SEO Facts All Complementary Therapists Should Know

September 09, 2010

If you are a psychotherapist or acupuncturist or hypnotherapist today, you either have a website already or you should have one. But if your site is without what is known as SEO (search engine optimization), it is not going to bring you the success you desire to have. Since SEO is not an inexpensive enterprise, some of you may be tempted to DIY it. If this is the case, you need to be on your guard against some common mistakes and know what you are doing. The following information will help you to a successful SEO-laden site:

The Title of Your Website Should Grab the Attention of Search Engines

There is simply nothing more important than the title that grabs the attention of your potential clients. You must, therefore, come up with a catchy phrase with which to host your site. You can combine this with the SEO demand to have the product or service reflected in the name of the site. This is the all-important relevance factor that search engines utilize in their rankings. It is also an essential aspect in terms of the search phrases potential clients may use to land on your site.

PR Has No Bearing on Your Rankings

Lots of practitioners are belaboring under the illusion that SEO is all about pushing PR (Page Ranking) in order to improve your search engine rankings. Having to explain that PR has virtually zero effect on a site’s ranking can become tiresome, or even that a low PR is not necessarily a bad thing for a website. The days when PR was an all-important factor in determining the quality of a site have gone with the wind a long time ago by now. You can, therefore, rest assured that PR per se is not going to make a difference one way or the other. What will matter is your backlinks!

The Quality Rather Than the Quantity of Your Links Is What Matters

The number of links by itself is not what’s going to get your site the attention it deserves. A link that has a high quality value (as in terms of its relevance to your site), will outdo a 101 bad or irrelevant links, which means that quantity alone can actually backfire on you. So don’t be tempted to mimic SEO companies who keep adding hundreds of link to their sites each month. If the links are woefully irrelevant, such sites might actually get penalized or banned altogether by most search engines.

So keep this adage in mind: it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality that matters.

Your Rankings May Fluctuate

Google, the most popular and widely used search engine, is constantly experimenting with its search algorithm. What this means is that keywords that kept your ranking high may suddenly drop down a bit without apparent rhyme or reason. Don’t panic when you see this happening. Keep in mind that this is just a passing phase. In other words, your keywords may bounce back to the top in no time at all. There may be times when months go by without improvement, but if your site is a quality site and you have done nothing that could incur a penalty or a ban, your ranking should get back to its deserved place eventually. The problem may simply be due to your keywords ranking low in some outdated datacenters.

Traffic By Itself Is Not Conversion

If your website ranks high because it has been properly search engine optimized, and even if it comes up in the number one position in Google, for example, you can rejoice, but only to a point. What you need is the kind of content that will get your potential clients to at least start making enquiries. The more enquiries you get, the more chances you have to land clients.

At NaturalTherapyForAll we get thousands of enquiries each and every month. What is crucial here is that we don’t simply pass these enquiries on to you. That alone would not give you much of an advantage. What we do is verify all the enquiries before we pass them on to our registered practitioners. This can obviously save you a lot of time and effort.

The SEO of your website need not cost you more than you think you can safely afford to spend on this all-important factor in your attempt to have a successful, a client-converting, website. Just remember that we can help you achieve your goals. Our support is like no other. With us on your side, your luck is always already also there.