Thursday, January 14, 2010

Randall Wong, MD: What's in a URL name?

The Uniform Resource Locator (URL) is the fancy name for a Web site address. The URL should be composed of keywords that describe your business or practice. It used to be that you’d just want to take your business name and add “.com,” but that won’t gain you much Web presence these days.

Carefully selecting a few keywords to construct your URL can give you a big jump on your competitors in terms of gaining a higher listing with the search engines. A smartly chosen URL is the first step to good search engine optimization.

For example, suppose Joe Smith, M.D., a pulmonary specialist living in Bedrock wants a Web page. It would be smarter for Joe to choose a URL such as "BedrockPulmonaryCare.com" instead of "JoeSmithMD.com."
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Most people looking for a pulmonary doc in the Bedrock area will most likely choose words like "pulmonary," "doctor," and "Bedrock." Because these search terms are already in the URL, it will be noticed by the search engines and yield a higher listing. Joe Smith, M.D., may never come up on the listing. Easy?

Suppose the law firm of Wong, Wong, and Wong has a URL www.WeSueDocs.com. Can you guess what they do?

Once you have selected a few keywords, check out their strength using a keyword search tool. There are plenty of Web sites that will analyze your keywords and give you an idea of how popular, or how often, people use them for searches. And it's free.

I would suggest using ones generated by Google. The results are based on actual Google search queries.

Once you have chosen a few strong keywords, construct the URL and then test it. The search engines naturally break down any URL into useable words, so don't worry about confusing the search engines.

Test the URL at a place such as GoDaddy.com. Enter your new URL and see if it is available. If not, you may change a word, the order of the words, make a word plural, etc. Most of the time, the URL will be cheap since it is unlikely you will be using any "branded" keywords in the URL. Basically, certain keywords may cost more and this will be reflected in the price of the URL.

If you buy now, you own it. Rest assured, you don't have to do anything with the URL, but you have come up with a Web address!

Randall Wong, MD, is a retinal specialist in private practice in Fairfax, Va. Wong has a strong interest in Web 2.0, the Internet, and social media, and will write regularly about how social media can help build your practice and even improve healthcare.

3 comments:

  1. My Myspace url name is weird. But I don't want to make a new one. Do you think I should make another one or just forget about it and not care what others think?

    ReplyDelete
  2. My Myspace url name is weird. But I don't want to make a new one. Do you think I should make another one or just forget about it and not care what others think?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Medical Billing Service as a URL would be like MedicalBillingService.Com right?

    ReplyDelete