Search engines like Google and Yahoo can be a great way to bring people to your website. Further, they bring you targeted traffic, people who are searching for information on cosmetic procedures and the doctors who perform them. The only problem is that someone searching for ‘abdominoplasty’, for instance, receives about 277,000 results, or other websites, on Google. If you’re at the bottom end of those results, you have very little chance of being seen. Ideally, you want to be in the top 50 results of a search engine, with the top 20 being most preferable. Anything beyond that is really pretty useless as most people searching the Internet aren’t going to continue beyond that 50 th result, if they even get that far.
Search engines have different criteria for how they return search results, and most tend to change their algorithms on a regular basis. Sites listed prominently one day may be at the bottom of the results the next. Google is currently the largest search engine and there are a number of things that they seem to like. They like sites with original, keyword-rich content and relevant incoming links. They like lots of technical things like good URLs and well-written description meta tags. The key, when it comes to search engines, is to know the factors that each of the search engines uses to rank pages and, simply put, to give them what they want.