“Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" search results for targeted keywords.” (ref 1).

Ranking high on Google and other search engines is essential if you want lots of people to visit your web site, but achieving a high ranking can be difficult in a competitive field like healthcare.

However, once you know what to do, it is possible to have a big impact by doing relatively little.  Here are our top 10 tips for improving your search ranking: 

1. Add page titles to all of your web pages.  These should be clear and descriptive and should contextualise the page keywords and content, e.g. Minervation Ltd - Evidence-based healthcare information.
   
   
2. Add metadata keywords to all of your web pages.  These should be relevant to the page content and the most likely search terms of users, e.g. Minervation Ltd, evidence-based healthcare information, EBH, EBM, accessible, usable, reliable, web sites, Oxford, Andre Tomlin, Douglas Badenoch etc.
   
   
3. Add metadata descriptions to all of your web pages.  These should be relevant and (wait for it) descriptive, e.g. Minervation Ltd is an Oxford University spin-out company that specialises in evidence-based healthcare information, information science consultancy, technology and design.
   
   
4. Use key search terms in your web page content as much as possible.  For example, if you know that people search a lot for the phrase ‘reliable health information’, make sure this appears in your page content and is contextualised in your page title and metadata fields.
   
   
5. Use only one H1 (header) tag on each web page.  Again, the content in these tags should reinforce the message from your page title and metadata fields.  Use other header tags (H2, H3 etc.) if you need page headings further down the web page.
   
   
6. Maximise the number of back links on your site.  Back links are links to your web site from other sites.  Having a large number of back links will really increase your search engine ranking.  You can install Google Webmaster Tools  to find out how many back links you currently have.
   
   
7. Ensure that your web site uses ‘pretty URLs’.  For example, use www.minervation.com/content/evidence_reviews rather than www.minervation.com/index.aspx?o=1114
   
   
8. Make good use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication).  If you have a news section on your site, you can create an RSS feed to which your users can subscribe.  This feed can also be submitted to RSS aggregators (e.g. www.newsnow.co.uk) that will publicise it on your behalf.
   
   
9. Implement a footer menu on every page to highlight key search phrases.  This is a common trick and perhaps one step too far for some sites.
   
   
10. Promote and link to your site elsewhere, e.g. partner sites, blogs and social bookmarking sites.  One simple trick is to register for lots of relevant blogs and online discussion sites and add your web site URL to the signature of your account.  This means that every time you post a message on another site it will add a back link to your web site.

We would always recommend carrying out these kinds of changes in a step-by-step way and measuring the impact that the change has on your Google ranking as you go along. Remember, that it sometimes takes a few days for Google to reindex your site, so you won’t always notice the impact straight away.

Thanks to Nick Clarkson for his advice and support in writing this article.

Links:

• 1. Wikipedia  - Search engine optimisation
• Google webmasters