Online Publicity

Google has become a household name over the last 5 years. If you were to say “Google it” to someone in the early 90’s, they would have looked at you like you were crazy. Now, Google.com has become THE online gateway for online information.

How do you get listed on Google? Well, you can go through their adwords program where you actually bid to have your name at the top, OR, you can take advantage of the little known free ways to be listed on Google.

First, lets see how Google works. Every day and night Google has “bots” or “spiders” that crawl around all of the code on the internet picking up on certain things that rate a website. These things can range from key words to links, to mentions in a blog article. These go into the google computer and out comes a score for a website based on how many links it has from other sites, and how many relevant key words it has on the site itself.

This is the short version of how Google gets its information.

Now that we know how it works, we can look at how to get listed without paying big for a listing.

One of the easiest ways is through Google News. In order to be the top Internet news service in the bunch, the Googlebots crawl through news websites daily in looking for relevant content.

The easy way to get listed on these searches is through your local paper. These newspaper articles, if written correctly, will not only appear on the Google news page, but can also appear as top ranked content on the main Google search page. This is an easy, FREE way to get your practice mentioned and attract new patients through the Internet.

Of course, this is not the only way to promote your practice on the internet, There are still many options out there that are very passive and can lead to great new patient acquisition strategies.

ACTION TO TAKE: Browse the Internet and especially Google. Check local bulletin boards (www.craigslist.org), Local city sites (www.citysearch.com), and especially your local media sites and see what it takes to get listed.

The more you are mentioned on the Internet, the more you are likely to be found.

Have a profitable week!