When marketing cosmetic surgery practices on the Internet, proper keyword selection is essential. Many, if not most, of the visitors to your site will likely find your through the search engines. By selecting and targeting relevant keywords you can earn high rankings in the search engines, thus bringing more targeted traffic to your website. In order to select the best keywords for your site and to optimize their use on your site, keep the following in mind:
- Keyword Relevancy. It’s essential that the keywords you target be relevant to the content on your pages. Consider what your site’s focus is, who your audience is, what information you have to offer, and what makes that information valuable. Your answers can help you to select the right keywords. You can even ask people you know what sort of keywords and terms they would use to find you on the Internet. Many times you have to expand your thinking. While you are looking to offer your services as a plastic surgeon to visitors to your site, people may be looking for other things that your site can provide. Perhaps you’re a plastic surgeon located in Tulsa , Oklahoma . Don’t simply target search terms like plastic surgeon’, plastic surgeon Tulsa ‘, plastic surgery Tulsa ‘, cosmetic surgery Tulsa ‘ and so on. Many potential patients use the Internet to search for specific information about procedures, so consider phrases like rhinoplasty’, rhinoplasty complications’, rhinoplasty photos’ and so on. Targeting more specific keyword phrases can be very beneficial and they’re also much less competitive.
- Keyword Popularity. Once you have a good list of potential keywords, you need to determine how popular they are. You need to determine how many other sites use the same keywords and how often the keywords are actually used in searches. Be sure to check with a number of different search engines. Using the previous, the following were results returned on Google:
| Keyword Phrase | Results Returned |
| plastic surgery | 11,600,000 |
| cosmetic surgery | 7,870,000 |
| rhinoplasty | 2,650,000 |
| plastic surgeon | 1,800,000 |
| rhinoplasty photos | 14,400 |
| plastic surgery Tulsa | 973 |
| rhinoplasty complications | 436 |
| plastic surgeon Tulsa | 400 |
| rhinoplasty Tulsa | 73 |
Keyword phrases that are too broad or general are not always best. As you can see, with the term plastic surgery, your site would be competing against 11,600,000 other results. With more targeted keyword phrases like plastic surgery Tulsa ‘ and rhinoplasty photos’, your website has far less competition, increasing your chances of appearing higher in the results list and of people clicking onto your site. You can also determine how many people are actually using these keyword phrases to conduct searches, which can further help you to determine those that are right for you. For instance, the following are the number of times these phrases were used in Yahoo searches during the month of August, 2005:
| Keyword Phrase | Searches Conducted |
| plastic surgery | 189,316 |
| plastic surgeon | 116,097 |
| cosmetic surgery | 73,055 |
| rhinoplasty | 33,347 |
| rhinoplasty photo | 495 |
| plastic surgery Tulsa | 328 |
| plastic surgeon Tulsa | 312 |
| complication of rhinoplasty | 74 |
| rhinoplasty Tulsa | 0 |
- Keyword Usage. After determining which keywords are right for your website, it’s important that you use them properly on your pages. Don’t attempt to stuff your pages with keywords in a meaningless way as search engines consider this a form of spamming and visitors to your site will be put off. Also make sure that the keywords you use are relevant to the content on your page. For instance, don’t target the phrase rhinoplasty photo’ unless the page actually has rhinoplasty photos. A META keyword tag should be inserted into the head section of your page and can list all of your keywords. The content of your page should include your keywords many times and early on is best. You can also make contingencies for commonly misspelled words by using the misspelling as a keyword, though not in your content. Also include both singular and plural forms of your keywords.