Once your website is developed to be fully optimised for search engines (this is the SEO part), then it is time to start promoting your site. In other words you now have a website that Google can easily find, but to also get top ranks and increase the number of visitors to the site, you need to advertise and market your site.

The Internet has brought many unique benefits to marketing, one of which being lower costs and greater capabilities for the distribution of information and media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing, both in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium.

Another advantage of Internet marketing is that all your marketing activities are fully measurable. What that means is that if you for example advertise on a dental directory, you can immediately find out how many visitors that particular directory is sending to your website.

What are the different ways a dentist can benefit from Internet marketing?

There are many different ways you can promote your practice online. Below we list some of the most popular ones.

Search Engine Optimisation

If your website is developed to be fully optimised for Google and is targeting the right keywords then this will automatically be found in Google. But then there is more to do to get top ranking.  More about this in SEO for dental websites

Directory listing

There are numerous general and dental specific directories where it can be beneficial to include your practice details. The better directories, sometimes at additional cost, also allow you to include your web address, which his very beneficial.

The advantage of being listing in directories is that, good directories receive  thousands of visitors per months and for some people are the preferred method of looking for searching for a new dentist.

Some example of directories: yell.co.uk, www.city-visitor.com/, www.dentalguide.co.uk/, http://dentist-finder.co.uk/

Another feature of some of these directories is that people can leave reviews about a dentist and rate their level of satisfaction.

Newsletter

Newsletter can be monthly or quarterly and be distributed via post in print format or via email in digital format. Typically a newsletter contains some latest news and promotions from your practice and some general informative or entertaining articles.

Newsletter can be an effective way to stay in touch with your patients and remind them about your practice.  A well written newsletter allows you to engage with your patients in a fun and informative way.

Email newsletter are much more cost effective than print and post, but on the negative side an email newsletter can be caught by spam filters or get lost in many emails that people receive everyday. Hence email newsletter can only be effective if the right  software and techniques are used to distribute the emails. Another advantage of good email marketing software is that after sending the emails you get detailed statistics about how many people opened and viewed the newsletter and whether they clicked on a link in the newsletter.

Online PR

PR stands for Public Relations and essentially it is about raising your profile on the Internet. The most famous example is Richard Bronson the boss of Virgin. He has always used his name and face to create publicity for his business.

Now how can you as a dentist create publicity and PR for your practice?

Answer: You can for example appear as panel of expert in some of the top dental portals where dentist answer questions in a specific area. You can create video clips of your satisfied patients and publish on Youtube and your website. You can use social media sites such as Facebook to talk about the latest treatment methods you provide at your practice. You can create a blog on your site and write informative or fun articles which are more personal to you. Blogs are a good way of holing a more informal dialogue with your audience, and can cover any topic from dentistry to personally hobbies, lifestyle, and other fun content or stories. You can also submit articles for various print and online publications such as the Dentistry.co.uk magazine.

By Ashkan Parsa

www.theworldsmiles.co.uk

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often considered the more technical part of Web marketing. This is true because SEO does help in the promotion of sites and at the same time it requires some technical knowledge – at least familiarity with basic HTML. SEO is sometimes also called SEO copyrighting because most of the techniques that are used to promote sites in search engines deal with text. Generally, SEO can be defined as the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine-friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.

One of the basic truths in SEO is that even if you do all the things that are necessary to do, this does not automatically guarantee you top ratings but if you neglect basic rules, this certainly will not go unnoticed. Also, if you set realistic goals – i.e to get into the top 30 results in Google for a particular keyword, rather than be the number one for 10 keywords in 5 search engines, you will feel happier and more satisfied with your results.

Although SEO helps to increase the traffic to one’s site, SEO is not advertising. Of course, you can be included in paid search results for given keywords but basically the idea behind the SEO techniques is to get top placement because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay. The efforts used to create relevant terms on your website is also referred to as Keyword optimisation. In reality you can only effectively optimise a web page for one or two keywords. The focus allows you to get high ranking in Google for those keywords.

SEO can be a 30-minute job or a permanent activity. Sometimes it is enough to do some generic SEO in order to get high in search engines – for instance, if you are a leader for rare keywords, then you do not have a lot to do in order to get decent placement. But in most cases, if you really want to be at the top, you need to pay special attention to SEO and devote significant amounts of time and effort to it. Even if you plan to do some basic SEO, it is essential that you understand how search engines work and which items are most important in SEO.

If you want to understand more about SEO we recommend two website which have tones of information about SEO: seochat.com and seomoz.com.

By Ashkan Parsa

www.theworldsmiles.co.uk