Keywords are what lead to your website.

(This continues the series on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - how to have your website found by ranking high in the search engines.)

Keywords and search terms are basically the same thing.  When someone looks for acupuncture in google, they’ll enter a search term.

The most reliable search term to bring in patients is your location + acupuncture.  For example, if you’re in Atlanta, someone would probably search for one of

acupuncture in atlanta

atlanta acupuncture

acupuncturist atlanta

They may also search for other towns local to Atlanta, such as Rockdale or West End.

In order for your site to be found, you’re going to need to be indexed for those search terms.  If you’re like many acupuncturists, you probably have your location on just your main page and your contact page.   You really want to have your location on ALL pages.

However, it’s more complicated than that. There’s a bunch of different places to put keywords.  You can put them in

• The domain name (yourlocationacupuncture.com or acupunctureinyourlocation.com for example.)
• Meta tags (only seen by search engines)
• Title tags(seen in the top bar of the web browser)
• H1 tags (your on page tags - basically headlines)
• And or course, in the actual page text.  (You will use the word acupuncture on your site, of course!)

Before you go nuts and put your location and acupuncture keywords everywhere, realize that Google also looks for abuse of keywords.  Simply filling up a page with keywords can get you black listed for “keyword spam”.

Don’t be afraid of using keywords, just use them sensibly, along with related content and related words.  Google uses something called Latent Semantic Indexing for this.

Latent Semantic Indexing is a fancy way of saying “Google looks at related words.” If most sites related to acupuncture have words like moxibustion, pain, relief and herbs, and you have those same words, your site will rank higher for acupuncture.  This is a surprisingly slick way of figuring out if a site is truly related to the subject matter.

Bottom line - make sure you have your keywords in prominent places throughout your site, and make sure it’s relevant to the page’s main topic.

“Buying” Keywords vs. “Research” Keywords

In theory you should also be able to rank for keywords such as “pain relief in boston”, and get patients that way.  I have yet to hear of an acupuncturist successfully doing this.  It’s entirely possible, but the most reliable keywords are for people who already know what they want.  “Acupuncture in Boston” is a search term entered by someone who’s probably ready to become a patient.  “Pain relief in Boston” is a search term entered by someone who’s researching.

I see no reason why you can’t help people who are researching, but I recommend working on this only AFTER you’ve got the other keywords covered.

How to Be Relevant AND Important

The reason why Google is the top search engine is because it returns relevant results.  They have patents galore on different methods to discover if a web page or website is relevant.  Some of the ways Google determines if your site is relevant:

• Age of the domain name (such as acupunctureclinicmarketing.com) -  A domain that has been around for awhile is much more likely to be relevant.  (Google somehow patented this!)
• Latent Semantic Indexing - As mentioned above, if you use terms that are common to other sites in your industry, it’s far more likely that your site is relevant.
• Keyword Presence - As mentioned before, having the keywords in various places on the page is important.

I believe there are at least 30 other factors that are used to determine your web page’s relevance. For the most part, they are determined by what’s actually on your page, called “on page factors”. Google and the other search engines give hints, but keep the specifics top secret.

So once your site is relevant, how do you help Google decide that your site is also important?

How to Be Important (according to Google)

Simple.

Incoming links (and off-page factors, but mostly incoming links.)  Google’s thinking is if other websites find your site to be important, they’ll link to it.  If your site isn’t important enough to be linked to, it’s obviously not very important.

There are various directories where you can sign up for incoming links.  I’ve listed some in “The Faucet”.  It still surprises me how many people have the book but haven’t used it!  It wouldn’t be fair for me to give you information that other people paid for, but I definitely recommend acufinder.com and google local.  You may also want to consider TCMDirectory.com.  Acufinder has a free listing, but in order to list your website you have to pay.  TCMdirectory is a paid service.

This past weekend I heard from an acupuncturist who told me,

I paid alot of money to have my site SEO’d and then hand delivered over the last 6 months to 25 sites a month.

That amounts to 150 incoming links.  When I checked her site, she only had 41 links.  Most of them she received herself.  Many of them are duplicates from the same site.  I don’t have all the details to know for sure, but I really don’t think she got her money’s worth.  This is actually a typical experience for acupuncturists trying an “SEO person”.

If you pay someone to “SEO” your site, it’s pretty common for them to do one of two things:

1. Work on on-page factors, which is mostly putting your keywords in the right places.  This isn’t very difficult at all, especially if you’re able to edit your pages yourself.
2. Work on off-page factors, which is getting relevant backlinks to your site.  This is more time consuming and expensive.  Unfortunately, most of the time they give you poor links.

BOTH on-page and off-page factors are needed for good SEO.  Your site must be relevant AND important.  Any SEO person who tells you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re doing - or they’re selling you something.

Frankly, SEO is the most important factor determining the success of your website!  If you want to market your acupuncture practice with a beautiful site but no one ever visits it, good luck.  The problem always is, finding an SEO person you can trust, or knowing what to do.  From what I’ve seen, most SEO folks know just enough to talk a good game, but don’t actually understand what they’re doing.  Or perhaps they do, but they’re lazy and deliver through shortcuts.

(I’ve even run into this problem myself.  A month ago I paid for 400 backlinks of a certain quality.  The SEO person did get me 401 links, BUT they were of low quality.  I’m still waiting for him to make up the difference.)

One person who does know their SEO is Elie Goldschmidt.  He runs AcupunctureBusinessSchool.com with Andy Rosenfarb, and also TCMdirectory.com.  He actually has a course on SEO for acupuncturists, and even better, it gives you 10 CEU/PDA Points from the NCCAOM. I actually looked up the details just now, and discovered he’s also offering a free listing in the TCMdirectory, which is normally $74 a year.

Page from the SEO Report

Elie also produces a report for $150 that covers 35 different areas of SEO. It gives 41 pages of details of how to improve your site’s ranking. He did it for one of my websites, and here’s the result (click for a full size image):

(You’ll notice I scored well, but could do better. I need to pay more attention to my own SEO instead of my client’s websites!)

This is just one page out of 41.  Like I mentioned, normally this costs $150, but Elie has agreed to offer it to my readers at a discount, just $120.  Also he has agreed to discount his course to $160 from the normal price of $200.  Buy both together for just $250.  Remember, this also includes the TCMdirectory listing, which gives a very relevant link back to your site, and NCCAOM credits that you need anyway (if you’re in the US).

This deal is not advertised on his sites, of course.  You’ll need to contact Elie directly and make sure to mention Burton sent you.  Be sure to let me know how it turns out - I’d like hearing that your site jumped to the top of the listings.

Before you rush off to take advantage of this, I want to point out one thing.  Much of this report deals with on-page changes you’ll want to make to your site. If you have a website, you might not have the ability to edit it yourself. Keep that in mind.

Our service at Acupuncture Clinic Websites is completely editable and contains all the SEO capabilities that you’ll ever need or want to use, including:

• Editable Description and Keyword Meta Tags.  Description meta tags usually determine EXACTLY what shows up in Google’s search results.
• Automatically generated and submitted XML sitemaps.  The sitemaps are automatically sent directly to the search engines every time you add or remove pages or posts.
• 301 redirects for moved pages.  You can change the location of the page, and readers/search engines will be properly redirected.
• No .htm or .html extensions  All pages show up as simply www.site.com/page instead of www.site.com/page.html

The only one thing Acupuncture Clinic Websites doesn’t do for SEO is a complex internal linking scheme that is used by some very large websites with a lot of content.

Anyway, if you’re unhappy with your current site, let me know. I may be able to help out or recommend a solution even if you’re not using our website service.

Next week I’ll cover more about On Page SEO factors.

By the way, my contest for renaming my book, Never Market Again is still on.  If you have ideas of how to give it a more relevant name, I’d love to hear it.  Go here and suggest a title. You could win a prize.

As always, if you find this article helpful, or have any questions/comments, I’d enjoy hearing from you. Just leave a comment below.