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If you or a company you’ve partnered with is managing your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, then you may want to take a few minutes to review its progress.  SEO is universally considered one of the most effective techniques you can employ to generate new traffic and patients from your website.  An improper strategy, however, can cripple your search marketing efforts, driving your search ranking down and traffic away.

The search engines use algorithms to direct Web queries to the most credible results. Unethical SEO techniques, commonly referred to as black hat SEO, attempt to cheat the search results by manipulating specific properties that search engines value.

Check your current SEO campaign for the following black hat techniques:

Improper use of keywords

The keywords you choose for your search campaign should be well researched and relevant to the content that is on your webpages.  Unnaturally stuffing as many keywords as possible into the text of a page or creating content just for the sake of filling up space is not favored by Google and other major search engines.

Link misuse

Purchasing links to highly rated sites or swapping links for the sake of enhancing a website’s rank is considered bad practice.  To build quality links for your site, focus on submitting your practice to relevant, quality online directories or syndicating press releases and articles written for your practice to niche press outlets instead.

Hidden text

This technique involves making the text on your webpage the same color as the background on your website so that it is invisible to the human eye, but readable to the search engine spiders that index the webpage. Search engines can pick up on this form of cheating, which will lead to the penalization of your website in the search results.

Best practice leads to best ranking

Successful search engine optimization should be a part of your long-term online marketing strategy, but be aware of bad practices. Using one or more of these search techniques to increase your ranking may improve your visibility in the near-term, but will ultimately be penalized by the search engines.

Officite has an entire department dedicated to search marketing for medical practices. Find out how we can help your practice navigate proper SEO techniques for improved visibility and increased traffic to your website.