How Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Works

Search engines love information -- in fact, they depend on it. A search engine can only produce accurate results if it can fully understand the websites that it indexes. If your website is missing any key bits of information -- such as keywords, descriptions, machine-readable HTML, and others -- the major search engines such as Google and Yahoo! will simply gloss over your site or ignore it. That is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is so important. When you sign up for Medforward's SEO service, our technicians will pour over your website in the greatest detail, tweaking, redeveloping, and reorganizing it so that search engines will correctly recognize and index every piece of data that exists on your website.

The MedForward team will focus on these commonly overlooked techniques:

• Keywords. Each webpage in your site can be associated with a set of keywords. These keywords are used by the search engine to help determine what topics are likely to be discussed on your website. With MedForward Pages, it is easy to define and update keywords for your entire website and your individual pages.
• Descriptions. Each webpage in your site will also be associated with a summary paragraph, that search engines will use when displaying a listing of your site. A high-quality and appropriate summary paragraph will give your page a higher ranking.
• Image Tags. Web developers often forget to assign the "alternate text" to each image on your website. Search engines cannot interpret images, so it is critical to include an accurate text description for every image on your website. MedForward Pages makes assigning text to images straightforward and easy.
• Title Tags. These are the most basic element of every webpage, and one of the most important properties of your webpages to search engines. Ensuring that titles are succinct, informative, and relevant is one of the primary techniques involved in SEO.
• Friendly HTML Tags. Unlike humans, the automated programs used by search engines to read your website cannot interpret the look and feel of your website. For a search engine to understand how your webpages relate to one another, the code underlying your website must be written in a manner that is easy for machines to parse. For this reason, the development team at Medforward systematically reviews all the code in every website they produce.
• Free Directory Submission. Establishing a regular and persistent profile in online directories is a key component of SEO. Every three months, Medforward technicians will register your website in all appropriate directories to make sure that your entire site maintains the highest possible profile.
• Paid Directory Submissions. Medforward will also regularly register your site with paid directory submissions, to save you the time and resources of doing so yourself. If you decide to have this feature enabled, additional fees may apply.

For even more information about how SEO works and what to look for in your SEO provider, visit Google's Webmaster Help Center.

If you have more questions about Medforward's SEO service, or to request a quote for your website, contact MedForward today.

XML Sitemap and Webmaster Toolkit

As part of MedForward's search engine optimization service, we include an XML sitemap and analysis using Google's webmaster toolkit.

Can a blog help SEO?

Yes.  A blog can help SEO through the regular updates, but they have to be meaningful and pertinent to your business.  It also takes a commitment of time to make the updates, about one to two hours per month as a minimum.

Can social networking help SEO?

Yes, if done correctly, using social networking can boost your ranking.  Using tools such as Facebook and Twitter properly can also help bring new visitors and keep them at your site.  Your patients can use these tools to spread positive information about your business.