In the past few years there has been major rule changes by the search engine Google. By following their quality guidelines and basic principles your website's rank will improve.
Enable Google to Find Your Pages.
1. Get your pages found - Make sure that the important pages of your website has a referring link either on a menu item, text link, or an image. If it's an image, make sure you give it an alt attribute that describes the linked pages content.
2. Sitemap - Setup a sitemap that can be read by humans and directs to the important pages on your website. You also want to submit a sitemap file to google. Learn more by clicking here.
3. Utilize a Robots.txt file. This file is important because you can prevent google from crawling folders that are senseless to have indexed. If you are using a CMS like wordpress you will want to disallow the folders that make up the structure of the platform.
Help Google Understand What Your Website is About
1. Your website should contain information that pertains to you, your practice and your services.
2. While writing your site's content, think about what the user would type in the search engine. Note the phrases and make sure your content has those in the body and titles. Remember google doesn't index meta keywords anymore so don't waste time in preparing them.
3. Have a simple, yet modern website. There is beauty in simplicity. You can have a simple and clean design, yet maintain a sophisticated brand.
4. Follow Google's recommendations on how to display images, videos, and structured data. You will most likely need a website design for these elements, especially structured data. Our package Legend 2.0 includes this and so much more.
Help Your Visitors Use Your Chiropractic Website
1. Ensure your website is responsive. Google enforced this rule a couple of years ago. If your website isn't mobile ready, it will be hidden from the mobile version of google. Which means you're missing out on 70% of traffic to your website. This is also included in the ChiroBuilt website design service. If you don't know if your website is mobile ready, test it here.
2. Confirm that all of the menu items and links of your website work. If you are using a CMS, it uses php to render it's pages and sometimes this can produce 404 not found pages. Check your site once a month for 404's.
3. Have a fast, optimized website so your users aren't waiting for pages to load. Included in Google's search algorithm is ping time and trust me if your ping time is high, it will drastically effect your search results. Below is a few ways to improve your page speed:
3A. Better hardware which hosts your Chiropractic website, here at ChiroBuilt, we use the fastest dedicated servers.
3B. Cache your website. Downfall is if you make changes you will have to know how to clear your websites cache. There are 2 ways to cache - browser cache and file cache. Use both for maximum performance.
3C. Always use Gzip Compression. Not sure if your website is Gzipped? Test it here.
4. Secure your website with an SSL certificate. Makes the user feel confident your website is safe, and it carries a bit of weight in Google's search algorithm. We offer SSL certificates, please contact us for more information.
5. Cross Browser Compatibility. Ensure your website displays correctly on all browsers like Microsoft Edge (formerly Internet Explorer), Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and safari. I found a great cross browser testing tool for free for you here.
Thanks for reading and I hope this post helps your page rank, if you follow my advice it surely will. For more information, please contact us using our general contact form. You can always register for pricing here.
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