MedMarketLink

Medical & Healthcare Marketing: The Science of SEO

How two computer grad students changed the practice of medicine forever

Who would have guessed it would lead to this? It's barely been a decade since Stanford graduate student Larry Page pointed his newly designed World Wide Web crawler – a software tool designed to explore online information – at the fledgling but mushrooming Internet in 1996.

Compared to other search tools, Page's crawler was different in that it looked at everything on the Web, not just at Web page titles and at a little bit of computer code; it looked at all the words within Web pages. And, most importantly, it used all its findings to rank Web pages in order of importance.

What 8 million Americans do every day

Page's crawler ultimately changed everything. Today, humans conduct more than 600 million Internet searches every day. And every day 8 million Americans go online to search for healthcare information, according to the Pew Research Center. [link to "SEO & Medical PR] The majority starts its searches with the use of a search engine.

This revolution has created the science (and art) of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). So many people ask for help on the Web that marketers now spend $5 billion (with a b) annually to advertise with Internet search engines. By far, most of that money goes to the company founded by Page and Sergei Brin, his former Stanford classmate: Google.

How to bring some of those 8 million your way

How do you bring the right searchers (i.e., prospective patients) to the Web-site door of a medical provider? Well, the answer is complicated and getting more complicated every day.

The formula, or mathematical algorithm, that search engines Google and Yahoo! use are proprietary and secret. But we do know a few of the factors in SEO and SEM results:

How many other Web sites link to your Web site.
The prominence on your Web site of the same words that prospective patients use in their Internet searches.
The amount of relevant information on your site and how often it's updated.

Experts estimate that there could be as many as 100 factors in ranking of Web sites – but only a precious few insiders know for sure. And Google and Yahoo! change the factors and algorithms constantly to keep ahead of marketers trying to beat the competition to the top of rankings – including by cheating or gaming the system.

In any case, effective SEO and SEM requires constant effort and education to stay ahead of the competition and shifting algorithms. The methodology is part science, part information technology, part communications arts and a whole lot of hustle.

Moms Mad for the Web Parents are among the highest users of the Internet, significantly outpacing couples and singles without children, according to a variety of sources. The Vanishing Newspaper Is the daily newspaper dying? Or just catching its breath for a new competitive sprint in a different format? The Pew Charitable Trust's annual report on American media says people appreciate journalism perhaps as much as ever. But mass communications is reaching a pivot point in accelerating changes. Online Journalism Booming While newsrooms are shrinking alarmingly quickly, many major daily newspapers are seeing mushrooming growth in online readers, according to Editor and Publisher magazine and the Nielsen research company. As of 2008, some newspapers have seen a doubling in numbers of online readers in just a year.