Another year is winding down, and I want to wish all of our clients, friends, family and visitors a wonderful holiday season.
We have had an exciting year here at Bionex Multimedia, with a lot of positive changes (and some challenges too!). I really want to thank our fantastic clients for their continued support. I really believe that we have some of the best clients in the web design profession!
We are also really looking forward to 2010: We will be at the OVMA Conference at the end of January and, just before then, our team will be rolling out several new services, which will help us reach even more veterinary professionals.
Once again, have a wonderful holiday. We wish you all the best for the New Year we look forward to continuing to serve you in 2010.
Today I'll discuss the various ways that you can update your veterinary web site. We are happy to help with any method of updating your web site - the important thing is that you do update it!
Why Update Your Veterinary Web Site?
Before we talk about how, lets briefly reflect on why it's important to keep your veterinary web site up to date:
- Google likes it: Google will rank your web site higher if it's updated recently and if you update it regularly (yes, Google knows)
- Your clients like it: Clients respond more positively to an up to date web site - it shows your clinic is committed to keeping current
- Your web site will get better: By regularly looking at your web site, you are bound to find and fix typos, and reword text to make it easier to read and more client friendly
Ways to Update Your Veterinary Web Site
There are lots of great ways you can update your veterinary web site: From simple emails to advanced web-based systems. Let's have a look.
With Our Help
We are happy to help you keep your web site current. You simply send us information, and we will format it nicely and put it on your web site. Ways to send us information can include:
- Email: Just type in what you would like to see on your web site, and we'll take care of the rest! Simple and quick
- Word document: Send us a word document with your updates (you can even use colors and styling), and we'll put it on your web site
- CDs: Lots of images or other large files? Just send us a CD, and we'll take care of optimizing them for your web site and getting them online
- PDFs: Like to draw? Simply scan it and send it to us!
On Your Own
If you like to do updates directly to your web site yourself, we can build a web-based system to suit you. These are call Content Management Systems (CMS), and come in several types:
- Direct editing: Know some HTML and want to edit your web site's code directly? We can easily implement a CMS to handle this
- Simple WYSIWYG: WYSIWYG = "What You See Is What You Get". This lets you edit the text of your web site in a Word-like setting. Really simple to use and no HTML skill needed
- Advanced WYSIWYG: Want more control? An Advanced WYSIWYG CMS lets you add, edit and delete pages from your web site, lets you move pages around in your web site's hierarchy, and can even let you update the overall look of your web site. Really powerful
- Custom editing: Want a hybrid of the above CMS's? We can custom-design any CMS that best fits your needs
As you can see, there are lots of ways to keep your veterinary web site up to date. Use whatever method works best for you!
I've had a lot of discussions recently with veterinarians about the importance of veterinary web sites, and I think that many of us don't have a good idea of what a veterinary web site does for a clinic: It's exactly the opposite of what you might think.
Veterinary Web Sites Are Different
Determining the impact on your veterinary clinic of your web site is much more difficult than with many other web sites, so the need for a veterinary web site is not nearly as obvious as in other professions. Veterinary web site are different...
Let's start by considering a web site that sells products, say t-shirts. Measuring the effectiveness of this web site is easy: You can see how many t-shirts you sold online. Veterinary web sites, however, don't sell products, they sell services (your medical skills). Since these cannot be bought directly on the web site, measuring the effectiveness of a veterinary web site is more difficult; measuring the impact of not having a web site is more difficult still.
So what does a veterinary web site do for your clinic?
Veterinary Web Sites Capture Potential Clients
Veterinary web sites do not sell your services - your expertise and compassion in the clinic do that. What a veterinary web site does is give you the chance to impress potential clients by getting them into your clinic.
The problem with determining the importance of a veterinary clinic web site is that it's successes and failures are essentially invisible to us. To see what I mean, let's consider the perspective from the point of a potential new client:
An owner has just got a new puppy and needs a vet. They will typically do 3 things: Ask their friends, look online, and/or look in the phone book. We'll consider each of these scenarios with respect to their use of your clinic's web site:
- Ask their friends: If their friends have a strong recommendation for a local vet, they will probably go to this vet. However if more than one clinic is recommended (by different friends), they will almost certainly check the clinics' web site and choose the one that they feel most comfortable with
- Look online: Most people are using the Internet to gather information about businesses before contacting them. If your clinic doesn't have a web site, or it ranks poorly in Google, these clients will not find you, and they will probably choose another clinic
- Look in the phone book (including online at yellowpages.ca): Here they will find your clinic, and the other clinics near you. More and more people are using this as a springboard to get more information: First they find the local services in the phone book (e.g. clinics within 10 kilometers), and then they visit the web sites of the most likely clinics to determine which one to choose. Here are potential outcomes:
- If you don't have a web site, they may choose to exclude your clinic because they cannot get more information
- If your web site is outdated or does not look professional, they may choose to try a clinic that presents a more professional online image
- If you have a great web site, your clinic is more likely to be one of their top choices
As you can see, if the pet owner above does not find your web site, or does not like your web site, they will probably move on to the next clinic. The problem from our point of view is that this is completely invisible to us.
Are You Missing 60-80% of Potential New Clients?
Our statistics show that around 61% of adults search for information on professional services, including veterinary care, online. In the 33 to 44 year old demographic, this jumps to 80%. How many potential new clients have passed up your clinic without you knowing?
Bottom Line: The Internet Net
The bottom line is that your web site is like a net in the Internet river - if you don't have one, or if yours has big holes in it, you'll never know how many fish got away.
After a brief hiatus for conferences and a vacation, I am back with the final installment in our photography series. Now that we know how to take great photos, we'll look at the best way to put them on your veterinary clinic's web site.
When using photos on your web site, keep the following simple points in mind to create a clean, professional look:
- Size: Photos on the web are tiny. Usually about 300 pixels wide is all you need (most cameras output pictures at about 3,000 pixels wide), so reduce the size of the photo ahead of time. This will make your web site much faster loading
- Number: Generally, web pages look better with one prominent photo on the page instead of several photos scattered about. I like to put the photo in the top corner of the page (near the start of the content) to 'anchor' the page
- File Type: Most digital cameras create photos in a 'jpeg' format, which is exactly what we want. In general if you're given a choice of file types, jpeg (or jpg) is safe. For completeness, if you are dealing with an illustration instead of a photo, the 'gif' or 'png' types are usually better
- The Photo: Since photos have a lower resolution on the web (since you've reduced the size as we talked about in point 1), it's best to choose photos that have a clear subject, with good composition and lighting
That's it for our photography series. If you want to learn more about taking great photos for your web site, just see our blogs from the previous few weeks.
Want a tip that will immediately get you taking better photos? Here it is: Use the Rule of Thirds.
The Rule of Thirds is simple:
1. Imagine a 3x3 grid over your framed shot
The standard subject-centered picture
2. Move your subject to one of the grid's intersections
The Rule of Thirds makes it more interesting
3. That's it. Easy, eh?
What's Going On?
The Rule of Thirds aligns a subject with the 3x3 grid's lines and intersections to create more tension, energy and interest in the composition than centering the subject does. It's that simple - we generally prefer the composition of photos shot this way.
A Great Example of the Rule of Thirds
Before:
The sun's right in the middle
After:
The sun's moved to one of the grid points
Using the Rule of Thirds adds more visual interest to the photo
We used a sunset here, as it is a classic photo for demonstrating the Rule of Thirds, but the Rule of Thirds applies equally well to people, animals, mountains, or almost any other subject matter. Give it a try for yourself.
For the next topic in our photo series, lets talk about common veterinary web site photography pitfalls. These are things we see all the time that really affect the quality of pictures and, as a result, your clinic's web site.
Common photography pitfalls to avoid:
- Fuzzy focus: The most important thing! Make sure the picture is in focus. Take a couple just to be safe, and zoom in on the photo on your camera's screen (it's amazing how often a photo looks in focus until you zoom in)
- Background clutter: Junk in the background makes your photos look messy (literally!). When taking a picture look at the background too. Is there a cluttered desk? Give it a quick straightening-up. Is the treatment room a bit of disaster? Tidy it up. I know it's easier just to point-n-shoot, but this will make a big difference in how your clinic is perceived
- Frame it right: I am surprised at how often we get photos of, for instance, a procedure where half of the action has been cut off because the camera wasn't aimed well. These pictures looked rushed and unprofessional (usually a 'guilty-as-charged' situation). Take a couple of pictures, and double-check them to make sure they have caught the action that you intended
- Make a list (and check it twice): Make a list of all the pages you'll need photos for, and then keep snapping until you've got your list covered. Again, it's a bit more work, but you'll be much happier with the result
- Lighting: Really important! See our blog from 2 weeks ago for all the info you'll need
Taking a bit of extra time with your photos will really show through on your web site. Remember, your veterinary web site is typically a new client's first impression of your veterinary clinic - good photos help to make that impression a good one.
As veterinarians, we have a great opportunity to have fun and interesting photos on our web site while still keeping our veterinary web sites looking professional - after all we work with animals!
Taking Unique Photographs
What's unique? Good question. How about we look at what isn't unique: The typical photo (of a person, animal, building, etc.) is the head-on shot. We often take these pictures because they're safe and easy to take. So how do we make a photo unique? Simply don't do exactly what you would normally do!
Here's just an idea of some of the things you can do:
- Get down! (or up, or whatever): Try taking photos from completely different angles. For instance get right down in the grass to get a picture from a dog's perspective, or try tilting the camera 30 degrees sideways to create a 'dynamic' feel
- Play with light: Last week, we talked about proper lighting, but that doesn't mean you can't break the rules creatively. Sometimes a silhouette is a more interesting photo
- Expose yourself (no, not that way): If your camera lets you, try playing with the exposure settings. This is how they get those great, slightly blurred, motion shots you've seen
- Crop it good: Try framing your subject so they are cropped tightly, even just shooting only a portion of the subject. This makes the photo interesting by focusing exclusively on one part of the subject
- Don't stare!: Photos where the subject isn't looking directly at the camera really engage us, because we feel like we've caught the subject in 'real life'
- Keep shooting: Now that we all have digital cameras, it's easy to take lots of different photos, so don't hesitate to play and get creative. After all, you can always delete the ones that don't turn out!
Veterinary Photography Examples
A typical photo. Safe, but a bit boring
A cropped, balanced photo. Notice that the subject is looking off-camera
(it's also really nicely lit, as we talked about last week)
Down in the grass. Now that's unique - a much more compelling photo, eh?
Breaking the rules of lighting make this a really interesting picture
Taking unique photos does take a bit more effort (after all, you might have to get down in the grass!), but it's definitely worth it, and the photos you get will really make your web site stand out.
Lighting: Just pop-up the flash and all is good, right? It depends... Your camera's flash is great for making sure photos aren't black, but haven't you always been a little disappointed at just how glaring flash photos look? They look just like they were, well, taken with a flash. Flash photos are great for remembering gatherings with friends, but they don't look very professional. To get that elusive professional look, lets look at some great techniques for lighting your photographs.
Professional Lighting
If you have a professional lighting kit available to you, that's terrific. There's lots of great stuff on the Internet about how to set it up, and it really does allow you to take better pictures. For this blog, though, I'll assume that you don't have professional lighting available.
What Not To Do
I think the most important thing to think about with lighting is what not to do. I've also mentioned some easy fixes.
The Flash
I know - we already covered this...
The flash has made the background dark, and over exposed the subject, making the picture harsh. Also, we've got some dreaded green-eye
Fix: The only time I use the flash on my camera is in bright light! I find when bright light is casting sharp shadows (like outdoors on a sunny day), the flash can be great for softening the shadows. Other than that, I try to avoid the flash. If the photo's dark, get some additional lights.
The Rear Window
Don't do it! Placing your subject near a window indoors almost always makes for dark pictures. The light looks great to us, but our eyes do a better job than your camera, which just averages the light in the photo. That means anything indoors (read: your subject) will be very dark.
Basically the opposite problem compared with the flash; the bright window has caused the rest of the photo to be under exposed (dark)
Fix: Place the window to your rear. That way the light from the window will help illuminate your subject.
The Light From Above
If the only light on your subject is from directly above, your subject will be shadowy.
The bright light above has caused shadows across the face that have hidden the subject's features
Fix: Use more light. Try adding some extra lighting from a lower angle - it's worth the effort!
Setting Up Great Lighting - Using What You Have
"OK" I hear you asking, "how do I setup great lighting?" Good question. Here's what I've found works well:
- Use 2-3 Lights, all pointed at the subject's focal feature (e.g. their face):
- One light high, slightly in front and to the side (e.g. the ceiling light)
- One light about the same height as the subject, in front and about 45 degrees to the side (e.g. a floor lamp)
- (If you have a third light handy) One light slightly higher than the subject, behind them and to the side (well out of the picture)
Here we have a really nice shot, lit from above and from the front, offset about 45 degrees. See the difference?
Keep these points in mind, and I bet you'll see an improvement after your first photo. Happy shooting!
Remember when web sites were black text on a gray background? That doesn't quite cut it any more. Today's best veterinary web sites are a combination of great content and visual appeal. A big part of the visual appeal of your web site is the pictures that you put on it.
In today's blog, we'll look at what you can do to make your web site pictures shine (in a related blog coming soon, we'll also discuss the related topic of where to place your pictures on your web site).
Good pictures start at the source: The camera. We'll assume that you will be taking the photos yourself (for some extra pizzazz, however, hiring a professional photographer to take your pictures will really payoff). So lets talk about what to keep in mind when taking pictures for the web.
Photo Setup
No matter how good a picture you take, if the setup for the picture is poor, the picture just won't be great. To setup for a great shot, think of the following:
- Camera: If you don't have a decent camera, it's definitely worth the investment. Your cell phone just isn't going to do it.
- Lighting: Make sure your subject (the focus of the shot) is lit well. And try not to cheat with the flash! In general, photos look much better in natural light. Bright, diffuse light is best. This usually means ensuring the subject is lit from above and from the front (e.g. near a window, but not with their back to one). Outdoor shots in bright sunlight results in harsh shadows and squinting people, so if shooting outdoors, try finding some shade.
- Focus: Be sure your subject is in focus! When reviewing the photo, zoom in on the camera's screen to check that the camera did focus properly (just looking at the whole photo on the screen can be deceiving).
- Tip: If you push the shutter button (the one that takes the photo) half-way down, the focus will lock on what ever is in the middle. Now, while continuing to hold the button half-way down, you can compose your shot (move the camera), without worrying about losing focus on your subject!
- Do It Again!: Take at least 2 versions of every shot. It really reduces the chances of missing a shot due to blurring (or the camera strap flying in front of the lens!)
Composition
OK, enough technical stuff. Here we'll talk about the artistic side of photography: The composition of your pictures. Here are some ideas that will make your pictures stand out:
- Your Subject: The most important thing! What message do you want your picture to send? For example, a vet in a crisp white lab coat presents a clean, professional image; the same vet in a sweater holding a kitten presents a warm, inviting image.
- The Background: This is the first thing I consider when taking a picture: What's behind the subject? Really look, and think about how the picture will look. For example, if there's a cluttered, messy desk behind the vet we're photographing, you can bet the picture will look messy.
- Be Unique: Don't just take the 'standard' picture of your subject - try something new. If you're photographing a dog outside, try getting right down in the grass with her. You can always take the 'standard' shot too, just to be safe.
- Think in Thirds: The 'rule of thirds' is great for amateur photographers. It automatically makes photos more interesting! To use the rule of thirds, place your subject on a point 1/3 the distance from the edge of the shot (horizontally or vertically or both).
We really think the importance of good pictures can't be overstated - in the weeks to come, we'll focus (pardon the pun) on several of the above points individually.
After a bit of a non-starter of a summer, a touch of fall is already in the air. What better time than now to talk about colours?
Colours on a web site are often chosen based on a company's logo, or on one person's particular likes or dislikes. Whereas integrating your web site with your taste and your overall branding is critical, colours on the web can do more than simply match your logo.
Colours and Feelings
OK, so web sites may not be as soft and cuddly as kittens, but the look and feel of a web site are nonetheless real, and play a big role in that all-important first impression. When considering your web site's colours, I recommend thinking about the look and feel that you want to portray to clients within your clinic, and then matching your web site to it.
"So how do I portray my clinic with colours?" A great question. Along with the design of your web site, colours can say volumes. Here are some thoughts:
- Do you want to your clinic to appear efficient and professional? Try a mainly mono-colour look using blues, grays and some burgundy for accents, with crisp lines straight edges.
- Do you want your clinic to appear soft and elegant? Try faded pastels, such as green and aqua or even light violets, with gradients (colour fades) to soften the colours further.
- Or maybe you want your clinic to look homely and inviting? Try sticking with warm colours, such as tans and browns, complimented with oranges and soft reds. Keep corners rounded and avoid a lot of white space.
Using colours that match your clinic's feel will create unity between your clinic and your web site, strengthening your clinic's 'brand' and its appeal to your clients.
Right now, there are somewhere around 200 million web sites in the world (consisting of at least 25 billion web pages). Given the sheer numbers, how can you make your web site stand out?
As vets, we are in a small enough profession that, fortunately, the numbers become much more manageable, and efforts to help your web site stand out can really pay off. As we talked about last week, a great looking site and easy navigation are important, but there are a bunch of other things that you can do. These efforts should focus on getting and keeping visitors on your site. It's especially valuable to offer them something that they will visit frequently.
What to Offer?
To decide the what is best to offer on your web site, consider what it is being used for. Generally, veterinary web site are used by existing clients to get contact information for booking Fido's next appointment, and by prospective clients as a way to 'check out' who you are.
By focusing on the visitors that you have coming to your web site, you can start to get more visits by offering them additional things to come back for, or more reasons to stay on the site.
Here are some great ideas:
- Refill Request Forms: When your clients are booking Fido's appointment, they discover that they can also pre-order a refill of Fido's food or meloxicam. Convenient.
- Advise: Often when clients book appointments, they are looking for advise. By having basic info online about, say heartworm disease, you can answer a lot of their questions. A weekly blog or ask-the-vet page would also give them lots to read.
- News: Keep your client up to date. You can even add a module to your web site that lets your staff easily update the site daily with a small tidbit - a great reason for clients to come back and have a look.
- Contests: Pets are fun! Your clinic could really stand out by offering, say, a pet photo contest with the best photo submission awarded a gift certificate to a local restaurant each month. You could even have your clients vote on the winner!
- Widgets: What the heck is a widget? A widget is a little program that runs on your clients' computers. It is able to take information from your web site and show it to them on their desktop. For instance, you could show the picture of the most popular pet in the pet photo contest that we just talked about. Very cool.
- Lots More: Get creative! Think about what would be useful to your clients. Ask you staff and your clients for ideas, too.
As an added bonus, not only will these things help you stand and add real value-added services for your clients, they will also make you look modern and advanced. Since your web site is often the point of first contact with potential clients who are looking for the best for their beloved pet, giving an impression of sophistication will definitely make them think twice about choosing another clinic.
Finally, if you offer your clients compelling reasons to come back to your web site, you can be certain that eventually word will spread in the dog park, which may get clients of other vet clinics asking, "why doesn't my vet's web site do that?". Which may get them thinking that there are other things that their clinic doesn't do. I know it's not fair, but it's true. Virtual food for thought.
Most of us think of our web site as a landing spot to capture visitors who are searching for vets through Google, or via the online Yellow Pages. But have you thought of the potential of your veterinary web site to compliment your traditional advertising efforts? Your web site can be more than just a tag-line for the bottom of your ads and flyers!
Traditional Marketing and the Web
Google is great for finding the most popular and important web site for any given business on an international scale, but it's actually not very good for searching on a local scale. Since veterinary clinics are local by nature, Google isn't always very good at ranking your clinic's web site appropriately. This is where the power of traditional marketing comes in.
The "New Traditional" Two-Step
- Create traditional marketing pieces with a call to action
- Have your web site answer the call
Traditional Marketing with a Call to Action
Create your "offline" marketing ads and flyers with a compelling reason to have the user go to your web site (the call to action). For example, you could create an online contest, offer advise, or even offer a cool interactive widget (more on widgets next week).
Answer the Call
Now that you have visitors coming to your web site, give them a great experience! For example, don't just provide a contest, but encourage them to explore your web site further. The more they explore, the more convinced they will be that you are the vet for them.
Our Example
We like this technique so much that we use it too. Below is our latest flyer that we will start mailing early next week. Notice the call to action at the bottom:
Our latest flyer with a call to action
Your web site can be much more than just an island in the Google sea - it can be an integral part of your marketing campaign, both online and offline!
Next week, we'll talk about some other great ideas to make your web site stand out and attract clients.
Sometimes it's just better to pull the plug.
Sure you've got a web site and it shows your address and contact info. That's got to be enough right? I think you already know the answer. The Internet is always changing - if your web site isn't keeping up, you're falling behind!
If this describes your web site, you're not alone! As vets, we have a lot on our minds... Our web sites (understandably) tend not to rise too high on our to-do lists. With the importance of web sites these days, though, it's worth bumping its priority up a bit. Here's what you can do if you've got an old, creaky web site:
- Update it, or
- Rebuild it
Either of these options is better than doing nothing!
Update to Get Noticed
If you're web site has good bones (in other words, it is well coded and looks good), then just updating it will probably do. The easiest thing to do is simply look at all of the pages on your web site and ask some questions:
- Can I update any outdated text?
- Can I re-write the content to make it more informative and appealing to my clients?
- Can I re-format the text to make it easier to read (e.g. add sub-headings, bullets, etc.)?
- Can I add better pictures to the page to compliment the text?
- Are there new services that we offer that aren't mentioned?
- Is there anything I can add that would help my clients?
Simply doing this every few months (once a year at the least!), will dramatically help your web site. It will keep it up to date and Google will notice. Did you know that an up to date web site does better on Google?
Pulling the Plug
Sometimes it's more humane to pull the plug on your old site and rebuild it from the ground up. This is a great option to consider if your web site is slow, doesn't look good, or is poorly built. Poorly built sites, especially, are difficult to update and don't do as well on Google.
And sometimes it's just more liberating to shake off the shackles of your old web site!
Whatever you choose to do, just by doing something, you will regain control of your web site, and start to realize its full potential as a powerful tool to attract and retain and clients.
The Internet is a unique medium. Unlike other media (such as books, magazines, or even TV), it's permanent, but dynamic; it's always available, but always changing with the times. A web page may have been updated since you last visited it, keeping its content current. Wouldn't it be great if the books in your reference library did that? This is the beauty of the Internet. But it comes with a catch.
The Catch: Stale Content
The catch is that if you don't update your web site's content regularly, it will go stale. Stale content is old, outdated content.
So what is stale? How old until content is old? We've all run into web sites that haven't been updated since July 1997; these are sites are definitely stale. How about July 2007? Probably stale. So where's the dividing line? So much depends on the nature of your content.
If your web site is covering celebrity exploits, it's stale if it hasn't been updated within the last day (or even hour)! For veterinary web sites, if you haven't updated a page's content within the last year, it's probably stale. We recommend reviewing your web site at least yearly.
But It's Not Outdated!
Keeping content fresh is not just about updating outdated content, it's also about continuously improving your content. If a page is truly fine as-is, you don't need to update it just for the sake of updating it. However, most pages on a web site could do with some tweaking. Here are some things to think about when reviewing your web site:
- Is the text outdated?
- Is there a better way to word something?
- Have you changed the way you do what the page describes?
- Could you add an example?
- Is there a new picture that would work for the page?
- Can you simplify or better organize the content?
- Can you make the content easier to read? For example, could you:
- Add sub-titles?
- Add bulleted lists?
- Break up long paragraphs?
- Highlight important points?
For more information on ideas for your web site, see our: Web Site Ideas page.
Stale Design
When most people think about updating a web site, they think about the design first. We've placed this last to make a point: Unless the design of your web site is very outdated, or makes using the web site really difficult, focus on your content first.
Veterinary web sites are information-driven web sites; visitors are coming for the content, not the design. This means that, even if your web site looks fantastic, if it doesn't give visitors the information they want, it's not doing its job. A great example of this is the VIN Message Boards: They're not much to look at design-wise, but they get a lot of visitors, because they have outstanding content.
VIN Message Boards: Not much to look at, BUT great content keeps visitors interested
So if your content is awesome, updating the design can be a great idea. This can be fast and easy to do, too.
We have just updated the colour scheme on the Bionex web site: We moved from the black and grays that were current a few years ago, to the more modern and inviting colour scheme you see now. The cool thing is that, because our site is built to be easily updatable, it only took a couple of hours. Nice, eh?
Final Thoughts
Not only will keeping your web site fresh keep your visitors interested, but it has the benefit of also keeping Google interested. Google knows when you last updated your site; and it likes fresh content.
We hope that we've motivated you to take a good look at your web site - it's worth the effort! Next week, we will talk about what to do when your site's just too far gone for updates alone to help.
This week, we will discuss a common question: How to get your web site shown on Google.
Just to be clear, we will talk about getting found in the "organic" search results (the unpaid left-side results). Getting your web site shown in the paid ("sponsored links") results (the links on the right) is a topic that we will discuss in a later blog. This is a huge topic, so we are only going to go over the basics here (and even then, this is a long blog!).
How Google Works
The first thing to understand about Google is that, when you search the web with Google, you are not searching the web! You did read that right.
What you are actually doing is searching Google's database (snap-shot) of the web. This means that Google saves a copy of every web page that it comes across on the Internet. It is from this saved version of the Internet that Google draws its search results.
Google search results for term "veterinary"
To order its results (often in the millions), Google gives each page in its database a ranking of 1 to 10, called PageRank. When you search for specific terms, Google shows the pages ranked from highest to lowest. This means the important question is: How do I increase the PageRank of my web site?
When Google looks at your web site, there are three main ways it's ranking it:
- Page structure
- Page content
- External links (popularity)
Let's have a brief look at each of these.
Page Structure
Page structure is how your web pages are built. Google looks for pages that have the following:
- Good bones: Google likes pages that are built using modern standards. For more information, see our article on Standards Complaint Design
- Proper ("semantic") coding: Pages that are coded properly are easier for Google to read and, as a result, ranked higher. For more information, see our Search Engines page
- Extra (meta) information included: Web pages are designed to include invisible information that describes what's on the page. These are often left off web pages, since they are invisible. Google tends to rank pages with full meta data higher
Page Content
"Content is King!" Content is the most important part of your web page. If people aren't finding the information that they are looking for, they will leave and your page's ranking will reflect it. Here is what Google is looking for:
- Relevant content: Google is looking for content that best matches the terms searched for. By ensuring that your web site provides useful and compelling content, you can be sure it will be relevant to people coming to your page.
- This means that one of the most important things you can do for your web site is take time when writing content (we know it can be painful, but it's worth it!)
- Current content: Google knows when you last updated your web page! Google ranks recently updated content higher than stale content. Google also really likes to see a history of updating content consistently
External Links = Popularity
Here's one of the most important concepts to understand with Google: No matter what you do to your web site, there are things outside your control. The most important of these is links to your web site (vs. links that you put on your web site).
Google treats links from other web sites to yours as a "vote" in favour of your web site. The more votes you have, the better... Sort of. Google is smart; a link isn't just a link. Here's what Google's looking for:
- Lots of spontaneous links: Google wants to see a lot of links coming from web sites that you do not link to (otherwise, you are involved in "reciprocal linking", a common trick used to try and fool Google)
- This means that you want to be sure that you tell lots of people about your site, and have great content that will make people want to link to it (e.g. from their blog, etc.)
- Links from high ranking pages: The higher the rank of the web page linking to you, the more important that link is. For example, if the American Veterinary Medical Association links to you from their home page (typically the highest ranked page of a web site), you're golden! However, if Bill's Diner on Route 3 links to you, Google doesn't think too much of it...
- Links to specific information: If the links to your web site are to various different pages (vs. just your home page), Google assumes (usually correctly!) that people are finding lots of useful information on your site, and are linking to it - exactly what Google wants to see!
We hope you found that helpful. Needless to say, the above only scratches the surface, but it should give you a good idea of what Google's thinking. Next week, we will talk about keeping your web site fresh.
Welcome to the new Bionex Multimedia Inc. blog. We've been so busy helping our clients in the last while that we haven't had time to work on our own online presence. This blog is our first step towards getting our selves back "online" with our own web site! It's also an excellent reminder of how easy it is to have your web site fall off your priorities list. And we understand - it happened to us.
As part of our continuing growth, we have been working hard to develop new services and make our great customer support even better. Over the next few months, we will roll out our new services - on our new web site: We are working on a completely redesigned web site to showcase what we can do for you. Keep watching, and please let us know what you think!
This blog will become a regular weekly feature on our web site. We will discuss Internet trends as they relate to veterinary web site design and other topics relevant to you. Next week, we'll start with a blog about getting your web site noticed on Google.
