Search engine optimization is an extremely time intensive process. If you have the time to learn the tricks of the trade and implement them - or if you have someone on your staff with the time for this endeavor and the commitment to succeed - you will probably outperform most of your competitors including many who hire professional search engine optimization firms. SEO is not rocket science, but it does take time.

First, you need the time to learn the basics of optimizing your website.

Second, you need to determine your target search phrases.

Third, you need to implement and incorporate your search engine optimization techniques on your website.

Fourth, you need to register with the search engines and directories.

Finally, you need to consistently work on your link popularity over an extended period of time. And, it's not over yet. You still have to track your results and tweak the optimization as well as add content to your website on a regular basis. Now, if you have enough time to devote to this process and the commitment to succeed, you will surely do well. But be honest with yourself about how much time you can devote.

Time vs. Cost. Search engine optimization firms like Page 1 Solutions charge a lot of money for their expertise and resources. If you do it yourself, you will save these out of pocket costs. You have to consider, though, whether the time you spend optimizing your website would generate more money if you devoted it to working your cases.

The question is one of opportunity cost. It is a lot easier to evaluate if you charge a fixed fee like $200 per hour. Then you can make the determination pretty easily. Ultimately, you must decide if your time is better spent working your practice and procedures or working on your website.

If you do decide to do your own website optimization and you have the passion and dedication, you will probably do very well. If you are not happy with the results or figure out that you don't have the time to devote, you can always call a professional search engine optimization firm.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Search Engine Registration for Cosmetic Dentists

2008-05-29T11:33:00.001-06:00

So you've got your dental website up and you want to get it registered on the search engines. There are literally thousands of search engines and directories where you can submit your site. A successful search engine optimization program will get you listed in as many of these as possible. However, if you are a do-it-yourself kind of person, here are a few of the big ones:

The Open Directory - It takes a while, but it is worth it. Don't use self promotional language describing your site in your submission.
The Yahoo Directory - In addition to the Yahoo! search engine, Yahoo also has a directory. The cost is $300 per year, but it is well worth it.
Google - some people say that you should not submit to Google. Let the Googlebot find your site. If your site is listed as a link on other sites that Google spiders, this strategy will work, but you can also submit to Google directly and avoid the wait.
Yahoo - Also covers FAST And AltaVista.
MSN - The last of the big three.

There are many more places to submit your site, but this is a starting point. You should also check for any websites that list local businesses in your area.

Good luck with it!

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Pay Per Click Search Engines

2008-05-21T09:34:00.000-06:00

Many cosmetic dentists are now familiar with the two major pay per click options - Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing. There are others, but these are the two most important ones. If your practice is using (or considering using Pay Per Click - PPC), you should start here. The way that I look at PPC is that it is great for a limited time focused on a specific campaign, especially when there is a lot of news on the subject. With YSM or AdWords, you can pretty much ensure that your site gets a lot of play and a lot of traffic - as long as you are willing to pay.

With Pay Per Click, you pay every time somebody clicks on the sponsored listing for your site. If they see your site, but don't click, you don't pay. Typically, the ads run above and to the right of the search results.

YSM is used on Yahoo and MSN as well as a number of other medium sized search engines. AdWords is used on Google and AOL and other search engines as well. They each control slightly less than 50% of the market.

With YSM you can control where you are positioned in the sponsored results- first, second, third, fourth, etc. It is all based on how much you are willing to pay. If you want to be number one for a particular search phrase, you either need to have software that constantly monitors your position/ranking or you need to manually update your bid. You can set caps on how much you want to bid per click, per day, per month, etc. You can also just prepay a fixed budget and when it runs out, you stop showing up until you put more money in.

With AdWords, it is more complicated - everything with Google is more complicated. With AdWords, your ranking depends not just on how much you want to pay, but on how frequently people click on your listings/ads and how long they stay on your site. Theoretically, you could be willing to pay more than your competitor, but he could get the top spot because people click on his ad more frequently and stay on his site longer. (Yes, Google tracks this.) This means, you have to have a very compelling ad and a strong site to keep people on it. Google also shows your ad on an irregular basis if you do not have a large enough overall budget to ensure that you can pay for all the click throughs. One major advantage of AdWords, however, is that you can be live with AdWords within minutes (they have an editorial review after you go live and may turn off or pause your campaign at that time) while YSM does a review before you go live which may take a day or two.

PPC is a great tool if you know how to use it, but don't ignore the natural listings. That is how you win the marathon. Both PPC and natural listings require lots of work and time and attention.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Marketing in an Economic Slow-Down

2008-05-14T13:54:00.004-06:00

Most dental practices pull back on their marketing spending when economic times get tough. This is a mistake. Especially where web marketing is concerned, practices will fair hard economic times better if they stay strong in their marketing. They will see more new patients come in the door.

Sure, they'll have to work harder for the patients that they get than when the economy was flush with dollars for elective medical procedures like cosmetic dentistry, but the point is that the patients will come - IF you continue to market for them.

Web marketing is the most cost effective marketing medium out there. Imagine trying to launch a TV campaign for $20,000. There are monthly costs to doing SEO, but they pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of dollars that you might spend on TV air time. The web is also cheaper than radio and direct mail. The beauty is that Internet marketing is also more effective because, unlike TV, radio, direct mail, and other forms of interruption advertising, the internet is targeting people that have already signaled that they are interested in dentistry by searching for dental phrases on Google and the other search engines.

There is an added penalty for pulling back on web marketing. Websites have intertia on the search engines. The more you put into your web marketing, the more that your website will build momentum and will be more likely to show up for searches in the future. When you pull back on your web marketing, you lose momentum and can even begin building negative momentum that is hard to recover from. If the search engines begin ranking your website as a has been, it is difficult to turn that impression around and show them that you're a source of high-quality, new information. This means that if you pull back on your web marketing now, when the economic market turns around and dentistry is hot again, you will suffer a lag time in getting your web marketing back up to speed.

In these times of economic slow-down, swim upstream and surpass your competitors that use the economy as an excuse not to market. Take this opportunity to be aggressive in your web marketing.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Jonathan's Web Marketing Blog
Page 1 Solutions

The Importance of Prominent Contact Information

2008-05-08T15:01:00.001-06:00

Almost every day I come across beautiful dental websites with rich, well-written content, but they overlook some mighty important things and therefore fall short of their potential to generate new patients. Since people who are searching on the Internet for a cosmetic dentist proceed in a "scan mode" until a website can draw their attention into more of a "reading mode," it is vital that your website include prominent displays of practice’s location, contact information (especially a phone number), as well as graphic and textual links to a main practice contact form.

Getting your website to the first page of Yahoo!, Google, MSN, AOL, etc. search results is critical, and will certainly increase your practice’s exposure to people looking for a dentist. But too many practice’s websites neglect to register as high up on the page as possible the fact that their offices are in the locale that matches the consumer's search, and fail to display their phone number in the field to which the consumer's eye is initially drawn. If I need a dentist and conduct an MSN search for "cosmetic dentist San Diego," and then click onto one of the first page links in the search engine results, it gets my attention to find immediately that the website on which I have landed represents a practice located near me. Having a phone number prominently displayed in the header of the landing page increases the odds that I will contact that practice.

It is also important to provide graphic and textual links on every page of the website that navigate site visitors to what should be the primary target destination page of your site: the main contact form. Graphics with human images of surgeons or other office staff begin creating the bonding with site visitors that evolve into actual relationships, and if these graphics are associated with mini-contact forms or link directly to a main contact form, odds are greater that site visitors become practice contacts. Links within the text of every website page are essential, too, such as "Click here for a free consultation,” or “0% financing on dental procedures."

If the goal of having a website is to help generate patients for your practice, or if you are only interested in being as helpful to site visitors as possible, providing prominent location and contact information is fundamental. Prompting site visitors to your main contact form via purposeful site navigation is indispensable to getting the information and developing the relationships that will bring you new patients.

Jessica Espinoza
Page 1 Solutions

Google's Page Rank

2008-04-30T10:22:00.001-06:00

Those of you who are actively promoting your practice’s dental website on the web are probably aware of your Page Rank. If you have downloaded the Google Tool Bar, you can see the Page Rank of every website you visit. Page Rank (or PR) is Google's way of telling you its perception of the relative value of a given website on a scale of 0 - 10. The more websites (especially more credible websites in related fields) that link back to your site, the more likely you will have a higher PR. Keep in mind, however, that PR is only just an estimation of the relative value of your site. Don't live or die by it.

Typically, sites with higher PR values rank higher on searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN. While this is not always the case, it tends to be true. It is especially true with very competitive search phrases.

New sites typically start at 0 and gradually increase their PR over time. It is very unusual to see a PR of 10. Naturally, Google has a PR of 10. Few other sites ever get that high. Many good sites have PRs of 4-5 and in some cases even lower.

Over the last week or so, you may have noticed that Google updated your PR. If yours went up, keep doing what you are doing. If yours went down, don't panic. Just keep trying to add relevant content and encourage more related sites to link back to your website. There is no shortcut here. You have to keep working it.

If you're struggling with your PR, let us know, we can help.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Mini Contact Forms Can Yield Major Results

2008-04-16T10:46:00.001-06:00

Who has the time or wants to give a lot of personal information through a long and tedious contact form? Not many people do. The solution? A mini-contact form!

By creating a call to action that appears on almost every page of a dental website, it is appealing even to the most cautious consumer and can even be extremely professional.

There are several styles or layouts one can choose for a mini-contact form, but they all have the same idea in mind. *Get the potential client to contact your dental practice by providing a haven for them wherein they only have to provide the most basic information possible.

This information includes:

Name
Phone Number
Email Address
Comments section

This is a great, non-threatening approach to justifying why they should submit an inquiry. Plus, by making the Name, Phone Number and Email Address fields required, all the information a practice needs to contact the person is right there.

For example, check out: Wendling Cosmetic and Reconstructive Dentistry. You don’t even have to scroll down the page any. It is just right there, in plain sight. This is a wonderful example of how a practice can use a mini-contact form to draw in patients as a call to action. They want people to know that they can “ask Vicky a question NOW.”

Mini-contact forms can be a great asset to any practice’s website. Page 1 Solutions will help answer any questions you have about the functionality or easy installation of a mini-contact form. In essence, by providing an alternative contact means for the consumer and customizing it to fit the practice’s needs, successful leads through the web are bound to increase.

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

Link Building

2008-04-09T15:43:00.001-06:00

The major search engines today rely on incoming links as a major part of their algorithms in determining the credibility and ranking of websites in the free search results. Accordingly, it is essential for you to develop as many incoming links as possible. Following are a few things you should do:

Make sure all of your listings with professional societies include a link to your website.

The same applies to all other organizations to which you belong - make sure they list your website and link to it when listing you as a member.Try to get an acknowledgement on the websites of the charities that you contribute to. Each charity should acknowledge your contribution and if they have a website, ask them to acknowledge your contribution and link to it.

There are hundreds of directories on the Internet. You should try to get your website listed in as many of them as possible. Many directories are general directories with many categories of website listings. Your website might be able to be listed in the cosmetic dentistry area or in the section for your city or state. There are also some directories out there that offer free listings. Make sure you are listed in these. Again, each listing should link back to your website.

Another suggestion is reciprocal linking. This can be taken to an extreme, but a basic approach would be to exchange links with your friends – surgeons or doctors in other areas - and vendors or colleagues in your own community.

Some listings are better than others. However, with the exception of link farms, it is almost always a good idea to try to get as many links to your website as possible.

If you need help with link building, you should call a website marketing firm that specializes in dental websites - Page 1 Solutions fits the bill.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Google vs. Yahoo

2008-03-26T15:28:00.001-06:00

If your practice wants to generate dental patients through the search engines, which search engine is the best? The answer is you need to do well on both Google and Yahoo to be successful with your practice’s Internet marketing. In fact, you shouldn't stop with Google and Yahoo. MSN is a strong third choice and there are many other second and third tier search engines that also generate a lot of searches - and hence a lot of search results for cosmetic dentists who have a strong presence on them. The second and third tier search engines include AltaVista, AOL, Ask, A9, Lycos, HotBot, and more.

Now, getting back to Google and Yahoo. The consensus is that Google is more important, but it is close. The numbers vary depending on who you ask. I have seen numbers in the range of Google generating about 39% of the searches while Yahoo generates about 31%. That is probably close, but your guess is as good as mine. MSN comes in around 12%.

The latest battle seems to be about how big their indexes are. Yahoo just recently claimed an index database of over 19 Billion webpages, plus images, music, etc. Google, by comparison claims its indexed database is about 8 Billion webpages plus images, etc. Who really cares? There aren't that many dentists or dental practices in your market. The question is - are you indexed and how do you rank on both of these important search engines - to say nothing about MSN and the second tier search engines I mentioned above.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Search Engine Optimization is the Foundation

2008-03-19T13:59:00.002-06:00

Search engine optimization is the foundation for a successful web marketing strategy. Some dentists make the mistake of thinking that if they're doing search engine marketing, then they should be raking in patients from the Internet by the bunches. This can be true for some dentists, depending on their market, the competition and the website itself, but more often than not, search engine optimization is a platform from which a complete web marketing strategy will build.

So, if search engine marketing is a foundation, how do we know when and what to build? Ultimately, you'll need a search engine marketing company that specializes in the dental industry to help you, but it's important that you understand the basics.

Search engine positioning will make sure that search engines find your website.

Optimization (frequently used synonymously with search engine positioning) clarifies the subject matter of the website for the search engines. Websites have certain cues built into their guts that optimization can play upon to send the clear message, "This is what I'm about. If you're looking for a top notch cosmetic dentist, then this is the right place!"

Search engines judge sites by more than their first impression. They judge sites according to a multitude of criteria (this is why you should hire professional search engine marketers). To name a few:

1. Optimization
2. Depth of Content
3. Freshness of Content
4. Link Popularity

Of all of these, I would say that most cosmetic dentists’ websites lack link popularity the most. Just go to Google and type in dentist and then your state. It's highly likely that of all the listings returned by Google, the vast majority of the first page listings are dental directories. Why? Because they have an incredible number of incoming links, and their sites are typically massive.

In order to compete with directories on the search engines, you need to begin accruing incoming links to your site. When you start doing this, you'll notice that your results will begin to rise. This is because search engines view incoming links as votes for your site. If someone else is linking to you, then that must mean you have something good to offer.

Depth of content is actually very simple. Just write quality, informative content. Organize the content well, and keep it coming. Remember, a website is NEVER complete.

You can make sure that your website has fresh content by manually adding new sections and pages, or you can make it easy on yourself. Once you have the core of the site (a page focusing on nearly every key area of your practice), add a blog like this one. When search engines find that your site is updated three or four times per week, they begin to list your website as a search engine result more readily as a source of up-to-date information for a given subject.

When your web marketing addresses all of these criteria, you'll find that your site appears more frequently and consistently on the search engines, but bear in mind, search engine optimization is a foundation. Without it, a search engine marketing effort will falter, but a search engine marketing strategy consisting solely of SEO is just a doomed.

Always glad to help,

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Page 1 Solutions

Link Popularity

2008-03-14T09:04:00.001-06:00

SEO is a foundation. If the site is well optimized, it will do well. However, in today's competitive search engine world, good optimization may not be enough. You also need regular content updates, lots of deep content, and lots of links coming into your website.

How do you know how many links your website has compared to your competition? There are link popularity tools that can help with this. Here is one - http://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/. Try this and find out how your website stacks up. If your competition is doing better than you, find out where they are getting their links. Maybe you can get them too.

Ultimately, if you have good content, other webmasters will link their sites to you. You can speed up the process if you actively develop your own link building strategy. This is something we do for our clients here at Page 1. At its basic level it is part of the overall search engine optimization strategy. However, we can take it to a whole new level for our dental clients who want to get more aggressive.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

How Long Does it Take to get Good Search Engine Results?

2008-02-27T13:25:00.001-07:00

The answer is - it varies.

Each search engine is different. And the answer varies on a case-by-case basis, so we can only speak in generalities. Of the major search engines - Google, Yahoo and MSN -Yahoo and MSN tend to index new sites a lot faster than Google, but that is not always the case. On the other hand, if you add a well-optimized page (say for a new type of procedure or service) to a website that is already performing well, Google is often quick to find it. This is particularly true if your dental website makes regular updates and Google is on alert for them. It is even truer if the case is a topical news item - like a new prescription medication for dental problems or major dental technology breakthrough. In those situations, Google seems to go out and look for new material on the subject.

If you have a type of procedure or technology that you want to promote aggressively, the solution usually is an aggressive pay per click ("PPC") campaign on Google, Yahoo and MSN. With PPC you have much more control over where your listing shows up. In that case, it is always best to be one of the top two listings (top three may work also), so your listing appears above the natural listings.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

The Importance of Frequently Updating Blogs

2008-02-15T08:47:00.001-07:00

It may sound silly, writing on a blog about the importance of updating a blog, but keeping fresh, new content flowing can significantly increase exposure and search engine results.

There are many variables concerning how well a blog will function. One of the main idiosyncrasies is the frequency of updates. But, along with quantity, quality must be provided as well.

A dental website’s visitor will usually not want to read the ranting and raving of a generic topic that yields no useful information to them. Instead, use specific topics relating to dental health or other specific procedures with constructive, interesting or unique content. Give potential dental patients your perspective.

It is critical to think about these tips when making an update:

Write about something that is familiar. Who is better qualified to write about a topic than someone who is well versed and experienced in that area?
Keep the blog entry concise, yet informative. Clearly an entry could go on for eons, but no one would want to read it. By making the entry short, sweet and educational, the visitor is left with helpful information and an appetite for more.
Update the blog at least two times a week. A great way to build readership is to be constantly adding fresh, new content. Updating the blog at a minimum of two times a week can start paving the way to blogging success.

By adding content frequently, search engine spiders recognize the additions. The spiders will come back to index the information over and over as long as there is something new to read. This not only helps with search engine positioning, but it also creates an environment conducive to overall success on the web.

In essence, frequently updating a blog with clever, informational content will add zeal to the blog. Not many things are reliable, but a habitually updated blog will assist in the quest of positive public exposure and good search engine rankings.

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

Online Inquiry Management

2008-02-06T08:34:00.000-07:00

Does your practice consistently bring in potential patients through your website? What percentage of these leads are actually converted into patients? If you think that there is room for improvement in this area, maybe your practice should consider implementing a database-driven software program to help augment this conversion percentage.

Page 1 Solutions offers a client relationship management capability called ‘virtual counselor’ that automatically tracks and manages incoming email inquiries generated by the website. The system helps your practice’s staff monitor inquiries, automatically sends customized responses and follow-up reminders, and provides a prospect database capability to ensure valuable inquiries are properly managed to avoid ‘losing prospects’ through inactivity or omission.

There are several key elements to this system. Because it is a database driven program, there is virtually no data entry to do. When a prospective patient enters their information on your website contact form, the information automatically flows into a database. Virtual counselor will automatically send a series of customized emails to the prospect. The emails are spread out over time, to gently remind the prospect to contact you. They are customizable so they can be sent out at any interval. It is important to ‘strike while the iron is hot’, so over a six week time, it would make sense to send the first one out within three days of receipt of an inquiry. The next email would go out at exactly two weeks after the initial contact, then four weeks after the initial contact and lastly six weeks after the initial contact.

The dynamic database interface allows for a dentist (or office staff) to log in and edit information. For example, a person contacts the office. Virtual Counselor follows up with them, and they call for a consultation. An appointment is set. At this point, no further email follow-up is necessary. So, the dentist (or office staff) can log in and change the settings for the individual so they do not receive any more follow up emails. This is a management system, which not only allows for database information building, but also acts as a wonderful tool to recruit and retain prospects.

If automated client management software makes sense for your practice, contact Page 1 Solutions to find out more, we’ll help you get real results from your web marketing.

I Tried Search Engine Optimization and It Didn't Work....

2008-01-30T13:36:00.000-07:00

If you are frustrated by the search engine optimization process, don't be. It is a process and it takes time and consistent effort. Your practice can have one of the dominant dental websites on the search engines in your market if you invest the time - or hire a website marketing firm with the necessary expertise and resources - to make a consistent effort over time to get the results you want.

For starters, make sure that you have optimized every page of your website for a narrow list of search phrases. We recommend focusing on your city and state on each page. In other words the search phrase you use for each page should include your city and/or your state (e.g., Denver cosmetic dentist, Colorado cosmetic dentist). The process of optimizing each page of your website tells the search engines how to index each page. It does not tell the search engines how to rank each page, but it does tell them what each page is about.

How do you optimize each page? That’s a great question. Start by making sure the caption for the page clearly identifies the subject of the page. In other words, if the page is about gingivitis treatment, make sure that is in the caption. In fact, you should also include the location of the practice – Denver, Colorado, in the caption or sub caption if you can. It will help.

Next, make sure these keywords and search phrases are also included in the body text and in the meta tags. For the meta tags, the most important one is the title tag. If these all have the search phrase in them, the search engines will know what the page is about.

The next part of search engine optimization is the hard part. You have to make sure that the search engines see your whole site as a credible resource. This means you have to have lots of links pointing into your dental website. This takes time. Register your site on as many directories as you can. Exchange links to a limited extent - but only with related sites. Finally, encourage other websites to link to you by making sure you have constantly updated relevant content. If you can become THE resource for your area of practice in your market area, more sites will link to you and the search engines will rank your pages higher when they index your site.

So, don't say it didn't work. Search Engine Optimization for dental practices is hard work, especially when you are competing with lots of other dentists and practices who want to be on top of the search engines too. You have to keep at it. It will and does work. It just takes time.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Domain Renewal Commitment - An Easy Google Brownie Point

2008-01-23T15:28:00.000-07:00

Recently, Google filed a patent to protect the search engine's technology. As patents are public record, this technology was finally unveiled to the search engine community. We learned a few valuable pieces of information about the inner workings of this search engine giant. One piece was somewhat surprising.

In United States Patent Application 20050071741, Google made apparent its efforts to wipe out search engine spam, stating:

“Valuable (legitimate) domains are often paid for several years in advance, while doorway (illegitimate) domains rarely are used for more than a year. Therefore, the date when a domain expires in the future can be used as a factor in predicting the legitimacy of a domain and, thus, the documents associated therewith."

What does this mean? Essentially, Google and other search engines use the length of time that you have your domain renewed for as a measure of your website's longevity and credibility. Search engines are constantly bombarded by fly-by-night websites of little or no significance. These nuisance websites (regarded as search engine spam by Google) typically have domain names that are registered for only one year.

You can send a clear message to Google and other search engines by simply renewing your domain name for a longer period of time. Since the Google patent release, Page 1 Solutions recommends domain renewals of two or more years. I typically recommend a five-year domain renewal period. This gives you an impressive domain expiration date and ensures that when the nuisance sites begin renewing their domains for 2 years instead of 1 (which is almost guaranteed), your site will still stand above the rest.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Page 1 Solutions

Websites - It's Not Just About You

2008-01-18T13:11:00.000-07:00

Is your dental practice’s website just about you? "Well of course it's about me. It's my website, isn't it?" is a common response. True, your website is about you and it is about your practice, but your knowledge and skills exist for the benefit of your patients. If you want your website to really perform, go the extra mile to ensure your website makes your potential patients feel like the website is all about THEM.

1. Make sure they can easily find what they are looking for. Don't try to be too clever or creative with your navigation or descriptions. A well-planned organizational flowchart for your website is a blueprint for success. Navigation that is not consumer-friendly is a recipe for failure. This is magnified if you provide a large menu of specialized services and expertise. Focus on helping visitors reach target "destination" pages.

2. Speak in their language, not in a manner that tries to make you sound so professional your site becomes "institutional". Ideally, your site should be filled with more "you, yours, your needs, your health, your well-being, your life, your future, etc." than "us, we, our practice, our dentists, etc.” Let them know it’s about them and "what's in it for them."

3. Be a resource of important information, and provide materials that have some value to the visitor. Don't just try to "sell" them superficial cookie-cutter or generic copy. Make the information value enough so that they might even print it!

4. Do things that accelerate the "relationship" between your practice and the visitor. For instance, identify "who" they will be contacting when they send your practice an email. I can't recall ever meeting a person in an office named, "info!"

5. Don't assume visitors know enough about dental services and general dental care that you overlook including important information. For example, if you offer services with a certain guarantee behind it, be sure they know that immediately and throughout the site.

6. Provide ample opportunities for visitors to send you an email. Yes, it is important to place phone numbers "above the fold" on every page and to try and generate phone calls. It's understandable that you prefer telephone calls, rather than emails. However, Internet users and most of your website visitors typically prefer corresponding through email. If email is the communication means of choice, then implement some mini-contact forms that make it quick and easy for them to contact you.

7. Don't forget, most visitors that come to your website are seeking help and want to educate themselves on an important decision that will affect them physically. They likely don't have a great relationship with a dentist and are feeling intimidated, confused, scared, and possible frustrated. Be sure you let them know you understand what they are going through, that you will listen, and that you care. Developing trust and credibility is what sets high-performing dental websites apart from those that only serve as an online brochure.

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

The Importance of Paying Attention

2008-01-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

In the movie True Stories, David Byrne from the Talking Heads plays himself exploring the eccentricities of a fictions small town in middle Texas. At the beginning of the movie Byrne says that it is exciting to get or go someplace new. But after a while, he says, the newness fades and the intricate details die away. People stop noticing all the things that made it exciting in the first place. Individuals get used to it and it just becomes part of the big picture.

What does this have to do with websites? It has everything to do with websites. It can be a very exciting to participate in web marketing and Search Engine Optimization. But after a while of receiving results, a lot of businesses forget about the details. SEO or web marketing just becomes “something they do.” Many individuals just glance at their results while some ignore them all together.

This month, I received a call from a client who was comparing his results from last month and the month before. By doing this, he noticed that his website’s first page listings were down slightly. It was really refreshing to have a person be concerned for the welfare of his web marketing. “I want to know how this drop is going to affect us,” he said. I was glad he asked.

I made several recommendations based not only on the number of Page 1 listings he had, but also on his web traffic reports. His average user time on his site was down. We took a thorough look at the site and decided to update some of the older pages. By adding new, fresh content, I can bet that his Page 1 listings are going to rise along with his average user time.

This success story was brought to you today by: “The Importance of Paying Attention.” If this client hadn’t reviewed his reports every month, he may not have noticed the drop and there may have been a continuous downward spiral.

It is just as key to pay attention to the results of marketing efforts as it is to market in the first place. If no one is paying attention, how does anyone know it is working? And if it is working, why not try to make it work better?

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

The e-PR Campain- Success Through Visibility

2008-01-02T14:10:00.000-07:00

Electronic Press Releases (e-PR) - e-PR is an excellent way to promote your website on the Internet. It spreads the word about what your site has to offer, locally and nationally, while expanding your link popularity at an almost viral rate. It's also the most cost effective means of growing your link popularity. Here's how it works:

1. Page1 Solutions e-PR program initially sets up your campaign by finding websites that will likely be interested in publishing your articles and press releases. We use this comprehensive list of online publishers to reference when it comes time to make a submission for you.

2. Select an article. Each submission will require an article that is pertinent to your practice’s website. The article can be something that you have had for some time, something that you've just written, or you can have us write the article.

3. Submit the article. Our e-PR specialist will optimize the article prior to submission. She will also plant links within the article's text. Once this prep work is done she will submit the article to your strategic online publishing list.

4. Track results together. By monitoring web traffic reports and incoming leads, you can see a growth in both the aforementioned areas. We can help interpret your results accordingly and monitor your success.

5. Continue the Process. It's important that you understand that e-PR isn't a one-shot deal. It's an ongoing campaign to grow your link popularity, which in turn helps your website visibility. Each article will have a peak performance, but after it reaches its peak, the links from the online publishers begin to fall off as the article is supplemented by new articles from other sources. For this reason, it's necessary to publish an article at least once a quarter and optimal results can be generated from campaigns that submit an article every month.

This comprehensive strategy, which will increase your exposure on the World Wide Web and boost your ranking on the search engines, will aid in the process of growing your website's link popularity. Link popularity is how Google and other search engines measure your website's reputation and credibility. They assume that if another website is linking to your site, then your site must have something good to offer.

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

Look Before you Leap...

2007-12-19T15:19:00.000-07:00

How often do you think about where you are looking? It isn’t common for a person to analyze the exact spot they are looking at, instead our brains are meant to decipher the information we receive instantaneously into practical thoughts. Very few people think about why they are looking at a particular object. Why did your eye focus on that big red text? Why did that image direct your attention to the text below it or to the right of it? Visual queues are used throughout print media, online media, television media, and in the living world around us. We generally take these queues for granted and just take it all in.

While that’s all nice and good, how does this relate to Search Engine Optimization? It has everything to do with it. Where exactly does a user look when they do a search on Google? We all know it’s important to rank high, or on the first page, but how should our ranking be positioned? Where does the average person focus their attention when searching the web, in particular Google?

A new study conducted by Enquiro, Did-it, and Eyetools has concluded the majority of eye tracking activity occurs within a triangle located at the top left of Google’s search. They dubbed this phenomenon as the “golden triangle”. Their findings conclude it is important where the eye falls on the page since most user clicks happen pretty quickly after the search is done. The study returned interesting percentages for the number of views a ranking will receive. Rankings 1 thru 3 all see 100% of users looked at the ranking. Subsequently rank 4 showed an 85% user looks. As listings went below “the fold” (the line in which you have to scroll to see more content) the rankings dropped off in percentage of views. Rank 5 showed 60% where as ranks 6 and 7 showed 50%. Ranks 8-9 showed 30% and ranking 10 had 20% of overall views. The research concluded that the amount of eye movement declined rapidly as it passed the 4th and 5th rankings. While more research is being done and analyzed, these findings are concurrent with what the researchers expected.

As a dentist and an internet user, take a moment and step back when viewing a page, and look for those visual queues that drive your eyes around your practice’s website. Think for a second, why am I looking at this? Just as a position on a search engine is important, it is also important to guide the users coming from the search engine around your practice’s web page. If a user doesn’t find the information they are looking for, they will go directly back to the search engine to look for a website that does.

Start Building Rapport with Your Visitors

2007-12-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Your dental website often is your first opportunity to develop credibility with prospective dental patients. And since they will likely spend more time viewing your website than any other marketing message you create, it is also your greatest opportunity to establish a rapport with them, as they voyeuristically examine you and your practice from a distance. Unfortunately, most websites, particularly their copy, are presented in a somewhat generic manner, with little very little of your “personality”. The solution: add a blog to your website.

Blogs, or web logs, are journal entries that you can make yourself on a regular basis, without the hassle and cost of going through a webmaster to update it. You can enter your personal insights, helpful consumer information, new discoveries, suggestions, your new procedures and awards, testimonials or other positive comments your clients have shared with you, etc.

It is an effective way for you to distinguish yourself from other cookie-cutter dental surgery websites, and for you to display your knowledge and ability to clearly articulate, demonstrate how you think, show your commitment to a client/case, and let potential patient get to know you on a more personal basis.

Keep in mind, you are in a professional service industry where patients choose dentists (not necessarily institutions or practices) that they like and trust. Start building rapport by letting them know “who” you are.

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

Advantages of Stats-Tracking Software

2007-12-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

The importance of having solid statistical information can never be underestimated when facing tough decisions. Do you have solid statistical information to support decision-making for your dental web marketing strategy?

If the answer to this question is no, then maybe you should consider adding stats-tracking software to your web-marketing arsenal.

There are an abundance of stats-tracking software packages available on the Internet today, targeting virtually every niche and industry out there. However, only a handful offers comprehensive data that answer the questions: Who is coming to your website? Where are they coming from? How do they find your site?

Page 1 Solutions offers a stats-tracking package for its clients called Urchin that answers these questions and more.

There are numerous advantages to being able to track, record and monitor your website’s statistics. One of them is being able to evaluate the effectiveness of a particular marketing or advertising campaign by funneling traffic from a particular campaign through a unique domain name which can be tracked and monitored independently of others pointing to your website.

Another important advantage that a good stats-tracking software package offers is the ability to more effectively predict what changes are necessary for maintaining and even accelerating the growth of your web-marketing campaign and overall Internet presence.

It is important to remember that the addition of stats-tracking software is only one part of an effective overall web-marketing campaign. Your practice’s website and web-marketing campaign must be complemented with other strategies such as optimization, having effective calls to action, and adding fresh content to the site on a regular basis to be able to realize its full potential.

If your website and web-marketing campaign are in need of a boost, call Page 1 Solutions today. We can help your firm realize its full web-marketing potential.

Think Fresh (Content)

2007-11-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

I was watching television with my daughter Stephanie recently and we were talking about marketing slogans, specifically Subway’s “Think Fresh” campaign. It occurred to me that what consumers want in their meals (“lots of visibly fresh ingredients”) is the same thing they want in their information when researching on the web. Equally important, this is also what the search engines (specifically, Google and Yahoo!) are wanting in your website’s pages, as well – unique, fresh, original content.

BEWARE OF USING TEMPLATED COPY - Although it may be hard to believe, search engines have ways to recognize the originality of your website’s copy. If your page’s content is the same cookie-cutter content used in lots of other dentist’s websites, many search engines will perceive they have already indexed that information, and not give your page a lot of credit, regardless of well it may be “optimized”. This is particularly an issue with Google.

Obviously, there is a higher cost to develop new original copy to your website. At the same time, you will likely pay a bigger price in lost opportunity by cutting corners with utilizing templated copy. Developing and continually adding fresh content to your website significantly increases your opportunity to generate a much greater return on investment.

So, “Think Fresh!”

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

Websites - A Resource Or Just An Online Ad ?

2007-11-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

I was cleaning out our basement and ran across an old set of Encyclopedia Britannica my father bought for me as a child. It occurred to me how the Internet has made these once valuable information resources virtually useless.

However, it did remind me of an important fact: Although you may try to leverage the Internet medium for advertising purposes, don’t lose sight of the fact that the Web is still primarily used as a research tool, particularly regarding more sophisticated service-based industries.

This magnified when you consider how it relates to the search engines. The more you understand that search engines (especially Google) reward “resource pages” more than “online advertisements,” the better your chances of improving your search engine positioning results. This also applies to updates. Encyclopedias used to regularly send “Book of The Year” updates to keep your encyclopedia information up to date. Doing the same thing with your dental website serves a similar purpose.

Remember, search engines don’t index websites, rather, they index pages of websites. Deep, well-organized, information-rich website pages have a much greater opportunity to get higher listings than short, superficial, “salesy” copy. The good news is that as dentists, you have a lot to talk about. Each type of dental condition you handle could be the basis for multiple pages. You can use a blog or an RSS News feed to keep it current as well.

At the same time, you will develop greater credibility with online consumers with more information-rich content, rather than generic, Yellow Page-like copy. You will help yourself and your visitors when you think of your website as an online dental resource for consumers, instead of an online advertisement for your practice.

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

Mini Contact Forms

2007-11-08T13:14:00.000-07:00

Web users are a fickle bunch. We all have been there. We search for a dental web site, go to the first one, click around to a couple of pages, and then on to the next site. Usually if a visitor to practice’s web site doesn’t find what they want within two clicks they’re done. Users don’t want to click around, they want to find their information fast. On the same token, if they are willing to reach out to you, say getting in contact with you through an online contact form, they are more likely to fill out a form that is on the page they are on rather than one that is one or two clicks away.

Here at Page 1, we call these instant contact forms “Mini Contact Forms”. The idea is to create a personal touch and an easy way of getting in contact with the practice. These contact forms are placed on every page in a similar location throughout the website. Often times we like to put calls to action such as “Ask Ashley”, “Schedule a Free Consultation”, or “Ask Dr. George." We have seen great results from these mini contact forms and we try to employ them in almost all of our dental practice websites.

Recently we had a client who had asked us to take down their mini contact form in favor of a call to action to a new practice area. Before we took down their mini contact form they were averaging 30 emails a day through their website. The same day we replaced their mini contact form with the call to action, they saw their emails drop to almost nothing. Within a couple of weeks they had received almost no emails through their website and asked us to put the mini contact form back on the site. They immediately saw their emails jump back to an average of 30 a day.

We had always been touting the value of a mini contact form from the perspective of ease of use and accessibility. As a firm, we generally thought that the faster a visitor has access to a practice, the more results the practice will see. It turns out we were right on the money.

Planning for Growth

2007-11-01T10:47:00.000-06:00

When you're developing a new website, it's a good idea to plan room for growth. It's a common misconception that when you build a dental website, and finally launch it live on the Internet, you're done. Internet marketing success stories have taught us that the most successful websites on the Internet are those that are updated and expanded on a frequent basis.

The trouble is, if growth is an afterthought, you risk tacking new material onto a finished product in ways that create clutter or confusion. Eventually, you'll find yourself faced with an organizational overhaul project. This isn't a bad thing. It's better to reorganize than to force your website visitors to sort through the clutter, but reorganization can be minimized with an organized plan for future growth.

Similar to an architect planning for a building's future expansion, plan for the expansion of your website. This requires significant forethought. Will you have changing promotions on your website, such as community involvement, seasonal reminders, frequently updated new items, etc.? If so, ask your designer to build this into the design so that your promotions add to the design instead of detracting from it.

How likely is it that you would like to add new sections to the website that will require a new navigation button? What about the new RepairPost Fibre or an advanced dental implant procedure? If it's likely, or you know of some growth area of your practice that you would eventually like to include on your website, consider asking your designer to build the design with a navigation strategy that can be altered and added to without needing to redesign the entire website.

Consider creating some additional content in the beginning that will be added to the website gradually. This way, you know what the end result will be and how you're going to get there. You're not scrambling for website growth ideas each month or quarter. For example, Frequently Ask Questions pages are helpful to visitors, and can be added a page at a time without sacrificing the integrity of the website, simply by adding a text link at the bottom of existing pages. Include a complete list of FAQs for each substantive area of your website.

If you know that you want to add content on a regular basis, but don't want to pay a web designer to add it for you every month, consider adding a blog like this one. Adding a blog is inexpensive, and will allow you to grow your website without the need for technical assistance.

When you take measures in the beginning to accommodate growth in the future, you can save your practice some time and money in the future. Nothing is more frustrating than feeling the need to revamp your new site six months after its initial launch.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Page 1 Solutions

Misconception: Websites Cost Too Much

2007-10-24T14:51:00.000-06:00

I am amazed when dentists grumble at the going price for developing a website to represent his/her practice on the worldwide Internet and generate quality clients in the context of other competitively designed and positioned dental websites.

Let's put the cost of a website in perspective: What did you pay for a practice brochure? How much did it cost your practice to place an ad in the Yellow Pages last year? What did you invest to record an "on hold" answering machine message? And what do you pay your practice’s employees to answer the phone and provide driving directions to your office? And how effectively are these investments working for you when your office is closed?

Yet how much would you invest in something that could perform all of these tasks 24 hours a day and 7 days a week? On top of that, it would showcase your expertise and accomplishments, send you additional clients, and allow you to update information at any time you choose. All this without interrupting your ability to create a credibility-building first impression to people who are have a sincere desire to find a dental specialist to help them pursue their interest in dental health?

Your practice’s website could pay for itself in a day, in a month, or in a year, but be assured that the cost of a good website is nothing when you compare it to the results it will eventually generate.

Dentists Are Richer, Teeth Are Poorer

2007-10-17T16:20:00.000-06:00

Recently I read an interesting article in the NY Times about the dental crisis that is affecting America. While the dental industry is booming, American's teeth are going untreated. Because of the rising cost of dental fees, which are rising much faster than inflation, there are over 100 million Americans who cannot afford dental insurance. The result? A decade of rapidly increasing untreated cavities. This pretty much reverses close to 50 years of dental health improvement.

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 2003 and 2004, 27% of children and 29% of adults have cavities that are untreated. This is at it's highest since the late 1980s and has significantly risen since the late 1990s. But, despite these staggering numbers, state dental boards and the American Dental Association continue to fight efforts to have dental hygienists and non-dentists provide basic dental care to those who do not have access to a dentist or dental insurance.

Most dentists will only accept cash payments and insurance plans and will not accept Medicaid. What few publicly supported dental clinics exist end up having waiting lists that can be months long. Some children are waiting over six months to have major surgery on decayed teeth, something not to be taken lightly, considering that this year two children, one from Mississippi and one from Maryland, died from infections caused by their decayed teeth.

A lack of proper dental care among nearly 100 million Americans is not just restricted to the poor. Data shows that many Americans, including those who have incomes well above the poverty line, are still without access to dental care. This is mostly due to dental fees rising much faster than inflation, along with the fact that the number of dentists in the US has remained pretty flat since 1990, even though the population has increased by 22%. Also, the average dental procedure has risen by 25% in the last 11 years. To top it all off, most dentists are working part time.

This is a problem that will remain and continue to get worse as the shortage of dentists increases, due to fewer dental schools and dentists in training. The average age of a dentist is around 50 years. This shortage will only increase as more and more of current dentists head into retirement. And unfortunately, there seems to be little action by the states and the ADA to implement plans to solve this growing crisis.

The whole article can be found here, on the New York Times website.

Jessica Espinoza
Marketing Assistant
Page 1 Solutions

Blogging about blogs

2007-10-10T08:54:00.000-06:00

Blogs seem to be all the rage these days. The Iraq war is sometimes called the first “blog war” since so many soldiers are chronicling their stories on Blogs. It has changed political landscapes as well, forcing Trent Lott to step down as majority leader in 2002 and put pressure on Dan Rather to resign after “Rathergate”. Blogs and bloggers (people who write blogs) have provided nearly instant commentary on everything from celebrity gossip to political commentary. I read a baseball blog almost daily.

You’re reading a blog right now.

These things seemed to have popped out of nowhere. To make matters more confusing, the word “Blog” is thrown around so freely when not many people truly understand what it is and how it is created.

It is, however, a rather simple process. Blogs are simply online interfaces that let you type in what you want, when you hit submit, it makes a webpage for you. In the simplest of terms, it is a text-editing program, like word, that makes a web page.

What’s great about a blog is that after it’s all set up, all you have to do is add content. The blog takes care of itself.

To sweeten the deal, blogs work amazingly well with dental search engine optimization. A regularly updated dental website blog (at least one or two submissions each week) can enhance your dental practice’s website rankings astronomically. We have seen client blogs outdraw the main website with search terms as broad as dental surgery and general dental care, on Google no less.

From a marketing perspective, if a potential client sees that you are personally and actively updating your own website, they might be a little more open to getting in touch with you in return.

So join the blog universe, it’s all the rage these days.

Paid Listings versus Natural Listings

2007-10-05T09:30:00.000-06:00

The question about what are more effective, paid listings or natural listings, is one that arises consistently. Although ROI is influenced in many different ways and can be very difficult to distinguish between each, there are some studies that do shed some light on the subject.

In a study conducted by iProspect (surveyed search engine marketers that did both SEO and paid listing advertisements), they found that more of these marketers got a better ROI from natural SEO than from paid search engine advertising. Although it was not unanimous, (over a 3 to 1 margin) marketers generated a higher ROI from SEO than from paid search advertisements.

Of the survey responses, 35% indicated a higher return on SEO, 11% indicated a higher ROI on paid search advertisements and 9% got similar returns from each. This also indicates that a large percentage of search engine marketers that outsource their search engine marketing don't, or can't determine whether they get a higher return from either natural SEO or paid listings.

Although this study tries to differentiate and quantify the value of each, the fact of the matter is that ALL the survey responses were completed by web marketers that implement BOTH paid and natural search engine campaigns. This information should not be viewed as an either/or question. As with most marketing campaigns that implement multiple strategies, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

Patience Is a Virtue

2007-09-26T13:56:00.000-06:00

One of the things everyone needs to know from the outset of any search engine optimization campaign is this: establishing a dominant Internet presence for your website takes time. There's no avoiding it. Getting your website to the first page of top search engine results should be the fundamental objective of any dental practice that wants to fully leverage the Internet to generate new dental patients, but you simply cannot expect instant, first-page, listings. Run away from any SEO firm that tells you otherwise! No wonder that a solid SEO company will typically require a six to twelve-month contractual commitment.

You may have heard the saying, "A watched pot never boils." In reality, a watched pot requires the same amount of time to boil as an unwatched pot, but a watched pot seems to take longer because you are staring at it. Once you hire a solid, reputable SEO company, there is no getting around the time it will take for your website to leapfrog your competitors on the top search engines. It is important to monitor your positioning on a monthly basis (and any good SEO firm knows that you expect results), but you must allow the time it takes for the process to work. A truly excellent SEO company will share the risk of investment by guaranteeing a contractual number of first-page results as a basis for any SEO billing.

After you have done your research and chosen a good SEO company, expect success, but only with time. Let the process work for you and good things will come... just you wait and see.

Jessica Espinoza
Page 1 Solutions

Duplicate Content

2007-09-19T09:46:00.000-06:00

One of the biggest problems that we see every day with prospective clients is duplicate content. I can't tell you how many dental practices’ websites have exactly the same content as one, two or hundreds of other websites. In most cases, the duplicate content can be seen on pages describing a specific type of operation or condition. Other practices’ websites use the exact same words to describe the same topic.

Why does this happen? First, there are a number of website development services that use database generated websites that use the exact same copy for multiple websites. In many ways, these firms are the worst. They know that the duplicate content is hurting their clients' ability to be positioned on the search engines, but they do it anyway.

The second reason for duplicate content is that the practice themselves wrote the content for the website and the dentists who wrote it took the easy way out and copied the content from another site - or many other sites - that they found on the search engines.

Why is duplicate content a problem? While this may not seem like a problem from the perspective of the consumer, it is a big problem from the perspective of the search engines. Consumers, who are looking for a dentist to handle their potential procedure, are not likely to do a careful comparison among several - or several hundred - websites to try to figure out which ones copied content from other websites vs. which ones researched and wrote the content themselves. Even if they found the duplicate content, they probably couldn't figure out who wrote it first. Anyway, they are looking for a dentist in their market and don't care if another dentist in another market has the same content on his or her website.

The search engines do care, however. First, the search engines index millions of web pages every day. The search engine algorithms specifically look for duplicate content and discount the websites and webpages that have it. Also, since they have so many pages relating to the same or similar content in their indexes, they know which one came first and they penalize or discount the pages that copied it.

So what do you do? First, don't hire a website development firm that does not promise to write original content for you. Does this mean that they need to be experts in your specialty? Not necessarily, but it doesn't hurt. It certainly means that they have to be aware of the problem and have content writers on staff.

Finally, after the website has been written. Try running the copy through CopyScape. In fact, try running some of the websites they show you through Copyscape. You'll quickly figure out if they know enough to avoid the duplicate content problem.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Now I'm a Believer...In Web Video

2007-09-12T10:49:00.000-06:00

Using video on the web isn't a new idea, but historically, it's been very problematic. Bandwidth used to be the biggest problem. It used to be that in order to put video on the web, you had to compress it until the picture was barely recognizable, and the viewing area had to be the size of a miniature post-it note.

As bandwidth becomes less and less of an issue, more clients are deciding to use video on their sites. I used to be a bit skeptical as to whether or not this was a good idea. Because of the conflicting platform standards out there, it's still possible that if you put video on your site, some people might not be able to view the video, which can mean that the viewer is prompted to download software and/or there's a gaping hole in your site. That can hurt credibility, and certainly means that, more than likely, someone who encounters these problems is going to leave your site and find the information they need elsewhere.

Having said all that; having presented the worst case scenario, it's now safe to say that the matters that made video risky in the past have settled enough to make video a worthwhile venture for a dental practice marketing itself on the web. The Internet has grown to embrace video, and some suspect that the Internet and television will eventually merge to the point that a website without video will seem archaic. But let's focus on the present.

Video can do so much more for you than just making your site look more high-tech. By adding more types of media to your site, you increase your exposure on the web. There are entire sites on the web that are dedicated to people looking for video. So, if you have a video about sedation dentistry, you could submit your video to all of those video sites in hopes of getting more incoming links, and therefore more exposure. Search engines like Google and Alta Vista have entire pages of search results dedicated to serving up video, audio, and images as search results. Those results won't likely generate new patients directly, but indirectly, this diversity in media can make your site more successful in the eyes of the search engines.

Video also increases your credibility. The public perception of video on the website is definitely that video is technically impressive, but it also sends the message that you know what you're talking about. Like it or not, if you say it on video, you're message is more convincing.

Lastly, video increases the time that the average person spends on your site. Not everyone will watch your video, and those that do watch your video are not likely to watch the entire video unless it's very short, but that's not crucial. A longer visitor session is more likely to generate an email than a brief, thirty second visit. If you can extend your average visitor session to four minutes or more, you'll find that you're getting more emails.

So, if you have a video that you send out to potential patients, consider putting it on your website. For example, if you're featured on the news, be sure to get that video out there. If you don't have any video, don't worry. Page 1 is now offering custom video production that will bring your practice to life on the web. Contact us today for more information and don't let a web marketing resource go to waste.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Page 1 Solutions

Back to Fundamentals

2007-09-06T09:08:00.000-06:00

Choose the Right Domain Name

Those of us in the web site marketing business spend countless hours testing and discussing what Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, et al consider being desirable web content in order to achieve the best search result positioning for our clients. This immersion in the latest search engine algorithms and nuances makes it easy for us to lose sight of the overall “marketing” component that is in our charge.

More savvy web site marketers recognize that once a prospect enters our dental clients’ web sites, the goal is to keep them there and ultimately to compel them to inquire about the products or services being offered. Relevant, informative and original web site content remains the best way to accomplish this.

But efforts on both counts are futile if despite achieving great search result positioning, prospects do not “click-through” to our clients’ sites in the first place. This is likelier to happen if a client’s competitor’s site’s domain name is more relevant to what a prospect is looking for as he or she is scanning even among the top search results.

One way to make the domain name relevant is to include the most desirable keyword (or key phrase) in the domain name itself. There is also an ever so slight optimization advantage to this approach.

If our client’s trade name is recognized locally or among likely prospects, or if it happens to be descriptive of the product or service our client offers, another approach would be take advantage of this “branding equity” by using it in or as the domain name. But there is a tendency for our clients to want to use their trade name as the domain name anyway, and we should advise against this if doing so does not make sense. The web marketer should put him or herself in the prospect’s shoes and carefully consider if he or she is more or less likely to choose a search result with a particular domain name.

Choosing the right domain name can be critical to the commercial success of a web site. This is reflected in what some domain names are being sold for in the domain name “resale” market. It is always a good idea to list and compare our client’s competitor’s domain names as part of our overall competitive research.

But we should not despair if our client is in a competitive market with apparently few remaining domain names, or with attractive domain names selling at prohibitive prices. First, there are many techniques to incorporate keyword(s) into a domain name, including the use of sub-directories, sub-domains, .net, .us or .biz extensions, and dashes (-‘s) in the domain name (as in www.santafe-dental.us). Please note that one common denominator in spam web sites (pills, porn and casino) is that they often have more than one dash in the domain name. From an SEO perspective, it is wise to share as few characteristics with such web sites as possible. Thus, we should try to refrain from recommending the use of more than one dash in the domain name if possible.

It also behooves a web marketer to encourage registering domain names a competitor may want to register, even if the names need to be purchased. This may seem somewhat aggressive, but is simply an investment in a competitive advantage, the lack of which could end up hurting our client’s business.

Choosing the right domain name is not a trivial matter. A poorly chosen domain name can clog the sales funnel resulting from even the biggest budget and otherwise skilled web marketing campaign.

Jessica Espinoza
Page 1 Solutions

Search Engine Marketing Scams and You

2007-08-30T11:58:00.000-06:00

An informational series for the curious- part 2

The Internet is a vast place full of information, resources and, sadly, scams. Search engine optimization is a valid, useful tool to help boost rankings of legitimate companies and businesses. However, some companies are deceitful in their tactics. They can lead to loss of site credibility, loss of site aesthetics, and most of the strategies can leave your website banned from the search engines.

In this second article in a short series, “Search Engine Marketing Scams and You,” I reveal some illegal or unethical tactics and suggest alternatives. In order to make the World Wide Web a more reliable source of good, relevant information, Search Engines have started banning such activities as:

Link Farms:

It has become more obvious recently that incoming relevant links to your website can help with website ranking. One marketing “technique” to avoid is participating in link farms. Link farms are created exclusively to increase a site’s link popularity. The more links you have going to your site, the more credibility is given to your site by the search engines. However, with link farms, sites whose links display on your site often are not relevant to your website topic. Search engines can recognize links that do not lead to relevant content and will disregard the link. It is becoming common for search engines not only ignore the spam type link, but they will often punish the sites found there.

Link farms can hurt your credibility and damage your ranking. As appealing as it sounds to “shoot to the top of the search engines,” real search engine optimization takes time. Try asking some professional associations that you are a member of or ask colleagues to add a link on their site to yours. These are just a few ways to get to the top of the search engines without cheating.

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

The Magic Hat of Blog Ideas

2007-08-22T16:40:00.001-06:00

In an effort to help our clients stay motivated and on top of their blogs, I have came across a tidbit of information that might help.

One of the reasons that blogs get pushed aside is due to writer's block. We've all had it - we know we need to write something, we sit in front of the computer, type a few lines out, delete it, type a few more lines, delete it, and then walk away from the computer feeling frustrated because we have nothing to write about. Being in your chosen profession, there are ALWAYS things to write about. The industry is constantly changing and there is news about it every day. Yet, when it comes to writing it all down, our brain just shuts down.

One tip is to develop a place where you can jot down ideas as they pop into your head. Maybe it's a small notebook that you carry with you all the time. Maybe it's a folder on your desktop and inside it, you keep a Word doc with strings of ideas. Whatever works for you! Even if you aren’t going to post that day, whenever you have an idea pop into your head or hear an interesting bit of news, write it down. That way you can have a stockpile of topics ready to go when you are. Then, whenever you are ready to write a blog, you can just dig into your magic hat and pull out a great topic.

Hopefully this small tip will help you in your quest for eternal blogging power. If you have any other questions about blogging or need help figuring something out, please don't hesitate to contact your account manager.

Jessica Espinoza
Sales and Marketing Assistant
www.page1solutions.com

The Importance of Regular Blogging

2007-08-15T09:28:00.000-06:00

Yes, this is another blog about blogging. While I’m sure you are aware of the value of blogging, many people find it hard to maintain a “blogging schedule.” This is the most important thing you can do when it comes to getting good results from your blog. You MUST update your blog regularly!

I know how it is (I’ve been there and I am guilty of it!) – you set up a new blog, get really excited about it, post some great entries a few times, and then the newness wears off. Other important things come up and blogging get pushed onto the back burner. Well, I am here to say that we have to keep posting, even if we feel we’re too busy to do it. You get no benefit to your website if your blog just sits there.

The best advice that I can give you on how to maintain your blog, is to make posting in it part of your schedule. We would love to see you post in it at least twice a week, but if you can do more, that’s even better (we’ve seen great results for client’s who post 3-4 times a week). Figure out a time when you have a few minutes to yourself and designate that as “blogging time.” It could be every morning after you get your cup of coffee, every other day right before lunch, or once a week on a quiet Saturday morning. Whatever works for you, but you have to be consistent. Believe me, it won’t take long to reap the benefits! Not only will the search engines love it, but your readers will too. If people see that your blog consistently has new information in it, they will continue to return to it to get the latest news!

The thought of all this writing may be overwhelming at first, but it will get easier as time goes on. If you have any questions about blogging, please don’t hesitate to contact your Account Manager!

Jessica Espinoza
Sales and Marketing Assistant
Page 1 Solutions

Search Engine Marketing Scams and You

2007-08-07T11:06:00.000-06:00

An Informational Series for the Curious- part 1

The Internet is a vast place full of information, resources and, sadly, scams. Search engine optimization is a valid, useful tool to help boost rankings of legitimate companies and businesses. However, some companies are deceitful in their tactics. They can lead to loss of site credibility, loss of site aesthetics, and most of the strategies can leave your website banned from the search engines.

In this short series, “Search Engine Marketing Scams and You,” many deceiving tactics will be revealed and alternatives suggested. In order to make the World Wide Web a more reliable source of good, relevant information, Search Engines have started banning such activities as:

Hidden Text

Some SEO companies try to manipulate results by hiding text for the search engine spiders to read. They believe this action will increase their key word density and bolster their rankings on the search engines. Designers can hide text by changing the color to match the background of the site, so it is not readable by the public, but is by the search engine spiders. The trick to finding hidden text is to highlight blank areas of the page and if hidden text is present, it will be exposed when highlighted.

Most importantly to note, the search engines have adapted to this sketchy technique and will penalize entire websites because of it. When searching out an internet marketing firm, ask them if they use hidden text. Ask them if they have references for you to talk to, and lastly make sure you feel comfortable contracting with them. Ultimately, scams, including hidden text are out there and you have to be careful. Hidden text is a tacky, unscrupulous way to try to achieve good website positioning and the risks most certainly outweigh the potential benefits.

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page1Solutions

Mini Contact Forms

2007-07-25T13:35:00.000-06:00

“Mini Contact Forms” provide Internet users with two very important things:

· Ease of Use – The form is simple and can be filled out quickly.
· Accessibility – The dental practice can be contacted on any page they are on.

The idea behind providing Internet users with mini contact forms is to give the website a personal touch and to make getting contact with the practice as easy as possible.

Most of the time, when a user visits a dental website, he or she looks for specific information, and if they can’t find it within two clicks, they go back to the search engine to find another website that will give it to them.

If the user is willing to contact your dental practice, he or she doesn’t want to search for a way to contact you; the user wants to be able to send you an email immediately. By placing mini contact forms in the same location on every page of your website, users are able to give you their information fast, without needing to go to a separate contact page.

Many times, our mini contact forms will be accompanied by calls to action, like “Speak With One of Our Dentists,” “Schedule a Free Consultation,” “Contact Our Practice,” or “Speak With Dr. Joe.”

Recently, we had a client using a mini contact form that was averaging 900 emails a month. They asked us to replace the mini contact form with just a call to action. We objected, but they insisted and we did it. The very same day, their emails dropped to almost nothing, and stayed that way for a couple weeks.

After seeing next to no activity for a while, we suggested to the client asked us to place the mini contact form back on the site. Their emails immediately jumped back up to an average of 30 per day.

We believe that the faster a visitor can access a practice, the better. Mini contact forms are not only easy to use, but they allow the user top access the practice as quickly as possible. By providing this, mini contact forms can generate more activity for your website.

Following are some examples of dental websites with mini contact forms:

Dr. Josh Bernstein in Sacremento, CA

Midtown Dental, The Gallery of Smiles in Houston, TX

Dr. Thomas R. Miller Dentistry in Albany, NY

Washington Center for Dentistry in Washington, DC

Create Authoritative Sites

2007-07-19T08:31:00.000-06:00

The following is a quote from Planet Ocean's monthly newsletter -

"However, you can bet it's going to be the most authoritative sites with the best incoming links that will continue to rule the top of the search results."

To those of us who have been working with search engine marketing for dentists over the last five years, this is no surprise. Gone are the days when you could just post a 5-10 page dental practice website that lists your practice areas and bios for the dentists and expect it to be successful. If you want to get good search engine results you need to have exceptional content that stands out from other practices in your area. Remember, consumers are not interested in practices with pretty pictures on their site. They want to find information that is helpful to them and they want to visit a doctor that demonstrates a level of knowledge and expertise in handling their specific problem.

Oh, and by the way, the second part of the Planet Ocean quote had to do with incoming links. Guess what. If you have the most authoritative content, you will attract more links from other websites. They will want to link into your website because it will be a good resource for consumers.

It all comes down to content.

How does your website's content stack up to the other dental websites in your market? Is your website the authority website? If not, you might want to rethink your dental website marketing strategy.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Using Articles to Create Inbound Links

2007-07-12T10:12:00.000-06:00

We all know that it is important to create inbound links - e.g., pages from other sites that link to pages within your dental practice’s website. Several ways frequently used to do this include reciprocal linking and purchasing text links. Both are frowned upon by the search engines including Google.

However, there are a lot of websites that will gladly publish articles or press releases that you write. If you write a substantive article about a very specific area of your practice or about a specific procedure, it will be unique content that other sites will want to post on their website. There are a number of websites that publish articles of this nature. The key is to make the article interesting and original. Finally, make sure that you include links back to the specific page or pages of your website that are relevant to the subject covered in the article. If you have those links in your article and the article is published, you will have automatically created links back to your website.

The best possible scenario is that the article will be noticed by other webmasters who also want the same content on their website and will republish the article -with the links - on their website. One well-written article may turn into multiple webpages with links back to your practice’s website.

Always make sure that you have good content on your website first, however.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Hanging In There with Sticktoitiveness

2007-07-03T09:41:00.000-06:00

Some of my most successful clients today didn't always do so well on the search engines. Many of them had new websites that the search engines were turning a cold shoulder to. Others had websites that used to do very well but over time had fallen out of the web's limelight. In each of these cases, determination won the battle for my clients and they now enjoy solid presence on the search engines, including Google.

If your site isn't doing as well as you would like it to be doing, one of the worst things that you can do is ignore the problem. If you're not happy, make your concerns known to your marketing company. They should have their finger on your website's pulse and should have a fairly good idea of how your site is performing, but ultimately they need you to tell them if you're not getting as many emails as you would like to. At Page 1 Solutions, we have a few different measures of a website's success, but our main way of telling whether or not our clients are happy is by talking to them.

If you want to do more with the web, whether it's because you're not doing well or because you're hungry for more, be sure to let your web marketer know how you're feeling. By being up front with your expectations, you'll hopefully get quicker results. If your web marketing company isn't being responsive, it may be time to find another provider, but keep doing what's working. Don't scrap your entire marketing plan. If you do that, you may find yourself sliding further downhill instead of climbing to a new level of success.

There is No Web Marketing Miracle

This is key to understand. No one can offer you instant, lasting results. You can pay for sponsored listings on the search engines, but when the money runs out, your presence is zilch. The only way to obtain lasting results on the search engines is through blood, sweat, and tears - well, and money. We all know well enough to steer clear of "get rich quick" schemes. We all need to learn that the same applies to "instant web results quick and cheap" schemes. Anyone who says that can position you well on the search engines for $50 a month has 50 angry dentists on the line and is replacing them as they go. Don't be one of those dentists. Start with a solid online investment and branch off from there.

Stick To It -tivenes

Above all, stay active in your web marketing. Web marketers are like those little lizards that can run across water. They have webbed feet and are speedy little guys, but if they stopped running...well, I'm sure that they can swim if they have to. Don't get caught standing still, or your competition will speed past you while you're struggling to keep your head above water.

Here's what you need to do:

Keep on top of your web guy.

Keep blogging.

Keep posting electronic public relations articles.

Keep adding pages to your website.

Eventually, your determination will pay off and you'll find that you've reached the first page of the search engines.

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Page 1 Solutions

Get a "Virtual Counselor" to convert more leads

2007-06-26T10:01:00.000-06:00

Web Marketing is more than just getting lots of traffic. It is also critical to convert website leads into new clients. Some dental practices have invested in telephone intake (hiring the right people, training them and developing protocols and resources) to ensure they succeed, but have done nothing to ensure the same success in their email leads.

Consider the following:

-McGraw Hill Sales Statistical Studies indicate that about 96% of all sales happen after 5.6 exposures to information.

-Internet researchers, particularly those conducting medical-related searches, are hungry for information.

-There is a sometimes a small window of time and opportunity when consumers research dental services and are in the market for a dentist.

-The majority of website-based leads come in the form of emails, rather than phone calls.

What does all of this mean?

It means that you only have a concentrated period of time to do multiple follow-up with email-based leads if you want to convert more of them into patients. If you only rely on one superficial, follow-up email you may be losing more than 90% of potential business!

Why? Because most consumers don't buy or engage in anything when they first hear about it and the Web allows them to be "in the market," yet remain somewhat anonymous or voyeuristic. They want to hear and see more before taking the next step.

Some suggestions to improve your practice’s ability to convert more website leads into patients:

-Secret shop your practice’s website and your biggest competitors' to see how you compare. Don't make the mistake of assuming you are the only website a prospect visits or contacts.

-Develop more strategic follow-up emails that do more than just tell them to call you. Superficial, text-only responses that don't offer something new, or provide web-friendly "next step" actions, fail to keep potential patients moving down the decision-making path that leads to your front door.

-Implement Virtual Counselor, an online database that captures all website leads and automatically follows up each one individually with strategic emails. After your initial efforts to convert an email lead, Virtual Counselor takes over and keeps you in front of each prospect during this crucial window of time, without burdening you or your staff.

Talk to your Page 1 account manager to learn more.

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

Who Owns Your Domain Name?

2007-06-20T16:05:00.000-06:00

If you are like most dentists, you probably assume that you own your practice’s domain name. (A domain name is a website address - e.g., www.mypractice.com.) Obviously, you should own your own domain name, but sometimes your webmaster will have registered it in the webmaster's name. While this is usually not a problem, sometimes it can become one if you have a falling out with the webmaster and decide to have another website marketing firm handle your practice’s internet marketing.

Following are two things to consider in connection with your domain name:

Check your registrar account. Go to a registrar like Network Solutions, GoDaddy, or Registar.com. Each of these registrars offer a "Who Is" search that will allow you to see how your account is set up. You or your practice should be listed as the "Registrant." It is OK for your webmaster to be listed as the Admin, billing or technical contact. If you are the registrant, you will ultimately be able to control the account by faxing instructions to your registrar on your letterhead even if you have a falling out with your webmaster.
Know your Registrar Account's login and password. I can't tell you how many times we have tried to transfer a client's website and the client does not know the login and password for his registrar account. Without that information, we can't point the domain to our webserver.

Another idea would be to get a letter from your webmaster early on confirming that you - and not the webmaster - own your domain name. Do this while you are on good terms with the webmaster and it may avoid a problem down the road.

If you have a falling out with your webmaster and your webmaster decides to play "hardball", one tactic we have seen used is to claim that the webmaster - and not you or the practice - owns your domain name. Usually, they back off, but not always. Sometimes you need to get control of it through the registrar and that process is a whole lot easier if you are listed as the registrant. Otherwise, the webmaster can claim that it was just subleasing you the domain.

In a similar vein, make sure you own your website design and content. But that story will be told in another posting.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

I’m getting leads, now what?

2007-06-12T08:59:00.000-06:00

So your dental website is up and live, your search engine optimization is kicking in, and you started receiving emails. Now what? It’s surprising how little thought is put into the follow up to the initial email lead. You’ve spent all this money getting people to your website, money on creating a website and money convincing people to email you, only to follow up an email lead with something like this:

Call our office to schedule an appointment.

Signed,
Dr. Joe

You may think this is all that’s needed, but what’s differentiating you from the three other dentists this potential patient has contacted who are undoubtedly doing the exact same thing? If it takes you longer than six hours to respond to the email lead, does the lead even remember who you are? The answer is most likely not. In the end, you’re wasting the opportunity to develop a relationship with a potential patient by not giving him what he wants.

For instance, the email lead references pain in his jaw due to TMJ. If you respond with the type of email above you aren’t answering any of the questions your potential patient is asking. Not only that, but it comes across as an uncaring and dismissive response to there genuine inquiry. These people have decided to look into improving their dental health and in turn their lives. Speak to that and make them feel like you are responding to their individual concerns.

A good way of doing this is with a detailed and informative email response with links back to your website. The potential patient will remember your website and create the visual connection between Dr. Joe and your website. That’s step one in cementing the relationship. Step 2 is including links to specific pages within your website that cover the issue presented by the lead. Send them a link to your TMJ facts page, or to your page of testimonials – if they asked about TMJ treatments, send them to a page about that. It might not be the exact information they need, but at least you are creating the desire to learn more and contact you over the phone.

A good follow up email should look like this:

Dear First name.

Thanks for visiting our website, www.yourpractice.com, and requesting information regarding TMJ relief.

The best way for us to help is to schedule a no risk consultation. Simply call us at 555-5555.

In the meantime, feel free to get more information about frequently asked TMJ questions (include link to page), or read our list of testimonials from patients of our practice (include link to testimonial page). This will help prepare for your consultation.

Feel free to also learn more about us and our ability to serve you (include link to your “meet the team” page).

We look forward to hearing from you and taking a closer look at how we can help you with your dental health needs.

Sincerely,
Dr. Joe
www.yourpractice.com
555-5555
Address

Your email response now has four or five links back to your website. The response can be tailored very simply to whatever type of lead you receive, just insert the appropriate links. As a result you will help create the visual connection between your name, email and website, branding your practice through emails. In addition, your response will not seem manufactured or trite, because it isn’t. Above all, you will be differentiating yourself in ways your competition has not even thought of. If five doctors respond similar to the first email and one responded with the detailed message, what first impression does that send to your lead?

Also, remember that it is not enough to just respond by email. If the prospective patient inquiry includes a phone number – ALWAYS call. And, until you have communicated with the patient at least five times (or the patient has scheduled an appointment or told you to stop), keep following up. Here at Page 1, we have a great program called Virtual Counselor that allows our clients to automatically follow up with a series of personalized emails without tying up your staff’s time.

Aaron Gerblich
Account Manager
Page1Solutions

Testimonials Through Blogs

2007-06-05T12:57:00.000-06:00

Today, I thought I would check out Page 1 Solution’s blog to see if there were any new posts. Lo and behold, there was and it was great! The blog, “My Own Porcelain Onlay," was written by one of our writers. In it, Jenny was talking about a recent experience that she had at the dentist. It was written in such a manner that it put my mind at ease about some dental work that I may have to have done in the near future. Dental work that has me really nervous because I am afraid that it will hurt. After reading her post, my mind has been put at ease (for the most part) and I realize that things aren’t going to be as bad as I have been imagining.

Another important thing that Jenny’s blog did, was show how happy patients can be a great marketing tool for their dentists. What better advertising is there than word of mouth from happy, satisfied patients? Before I read Jenny’s blog, I didn’t have a dentist. Now that I have read it, I know exactly where I am going to go. Just like that, I’m sold!

One way to capture this advertising opportunity is to encourage your happy patients to write a blog about their experience in your office. Have them write about what is it that they like about the office, the doctors, the atmosphere, etc. People want a dentist where they can feel comfortable and at ease and most of the time they don’t know anything much about the practice before they actually visit. They don’t know the people and the atmosphere of the office. Wouldn’t it be nice to go into the dentist’s office and already feel like you “know” the people and the atmosphere? I personally think that would be great. Just make sure that they put a link to your website so people can go straight there and fill out one of your valuable mini-contact forms. These links are valuable in your link building.

Blogs are becoming more and more popular nowadays and lots of people are blogging, whether it be on their personal websites, work websites, myspace.com, etc. Why not take advantage of this and get some quality referrals from your happy patients? With a little help from them, you could make a lot more people happy!

If you have any questions about blogging, getting your patients to blog, or anything else, please contact us! We are more than happy to help!

Jessica Espinoza
Page 1 Solutions

4 Ways to Avoid an Increase in Google AdWord's Price-Per-Click

2007-05-30T10:04:00.000-06:00

Handling your own Google AdWords account can be an incredibly time consuming and confusing experience. Trying to generate leads while conforming to Google's ever-increasing standards at times, may seem like a guessing game. And without hiring a pay-per-click professional, most dentists are probably experiencing an increase on some level to their price-per-click, which is the actual price they pay to have any one person click on an ad when it shows up in the search engine results pages. Recently, the Google AdWords program has created a robot (spider) dedicated entirely to crawling web pages in order to evaluate their quality.

What does this mean? Well, pages not meeting certain "quality" indicators are sure to see a dramatic increase in their price-per-click. And, what may be more important, since Google is now spidering sites in AdWords, one may assume it won’t be long until they incorporate this data into their organic search results - perhaps favoring those who use the AdWords program over those who don't.

So what are the "quality" indicators in question? For starters, your contact information should be readily available throughout your site, not just the Contact Us page. A small blurb indicating your email, phone and mailing address needs to present - I would suggest on every page - just to be safe. Oh, and make sure your Contact Us page is highly accessible from anywhere.

It's a good idea to have a Privacy Policy page clearly linked from your home page. As a medical professional, you may have a good idea what to include on this page, but if you think you need some help, Click Here to get a good idea of what Google thinks is important. And please - DO NOT COPY A PRIVACY POLICY FROM SOMEONE ELSE! This may seem common sense, but you'd be surprised.

Try to cut down on the number of "404 Page Not Found" error pages for all links internal and external. 404's are bad for both the end user and the search engine spider. Most folks who run across one will immediately leave your site - and so will a Google AdWords indexing spider. If your site has many error pages and you don't know how to fix this on your own, then contact your webmaster or visit Page1Solutions.com for a free dental website consultation.

Create a Links page. Linking out to other "high quality" web sites within the realm of the dental industry tells the spider that you consider yourself an authority and would like to be recognized as one. Finding .org and .edu sites as well as any particular dental associations you belong to and linking to them is highly advisable.

Nathan Joynt
SEO Specialist
Page 1 Solutions

Choosing colors for your website

2007-05-23T08:45:00.000-06:00

Colors can have a strong effect on your website visitors. A wrong color or the wrong mix of colors can impact how people view your site and navigate through it. On the other hand the right set of colors can effectively push a potential patient through a website to your intended goal.

Color is all around us and our subconscious emotions and reactions to them are worth noting. For instance bright colors tend to stir us up where softer colors tend to relax us.

When it comes to picking colors for your new website, logo or branding campaign, there are no definitive rules. Different things work for different people. They key is to identify what emotions you want evoked from a visitor due to the color you choose. In addition, depending on age, sex and cultural background, people will be attracted to varying colors. Traditionally, men look for strong, bold colors whereas women like to be surrounded by softer, pastel colors.

A good rule of thumb is to keep the number of colors on your site to a minimum, between 2-4, with one of those colors only used as an accent color. The accent color of your choosing should contrast with the rest of the site and drive the user’s eyes to a specific section of your site. A talented designer will incorporate all of the colors, including the contrasting element, and visual flow of the site to further drive your visitor’s eyes.

Below is a list of how colors can affect us in different ways:

Red - Passion, power, strength, attention-getting. Red is often a good choice for call to action items. Red can also invoke excitement, cheerfulness and warmth.

Blue - Confidence, truth, and professionalism. It can also invoke dependability, patience, cooperation, understanding, and loyalty. It is often associated with intelligence, trust and reassurance.

Green - Wealth, money, prosperity, health, nature, hope and growth. It can also come across as fresh and soothing.

Yellow - Purity and joy. Yellow, a warm color often represents sunshine, energy and happiness.

Black - Authority, committed, classy, elegance, serious, and sophistication.

White - Purity, perfection, fresh, and cleanliness.

The right set of colors can be very effective in driving your visitors and getting the results you want from your legal website.

Aaron Gerblich
Account Manager
Page1Solutions

Tips for Google

2007-05-14T11:17:00.000-06:00

I recently read this in an e-newsletter that I subscribe to and think it makes some very simple and obvious - but good - points. Here they are:

"- Link exchanges for SEO [Search Engine Optimization] is a bad idea. There is a big difference between link exchanges for SEO and two sites that happen to exchange links. Using automatic link exchanges, having highly unrelated links, massive amounts of links regardless of the quality, etc should be avoided at all costs.

- Purchasing links is definitely a bad idea. Some argue that Google could never find out who is selling links. The fact is, though, that purchased links, at least at the most basic level, is extremely easy to detect.

- Thousands of links does not mean what it used to. Links must be related. If you want to see a significant effect, they should also come from highly trusted websites in a natural way. It is possible to be hurt by bad links.

- Obvious SE [Search Engine] spam, such as hidden text, redirects, etc will eventually get you banned.- Being a careful webmaster is important. Innocent and careless mistakes can and will cost you. Setting up a website with broken links, multiple URLs for the same page, poor navigation, etc will scream poor quality.

- Rehashing content does not work. Google wants one of two things: 1) completely original content, or 2) content conglomerated in a completely original fashion. This goes along the duplicate content filter that is talked about so much.

How do we know these things? Because Google has been open about what they are looking for. These are not theories based on observations; these are things that Google has discussed openly through employees, at conferences, through the tools they offer us. Unfortunately many webmasters simply do not want to listen.”

The author of the article is Mark Daoust who is the owner of Site Reference. Hopefully, his words of wisdom will help you too.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Fun, Free Advertising for Everyone!

2007-05-11T08:31:00.000-06:00

This site is going to be BIG! …maybe.

Wikimapia.org - http://www.wikimapia.org/

It is a cross between Wikipedia and Map Quest, where users can actually find places and provide descriptions of them. Going on a trip to New York? First go to WikiMapia and check our "New York Restaurant" or whatever else you're interested in.

Better yet, make sure YOUR business is on there so when someone searches Wikimapia for "Cosmetic Dentists in _____," etc., they are given directions to your business along with a description written by you!

We have already tried it out on Page 1 Solutions, just to give you an idea of what it looks like. If you go to where the wikimapia bar is, click on “search” from the drop down menu and type in “dental marketing” you will see the ONLY listing (at the time of this writing) is for Page1 Solutions. Yes, that is our roof. It may not be pretty, but at least we have views of the Rocky Mountains.

Fun, Free advertising… what more could you ask for?

Analyze Your Competitors’ Web Sites...

2007-05-07T12:26:00.000-06:00

...Before Developing Your Own

Traditional search engine optimization is the most effective means for getting potential cosmetic dentistry patients to find your website. The reason for this is that “natural” top search engine result listings are more credible than sponsored ones (highly positioned natural listings tend to be viewed as a third-party endorsement).

If your dental practice is in a large, competitive market, chances are that in addition to extensive keyword optimization, you will need to use multiple web marketing tools on an on-going basis to become and remain competitive. But, if your practice is in a smaller market and you have a limited Internet marketing budget, a “Pay-Per-Click” campaign can still be an effective way to drive traffic to your website.

A quick caution: even if you decide to exclusively employ a “Pay-Per-Click” strategy, fresh, original and quality content continues to be of utmost importance since the Internet is being utilized increasingly by prospects as a research tool (do you recognize a consistent theme throughout this blog?). It is difficult to gain credibility as an expert in cosmetic dentistry among prospective patients if your web site is not a “go to” resource.

But regardless of how competitive your market is, as with any smart and effective marketing campaign, you first need to determine your budget, your marketing needs, an estimate of the return on your investment and a way to track results. The good news is that the Internet, more than other media, lends itself to the ability to track results. The way to determine your Internet marketing needs, on the other hand, is the same as for any of your other marketing endeavors: you must first investigate what your competitors are doing.

A good place to start is to generate a list of localized keyword phrases. This is an art unto itself and will not be dealt with in this article. The next step is to choose one of the four major search engines and do a search for one of your more important keyword phrases. Take note of which of your competitor’s websites are receiving favorable positioning and which appear under the sponsored listings. Do the same for three or four of your other top keywords. Then repeat the process with the other three major search engines (as of this writing, the four major search engines are Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask).

This process can be tedious, but not far along into it, there is a good chance you will identify some of the same websites persistently getting favorable positioning. Needless to say, these are the sites of your principal online competition. These are also the sites whose success you will need to emulate and improve upon.

First you should re-visit your keyword list and try to identify relevant keyword phrases that elicit traffic and your competitors may have overlooked. Then visit the sites you identified as those belonging to your principal online competition and try to identify what makes them successful.

How much and what quality content do they have? Is it well organized? Who do they link to and who links to them (you can uncover the latter with http://www.linkpopularity.com/)? Are any of the incoming links from a blog or an electronic public relations article? Where and how often do their keywords appear? Are their keywords being used in the headline(s)? How about the title page? What design elements are being employed? Are they offering “no recovery, no fee” or other promotions? Is it easy to contact them?

Now look at the source code. What meta tags do you find, if any? Are the keywords being used in their images’ ALT tags? Are they spamming (hiding keywords not visible to the web user) or using other deceitful tactics? If they do, you may want to report the site to the major search engines, not only for competitive reasons, but also for the betterment of the medium as a whole.

After going through this exercise, you will have a much better idea what it will take to be competitive online in your market. You will also be better armed to ask questions of the search engine optimization team you may consider working with and to set a budget for your internet marketing campaign.

And after you revamp or begin your online marketing efforts, be sure to keep track of your competitor’s online performance. Your competitors’ tactics will likely change, and so will the rules of the game.

Jessica Espinoza
Page 1 Solutions

Increase Pay Per Click ROI – Landing Pages

2007-05-04T08:12:00.000-06:00

Search engine marketing should incorporate both optimization-related results (free listings) and sponsored listings (pay-per-click advertising). Although more website marketers prefer 1st-page listings in the organic or natural listings, paid sponsor listings, which can become expensive, still offer a good ROI if done strategically. One element to increase your PPC ROI is to develop effective Landing Pages.

Expensive Paid Listings Demand ROI

Since you are paying for every visitor who clicks on your paid sponsor listing, the important point is this: PPC programs have to more than pay for themselves in order for your website to remain a viable marketing effort. To accomplish that, you need a well-planned, engaging landing page or pages. Otherwise, visitors, which you paid for, have to do work to find relevant information and won't hang around long enough to find or read your relevant pages. Thus, you have little chance they will contact you.

The Purpose of Landing Pages

Unlike sending visitors only to the home page of your website, sending potential patients to a landing page gets them to a target destination, without requiring them to make additional clicks. You will lose visitors with every click you require them to make. The key is to determine your most desired action (MDA) and design everything, including your headlines, graphics / images, text and layout to drive visitors to complete your MDA.
Ideally, keep each landing page limited to one MDA, since each landing page has a specific purpose. Extraneous information, overwhelming number of links/options, time consuming videos and an unclear calls-to-action are distractions. Having affiliate links, text links and unnecessary animations are other distractions that keep your visitor from taking your MDA.

Landing Page Design Principles

1. Your headline should accomplish the following objectives:
- Make your visitor realize they have reached the right page;
- Clearly state the most desired action and purpose of the landing page;
- Engage your visitor and encourage them to continue.

2 .Your headlines should grab readers and it should appear "above the fold" or at the top of your landing page. It’s the most visible, and thus, the most valuable area on your website.

3. Write your content using short chucks of text and single sentences. Try to surround it with negative space (white). Visitors generally start by scanning a page, rather than jumping right into reading large paragraphs and pages.

4. And because readers initially scan instead of intently read website text, utilize a lot of headers, sub-headings and bullet-point lists.

5. The lead sentence of each chunk of text should give the critical information you want to get across, if you want to engage visitors and get them to read deeper.

6. Promote an unambiguous call to action - Schedule your consultation, email a request for a telephone consultation. Leave no doubt what action is expected of the visitor. Calls to action can appear throughout the landing page text and a call to action should be the last thing visitors read.

7. Choose a type font that is easy on the eyes and very readable. Avoid script-style fonts and fonts with lots of curly-Qs that diminish the readability of your content.

Bill Fukui
Page 1 Solutions

Washington Post Article About SEO

2007-04-30T08:35:00.000-06:00

Interesting article awhile back about SEO in the Washington Post. One of the quotes - from a respected SEO guru named Rand Fishkin - addresses one of the things that we are doing for our clients that seems to be working. We refer to it as e-PR or article PR.

Rand Fishkin, chief executive of a Seattle-based search consultancy called SEOMoz, said he focuses on getting editorial links for his clients, partly by creating feature articles that Web publishers will link to: "We call it link-baiting. The idea is to attract a lot of natural links."

It sounds like the Web's version of public relations, with consultants baiting webmasters much like PR firms pitch stories to reporters. Fishkin's latest success came from creating an online awards contest he called "Web 2.0 Awards," touted on Web pages that linked to his firm's Web site.

Contact us to find out how we can use e-PR to improve your cosmetic dental website marketing.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Click Fraud

2007-04-27T08:53:00.000-06:00

Many web marketers have complained for years that the pay per click (PPC) search engines (including Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing - formerly Overture.com and before that GoTo.com, and others) tolerate fraudulent clicks because they get paid for each click.

There are also a large number of small search PPC engines. These include Kanoodle, MIVA (formerly FindWhat), LookSmart and many others. There have been rumors for years that these search engines artificially inflate their PPC charges with fraudulent click throughs.

Still another problem is Google AdSense, which is Google's program that allows websites to include AdWords (Google's PPC listings) to be on their websites. The website owners receive a small percentage of the revenue from AdWords clicks through on their websites. There have been many documented cases of AdSense participants clicking on listings to increase their revenue from Google. Google is pretty good about catching major abusers of this type of click fraud, but it still continues.

And then there is the problem with competitors. Sometimes competitors will click on your PPC listing to see who you are and what you are promoting. The fact that the click costs you money is not part of the consideration. Some really nasty competitors will even click on your listing multiple times to run up your costs so you reduce your bids or run out of money.

Historically, when we have seen client PPC costs increase and have not seen a reason why that should have happened, we will complain to the PPC search engines. Occasionally, they will reimburse us, but usually, the result of their investigation is that they could find nothing wrong.

Now, the lawsuit settlements - once approved - may allow PPC advertisers to get some portion of their money back. At least they can advertise a little at a reduced rate.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

A Good Description for Your Google Listing

2007-04-23T13:59:00.000-06:00

Did you ever wonder how Google comes up with the description for your site in the listing? It is pretty simple, and now you can have some control over it.

Google starts by checking the Open Directory Project to see if your site is listed in that directory. (By the way, if your site is not listed there, I strongly encourage you to submit it today as it will boost your position in the Google listings.) If your site is listed in the Open Directory Project (also known as DMOZ), Google uses the description assigned to your site by the DMOZ editors. If your site is not listed in DMOZ (sometimes it can take six months or longer to get listed there), Google will take the description you provide in your Meta Description Tag.

The problem with this situation is that the description that Google uses for your site in its listings is VERY important since it is a major factor in determining whether potential clients click on your listing. Further, DMOZ editors are known for using bland descriptions that are not very compelling. As long as you are not listed in DMOZ, you can control your listing since it will show what you want it to from your Meta Description Tag. However, once DMOZ accepts your site, you were stuck with their description of your practice - until now....

Now you can override the DMOZ editors' bland description of your practice by adding a very specific meta tag. MSN allows you to do this too. In fact, they were the first to allow this tag and now Google has followed suit. It is called the NOODP (no ODP) tag and it is simple to add in.

Just use any or all of the following:

< name="robots" content="NOODP">
< name="msnbot" content="NOODP">
< name="googlebot" content="NOODP">

Your web marketing firm should know how to use this. The key is making sure that the description that you do use is compelling enough to make potential clients want to click on it.

Dan Goldstein
Page 1 Solutions

Creative Ways to Add Content

2007-04-20T07:47:00.000-06:00

Everybody knows content is king on the search engines, but quality combined with quantity are what make a site go from good to great. Just like inventions, it is important to think about what you could do to make your website different from other websites. Uniqueness is just as important as heavy content.

Here are some ideas to tailor your site exclusively for your dental practice:

* Add a Blog or Forum
Blogs or forums allow for frequently updated content to be added to your site. Usually the topics are keyword heavy and relevant to your site. Blogs and forums are easily customizable and are a great way to gain a regular readership base. Whether your blog or forum is about the most recent findings in dental health, about your dental practice or just social commentary, it is sure to spruce up your site.

* Reviews
Whether you are reviewing new products or new procedures, reviews are a great way to get your name out there as a reference on the subject. You cannot only publish reviews on your site; you can also send them to online publications. By getting articles out there, you are promoting yourself and your dental office. It often does not matter what your opinion is, it is more important that you have one.

Noël Otten
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

Dental Web Marketing

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This blog has move and can now be found at http://blog.dentalwebmarketingblog.com/.

Why Add More Content Regualarly To Your Dental Website

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Calling All Dental Consultants

Get A Step Up On Your Competition

Rising To The Top (of search engines)

Facebook - Four Things to Keep in Mind

This blog has moved

Cosmetic Dentists Who Are Coming of Age

Three Tips to a Successful Online Dental Gallery

Dental Marketing Questions that Google Analytics Can Answer

Facebook Advertising for Dentists

Blogging to the Teeth - Dental Blogs

Great Posts in Recent Dental News!

Dentalnomics

Great Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry Blogs!

Great Posts in Recent Dental News!

TweetBeep for Cosmetic Dentists

Great Posts in Recent Dental News!

Page 1 Wins 2 LACP 2009 Spotlight Awards for Dental Websites!

Great Blog Entries in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry News!

Great Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry Blogs!

Great Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry Blogs!

LinkedIn Groups for Dentists

How to Handle a Negative Review Online

Great Blog Posts in Recent Cosmetic Dentistry News

How to Set Up a Facebook Page For Your Practice

Blogging for Dentists

LinkedIn for Medical Professionals

Dental Website with Video

Guaranteed SEO - Does it Exist?

Before & After Galleries: Including the Less Obvious

Social Media Marketing and the Economy

New Website

Dental Patients ARE Online

Flash Animation and Search Engines - Clearing Up Confusion

Reliable Website Maintenance

Selling through email

Common Website Writing Mistakes

More About Content

Flash Web Site Designs for Cosmetic Dentists

Dental Website Marketing

Of Phone Numbers and Calls to Action

Design or Update Your Website

Do It Yourself SEO

Search Engine Registration for Cosmetic Dentists

Pay Per Click Search Engines

Marketing in an Economic Slow-Down

The Importance of Prominent Contact Information

Google's Page Rank

Mini Contact Forms Can Yield Major Results

Link Building

Google vs. Yahoo

Search Engine Optimization is the Foundation

Link Popularity

How Long Does it Take to get Good Search Engine Results?

The Importance of Frequently Updating Blogs

Online Inquiry Management

I Tried Search Engine Optimization and It Didn't Work....

Domain Renewal Commitment - An Easy Google Brownie Point

Websites - It's Not Just About You

The Importance of Paying Attention

The e-PR Campain- Success Through Visibility

Look Before you Leap...

Start Building Rapport with Your Visitors

Advantages of Stats-Tracking Software

Think Fresh (Content)

Websites - A Resource Or Just An Online Ad ?

Mini Contact Forms

Planning for Growth

Misconception: Websites Cost Too Much

Dentists Are Richer, Teeth Are Poorer

Blogging about blogs

Paid Listings versus Natural Listings

Patience Is a Virtue

Duplicate Content

Now I'm a Believer...In Web Video

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