Randall Wong, MD: Tools for SEO

Last week, I introduced the concept of SEO (search engine optimization) and how it can be used for marketing. Good SEO is matching the content of your web page with the keywords used for an organic search (i.e., the words you type into "Google" or another search engine).

My Web site has become more visible on the Internet due to improved rankings on search pages. This is a result of my own SEO efforts.

While most blog software seems interchangeable, there are a few "themes" that are better at SEO than others. I recently bought "Thesis” for WordPress. Not only can I change the design of any element of the page (graphics, number of columns, font, background colors, etc.), but I can do it without knowing how to code.
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While most of the "themes" available for WordPress are free, Thesis (which is inexpensive) is designed to maximize the SEO of a Web site. It is written, or coded, so that search engines are able to easily find what they are looking for and rank your page.

Search engine optimization is the only way a page gets ranked, and stays ranked.

I also recently started using "Scribe." Scribe is a program that analyzes your article to maximize the SEO of your content.

After writing an article or post, I'll analyze it with "Scribe." Scribe will check for keyword usage (making sure I don't use a word too often) and review my excerpt, title, etc., to increase the SEO of my content. It makes my content more relevant for the search engines.

Scribe is a subscription service. It has a monthly fee and allows me up to 300 analyses per month.

Why bother?

I started using both of these tools about 6 weeks ago. Since then, my traffic has started to increase, I no longer write daily, and I don't have to "Tweet" to get traffic to my blog. It has saved me a tremendous amount of time.

My biggest source of traffic is now Google, and 70% of my traffic (an increase even from last week) is from search engines.

SEO can be done without these tools, but having software help you reduces the amount of work and time required to maximize your efforts. These tools allow me to spend more time writing and less time worrying about SEO.