Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vitally important to getting your website to show up on the first or second page of Google’s search engine results. If you’ve had a website for more than 2 seconds, you’ve heard this more than a dozen times.
If you are a counselor, coach, social worker, marriage and family therapist, psychologist, or other type of solopreneur with a private practice in the healing arts, talk of SEO probably makes your head spin and your stomach queasy. It’s like smelling something unpleasant that you can’t escape.
Do-it-yourselfers like you can generally handle creating a website on a host with cool templates and a simple online editing tool. But when it comes to taking the next steps, you lose faith in your abilities as the courage to get into things like html coding feels overwhelmingly intimidating. The more you start researching tips, and listening to SEO gurus with favorite advanced methods, the more insecure, scared or frustrated you become.
I was asked today:
Does SEO have to be done every day, or does it last a while, like a year or so?
Well, I don’t do SEO for a living, but I am increasingly hired to write website content and / or create a DIY website for clients — and that inevitably leads into doing or recommending the basics for SEO. In my experience there are simple basics that must be done that should “last” as long as your content stays the same. Then there are SEO “fads” which will change unpredictably. And lastly, there are ongoing marketing methods that boost SEO.
1. Good as long as you don’t change page content and as long as url stays the same
- meta tags, alt tags, and headline tags (done in your therapysites editor)
- internal links from your pages to your own articles elsewhere on your site
- strategic use of keywords sprinkled through your content
2. Current SEO “fads”, can change when Google feels like it — unpredictable
- interactivity by giving visitors things to click, do, fill out, download, watch, hear
- social media buttons and review / recommendation widgets
- blogs and other frequently new content
3. Marketing with SEO boost juice — ongoing
- incoming (back)links from high traffic sites, like PT, Facebook, and YouTube
- Google Adwords and Google Places
- Your own YouTube channel to house videos you create
- Give-away products like newsletters, special reports, ebooks
No Hype Help: If you head is still spinning from this simplified SEO instruction, and you want some personalized training in how to get your on page / on site (#1) SEO done, I’d be happy to walk you through that during a 30 or 60 minute strategy session.
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Deah,
Thank you for writing this. People are in a panic over the web changes, but I think that they are for the better. I have noticed my rankings go up with the changes, so obviously, I’m biased at this point. I would add from a reliable SEO resource that I was told to add 600-700 relevant static content on the front page, which is high in your keywords (wordpress doesn’t necessarily make this easy to do). Also, I really like Squidoo and other Ezine resources to make links with at least 300 words. That seems to have done wonders for me so far. Thanks Deah, as always, you give great advice.
Michael Salas, Vantage Point Dallas Counseling
Hi Michael, thanks for your comment. I love Squidoo, and you’re prompting me to get back there and do more with it. As for WP, it helps to have keywords in a sidebar widget and in a footer, and of course the tag cloud. You make great points. Thanks for sharing. ~ Deah