Search Engine Spiders And Advertising Doctors On The Internet

When advertising doctors on the Internet, particularly plastic surgeons, the search engines can play an integral role in your marketing strategy. Many potential patients will conduct research on the Internet, using the search engines to find information about procedures and doctors. In fact many, if not most, of the visitors to your site will likely have found you through a search engine, that is provided that you’ve optimized your site to rank well in the search engines.

By now, many people know that the search engines use robots, or spiders, to visit websites, scan the information, and index the pages. While you want to create pages that appeal to your visitors, it’s also important that they appeal to the spiders. But just what are the spiders looking for? The following are tips to help you create a spider-friendly site:

• Get to the point and get to it quickly. This is not just true for the spiders, but for your visitors as well. Some spiders and some visitors have lots of patience, but many do not. Some spiders will dig through your site and index all of your information, while others will stop before they finish indexing a whole page. However, most search engine spiders assume that the content appearing earliest in a page is the most important content, the text in your header tags is more important than other text, and that header tags and links with keywords matching the META tag keywords are more important than those that don’t.
• Be careful with your HTML code. If your HTML code is poorly written, your keyword and keyword phrases and important may not be the first thing the spider reads, or even the third or fourth. As such, it’s important that you be careful with your HTML code. When complex JavaScript code is used in the HEAD tag, it can take up a great deal of space. An external JavaScript file can be used to reduce page size or JavaScript code can even be placed at the bottom of the page. Cascading style sheets can also be used to reduce large amounts of code and reduce load times. Also be careful when using tables and keep the structure simple.
• Don’t add too many levels to your website. A website with fewer levels is better for both spiders and visitors. The levels relate to the number of clicks a visitor has to go through before finding the information they want. An example of four levels would be as follows: the splash page, the home page, the offered services page, individual services pages. With too many levels, spiders may have to wade through multiple pages before finding any good content to index and visitors have to do the same before finding the information they’re looking for.
• Optimize and submit deep pages. Don’t just focus your optimization efforts on your homepage. Be sure to create interior pages targeting different sets of keywords as well. This provides the spiders with lots of good content, and increases the chance that visitors will find you while using a variety of different keywords and keyword phrases.