Many healthcare SEO professionals and Internet marketers still continue to believe in the old school wisdom that external and internal SEO techniques can ensure top search rankings for any website. However, the truth is that the traditional SEO approach is now largely antiquated, and the content, quality and substance of a website is the new prime mover for search rankings. Google and other prominent search engines are continually improving their search algorithms to successfully identify websites that offer great content, and pull down the rankings of websites that solely go after SEO techniques to manipulate the search algorithms.

One of the best ways to develop an effective SEO strategy for your medical website is to listen to the suggestions of Google directly, rather than rely on presumptions and guesswork that is usually passed around as Google’s algorithmic attributes. Google continually makes efforts to educate webmasters about how to achieve higher page ranks for their websites. All that a smart medical SEO manager requires is to listen to Google’s guidance carefully and incorporate it wholly into the doctor or dentist’s SEO strategy.

Google’s official “Webmaster Central” blog offered the following guidance to webmasters in the wake of the search engine’s now-famous Panda update that adversely impacted the rankings of a large number of websites. If doctor SEO experts pay careful attention to this official guidance from Google and implement it, it is possible to reverse the effects of Panda on a doctor or dentist’s website rankings.

A post in the Google Webmaster Central, following the Panda update, informed everyone publicly: “Our recent update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites, so the key thing for webmasters to do is make sure their sites are the highest quality possible. We looked at a variety of signals to detect low quality sites. Bear in mind that people searching on Google typically don’t want to see shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that are just not that useful.”

In the same post, Google emphasized that even if just one portion of a website has poor quality content, the website rankings will suffer as a whole. In Google’s own words: “In addition, it’s important for webmasters to know that low quality content on part of a site can impact a site’s ranking as a whole. For this reason, if you believe you’ve been impacted by this change you should evaluate all the content on your site and do your best to improve the overall quality of the pages on your domain. Removing low quality pages or moving them to a different domain could help your rankings for the higher quality content.”

Photo Credit: waterlamd (sxc.hu)