I would like you to read the post or watch the video again, but consider it from a different light.  In October I was training on what is RSS.  Today lets talk about how an RSS feed helps the SEO of your Blog.

When subscribers are notified in their RSS reader you just added a blog post and they click on your links to the site to read the post,  it increases your click through rate!

It shows Google you are providing interesting content for your readers.  Written or video content is "King" when engaging the interest of readers on social networking sites.  If readers are subscribed and keep coming back when pinged you justed posted,  Whahlaaaa… more money in the Bank to increase page ranking of your site in the eyes of Google.

The higher the click through rate, the better the chance your blog will make it to page one in your local area if coded correctly.  RSS is just one way to increase the SEO of your Blog. It is also one of the easiest areas to set up and use to promote your site.

As long as you offer content of interest to your subscribers, they will most likely keep coming back.  However, if you are not adding good content, readers will either not sign up after they visit the first time or remove themselves from the feed if disappointed.  Here a Five Tips on what NOT TO DO when creating your blog and blog posts so viewers don't lose interest.

1. Ramble on about what you are doing during your work day.  Readers are looking for orthodontic, dental, or interesting social content viewed from your perspective.  Mix it up! Also, keep in mind that your blog is social.  No more than 20% active marketing of your practice. No one is interested in revisiting an ad.
2. Adding photos without written narrative explaining what is going on and why they should be interested in viewing them.. (the key concept being interesting to others)
3. Unorganized look and feel creating negative emotion.  A visually disorganized blog and navigation, just like your website, causes confusion and loses readers.
4. Using different fonts and font sizes in your posts.  Decide when you start what font and size to use and stick with it throughout for aesthetics.  Its OK to increase the font to emphasize a new idea or introduce a section of content.  However, maintain continuity with the same size font and color when doing so.
5. Different size photos on a page.  Think of your blog as a photo gallery of sorts.  Presentation is everything!  Crop photos the same for a uniform look and insert in a table.  If you have many photos, consider using Flickr or my favorite Smug Mug with a link to your photo gallery.  Photo services make for better presentation anyway.

Your Blog is a representation of you and your practice, just like your website.  With the growth of social networking, it may actually someday become more important than your website.  Who knows what the future will bring. Structure your blog correctly from the start to engage, add RSS, and promote subscription to your blog to patients, their families and friends.

But the truth of the matter is …if you provide a professional service… then YOU are your product.  It isn’t the type of braces you use that achieve the final result; it is your attitudes, skills, and knowledge using different treatment modalities that creates a beautiful healthy smile.  Your ability to sell yourself as a product builds and maintains a successful practice now and for the future. Therefore, your services can be promoted using your blog in much the same way as any other product being sold online.

One of the great things I love about blogs and blogging is the credibility you can build up over a relatively short period of time. You have much more flexibility with a blog than a traditional information website.

1. You do not have to know html code to manage your own blog which eliminates your webmaster
2. You have total access to the back end of your site to easily edit or add new content on a regular basis
3. You can upload photos, audio, and video to your site.  If  you don’t have your own video, you can embed free video from YouTube
4. You can SEO every blog post and page of your site so it is found in your local area on the search engines
5. Plugins or add-ons are available to add flash and cool affects on your site.  You are only limited by your own imagination, time invested, and skill level

Many professionals still believe prospective new patients are not looking online for orthodontic or dental treatment providers.   This belief couldn’t be further from the truth. The monthly reports from the Google Local Business Center are verifiable proof patients are looking for you every day. The question is are you there at the exact time they are looking you… and offering content they are interested in reading or watching on video.

One of my clients Dr. Joseph Porter in Louisiana has allowed me to post one of his monthly reports off the Google Local business center.  If only one new patient per month calls the office to schedule an appointment and starts treatment (very conservative projection) consider how powerful it would be if you had a website and a separate blog to attract and engage new patients to contact your office.  Can you afford not to target this Internet audience?

If you don't have an Internet presence your local area, you might as well be invisible in today's orthodontic market place where the vast majority of consumers go online to research treatment providers whether they are referred to them by their general dentist, friends, or family.  Doesn't matter, they want to check you out first before picking up the phone to schedule an appointment.  This is the way it works today.  The Internet and social networking has changed all rules when it comes to marketing a business today.

The key to an effective blogging strategy is the correct setup of the blog to engage and inform visits which includes SEO, a separate domain name and hosting service from your website, and continually adding new content on a regular basis of interest to visitors so they know you are out there. Blogging is an art and like everything else, in order to do it correctly, training is necessary to learn how to do it yourself or have a basic understanding what is involved to oversee vendors you outsource your services for optimum results and return on investment.

As one of your New Year Resolutions, I want to urge you as a professional, to look into and actually start blogging about your professional services and the benefits and features of undergoing treatment in your practice rather than your competitors.  It could bring in more new patients, make you a published author online, and who knows what opportunities are awaiting once you get the word out on a more personal level to those interested in treatment in your area.  Social networking is the "HOT" marketing medium in today's tech savvy society.

I predict that in the not too distant future, your blog will attract more new patients than your website. Eventually many Blogs will outrank websites on the search engines. Social networking is virgin territory for most professional businesses.  Stake your claim now on Internet real-estate in your local area to gain early positioning in front of your competitors and then maintain it for the long haul.

If it’s the technology and the time required to blog on your own that scares you, let me help clear the fog around blog building for you. 

It works if you work it! Promote your practice and orthodontic expertise through the marketing power of the Internet.

Share your thoughts… do you agree or disagree blogging as a marketing tool is a good option to implement today in to promote your business

I spend much of my time these days coaching orthodontic practices on how to write a SEO blog post so it gets noticed on the search engines by readers?

To start, the first thing to consider when you are writing a blog post is how you are going to please both the search engine spiders as well as your human visitors. It isn’t all about SEO and keywords no matter what you may have heard or read.  Google for example is much more interested in you making your articles readable and interesting.  Your click through rate (CTR)  is one of the criteria it looks at.  If readers are immediately clicking out of your blog or don’t return because the content is considered boring or unreadable, it will hurt your ranking.  Your goal is to create fun and interesting blog posts to please both the search engines and readers.

The second thing to consider is no matter how great the content in your blog post, if you don’t add keywords, you’ll find it harder to get free search engine traffic.  When consumers are searching online with keywords, the search engines rank your content based on the keywords, Meta tags, and written content that correspond.

Since the search engines are sophisticated software programs based on mathematical algorithms.  They cannot read the written word, so they have no idea what you are blogging about unless you tell them with SEO (search engine optimized) coding on each of your blog posts.  If there are no keywords in your article to match Meta tags or an anchor text link the search engine spiders deem relevant when they index your blog post, they will bypass your post making it impossible for readers to find you. 

Don’t get carried away with keywords in your posts that make your blog post look and sound weird or artificial.  This is called keyword stuffing. Your goal is to achieve a balance between good content and optimizing your post so the search engines will consider the content relevant and index it accordingly.

Believe it or not, effective blogging is an art! So let’s take a look at 7 ways you can create blog posts to engage both search engine spiders and human readers:

1. Include keywords in your title tag.  The title is the first area the search engine spiders are programmed to look when they come to view your web page. Every time you add a new blog post, it is considered a NEW page to the search engine spiders and they are on alert. If you have your blog setup correctly with an SEO plug-in, it will give you the option of writing a more appealing title for your human readers and then using a manual override for the search engines. How you SEO your blog setup initially is critical to the success of your posts.
2. Use keywords in your headlines that are relevant to your topic.  It will help the search engines find your article and encourage potential readers to click on the link to your post.
3. Content is King when writing a blog post.  Write on topics of interest with a human element.  Blogging is social networking.  Readers are entertaining your insight, opinions and evaluating your personal expertise in any given area.  I recommend blog posts be written on an ninth grade reading level, not on a professional post graduate level they don’t understand or are interested in taking the time to decipher.  If you write as though you are talking to a group of friends or high school students, it will flow better and sound like you are really interested in writing on the topic.
4. Use relevant links in your blog posts whenever possible and link your keywords with an actual word or keyword phrase.I also suggest you write in the first person using “I” when writing blog posts rather than the third person using “WE”, whenever possible. It elicits authenticity which is hard to deliver when writing in the third person.
5. Break your blog article into small paragraphs and/or bulleted points just like this one.  Internet readers skim content.  Readers view content on a computer screen differently than they do on a printed sheet. Bullet points and short paragraphs makes it easier for them to read your post, increasing you’re the chances they will come back and read more at a later date if they find your content interesting.  
6. Throw in video whenever possible.  Readers today relate to video.  Who wouldn’t prefer watching a video to reading a post when trying to get your point across or discuss content of interest?  YouTube and other social video sites are a wonderful source of content.  You are only limited by your own imagination when blogging.  Mix it up and give it a twist you can associate with your content.
7. Always add a thumbnail or photo to your blog post.  Photos add interest to a boring text page and break it up for the human eye to scan easier.  To maintain and aesthetic look to your blog, I suggest using the same size photo whenever possible.

You don’t know… what you don’t know… til you know it!  Hope you found these tips and links of benefit to you.  Leave a comment or question below we can share with others.  Let me know what you want me to write about and subjects of interest in Internet marketing.