Chiropractic Homepage

I received a call earlier today from a family member searching for a bed Bath and Beyond store that they thought was on Pico Boulevard in West Los Angeles. I thought I recalled the store being on Olympic Boulevard, down the street from a
West LA chiropractor, Dr. Brandon Takahashi.

I did some searching and found the bed and bath West Los Angeles Store was at 11854 West Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles, CA 90064. It took me a few tries to find the address data so I thought I’d check and see how easy it was to find out it Dr. Takahashi’s information showed up in an address search.

I entered the following address and performed a search: 11340 W. Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90064

I was perplexed because I received dozens of results which included business listings for a dental office, a catering company, an orthodontist, a holistic wellness center, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, and other professional services.

To do a comparison I ran to the other Olympic Boulevard address again: 11854 W Olympic Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90064

That search brought up listings for physicians, surgeons, mortgage lenders, lumber services, a personal injury attorney, and a debt collector’s office. It was then that I realized that the Takahashi chiropractic office was located in a building that housed numerous companies providing a wide variety of products and services.

I added Suite 340 to the search field and the results changed. The search now was: 11340 W. Olympic Blvd., Suite 340, Los Angeles, CA 90064 (the complete business address) and I was presented with a map in the search results, a listing page that had two chiropractors featured on it, and a city of Brentwood page that also had two chiropractors featured on it.

The lesson here was that you can’t be too granular when including your address information on your homepage (or landing page, if that’s the case). Had the various web pages not included information for the office suite, it would’ve been less likely that consumers would find the information they were seeking.

This article is more about keywords then design of a chiropractic homepage, but I was having a conversation the other day with someone having questions about doing locally related searches, and I decided to write about our discussion here.

The individual I was speaking to manages a chiropractic office in a city located in Southern California. He contacted me because he was doing a search for Chiropractor Lancaster, CA (abbreviation of California) and he was curious if I knew any other ways people may be searching in that area.

I began looking around and noticed that there was a city of the same name in Pennsylvania. This makes the situation interesting, because a person living in Pennsylvania is not likely thinking about the city in California when performing their search. I don’t have any research to back this up but them under the impression that someone seeking chiropractic services in California or Pennsylvania, is not going to use ,PA or ,CA when performing their search, or at least their initial search.

It’s a good idea to have your page optimized for the city and the state that you’re located in. You may not do this on your homepage, but you should try to do it on some page of your web site, so that people can better find you when searching via location.

I just did a search again and noticed there was a Lancaster in the state of Texas. If you’re practicing in a city of the same name, now you have three states competing for the top results of search engine pages. Is very likely that it won’t soon matter what other states may have cities, as search engine results get smarter and more targeted with the results they deliver. For now, my advice to the Lancaster chiropractor, is to include information about the state of California, and may be the CA state abbreviation, to help increase odds that searches within that state, will provide satisfying results for consumers.

So you had your website built in 1998 and it was created in Frontpage. You know you are long overdue for cleaning up some areas of the site (comic sans font has to go) and having some optimization done in hopes of getting the site to rank better.

You may have been wondering whether you need to scrap the entire site and begin with a whole new design in order for it to rank well. I’ve heard it before, someone suggests to dump the frontpage created site since there is no other way.

What is one to do? You want your website to appear in search engine results, but maybe you are not ready for a completely new design. Face it, many chiropractic websites have only a dozen pages or so of content anyway, is there anything else that can be done?

Fortunately, SEO experts like Jill Whalen take the time to answer questions regarding frontpage and search engine friendliness.

View Jill’s website to get more information about this topic.

by Michael Dorausch, DC

PageRank (PR) is hard enough to come by for the typical chiropractic website. You don’t need to make things more difficult for yourself by splitting your PageRank amongst two or more pages possibly being indexed as your web site homepage file.

It’s common to see web sites using homepage files such as index.php, index.html, index.htm, and even index.shtml. If your chiropractic web site is showing results in search engines like Google for both the document root and your index file, you are likely splitting your PageRank, and possibly affecting the overall ranking to your chiropractic web site.

What you will want to do is have your webmaster set up a 301 redirect so that only one instance shows. Personally, I prefer to redirect from files such as index.htm to the domain root, and not the other way around.

What this appears like
As an example take a look at the homepage for Planet Chiropractic. You can enter the following into a browser… http://planetc1.com/ but the URL address that is going to display will include the www prefix, which is technically a subdomain.

Why is this important?
It’s important for search engines to know that there is only one destination for your homepage, not two, or sometimes even three. If you’re showing more than one version of the same content on your homepage, it could be considered duplicate content, and it may affect your overall rankings in the search engines.

Once again, what you want is a 301 redirect. Talk to your chiropractic webmaster for more information.

Hidden text (in relation to this article) is a search engine spamming technique that used to be popular a few years ago. In recent years, Google, and other major search engines, have figured out ways to determine whether text is hidden on web pages. As a result websites employing techniques such as hidden text are typically banned.

Hidden text is most commonly achieved by setting the font color to be the same as the background color, rendering the text invisible unless the user highlights it.

Whether it was done by you or your webmaster, using techniques such as hiding keyword text can get your website banned in major search engines like Google and others. It’s a pretty foolish technique and it’s very easy to spot, even with the human eye.

I was visiting a chiropractic website, for an office that was located somewhere in Virginia, and I was noticing that there was a blue border with about an inch of blue space across the bottom pages of the website. Looked like nothing at first but something triggered me to take a closer look. I right-clicked the page to take a look at the source code for the web site I was visiting.

Take a look at the image…

Just a blue screen at the bottom of a chiropractic webpage. Appears innocent enough hey? Let’s drag our mouse over the blue area and see if anything appears.

Presto, look at all the hidden text appearing on this page.

According to the hidden text, looks like this website wanted to get ranked for terms such as Chiropractor, Massage, Southside Chiropractors, Hanover Chiropractors, Richmond Virginia Chiropractor, Richmond chiropractic, Chiropractic massage, Massage therapy, Chiro clinic, and a whole list of other rather redundant stuff.

Problem is the hidden text sets one up for a website ban and they may not even know why (although it’s likely they do). A simple way to correct this entire mess is to actually create some good content using some of the terms found inside the hidden text.

For example… Our Southside Chiropractors and massage staff at West Virginia Chiropractic Wellness offer relaxing body treatments, relieve stress, provide spa services, and specialize in addressing the causes of back pain, neck pain, pregnancy pain, and others. Even if you are searching for a Glen Allen chiropractor or a Hanover chiropractor, we feel our office in Henrico is worth the extra few miles of travel.

Not all the text was used but that’s only one paragraph of content. Don’t need much on a single page anyway. My advice: get creative, don’t hide text on pages, form some smart paragraphs that use location information properly, and be sure to link to this website.

The idea that adding thousands of keywords to your web site in order to improve rankings from search engines is something that some people still believe and practice.

I was checking out a chiropractic website, apparently hosted and designed by a professional business directory company, and it was amazing how many keywords were being stuffed onto the page.

At first glance the page didn’t look so bad. There was a photograph, name of the chiropractic business, a phone number, some local information, and a sentence about the business services provided which included the DRX 9000, and treatments for a neck, back, leg and arm pain.

Below that was some business information with several paragraphs about the chiropractic office, the history of chiropractic, important things consumers should know about biomechanical corrective care, a few sentences about scoliosis and herniated discs, and a brief overview of what to do after suffering a whiplash injury.

The page would’ve actually been great if it would have stopped there, but it didn’t. Below the regular business information was a list of business products, services, and specialties. This is where the keyword stuffing began.

It was placed clear on the page so one could argue that the information was important for consumers and was not posted just for the sake of stuffing search engines with content. I performed a word count on bundles of words packed together and it appeared as if every therapeutic term related to the spine was included. On the list were words like Active Release Technique, back injuries, back muscles, herniated discs (also misspelled versions), spinal decompression, and about 600 others.

Under the list of services was another group of words ranging from auto accidents, degenerative disc disease, to Radiculopathy and spinal trauma. That list was a few hundred words just separated by commas.

It continued with a few hundred more words such as Muscle Stimulation, Bulging Disc, EMG, Infrared, Nonsurgical Spinal Decompression, Quantitative Functional Analysis, and ultrasound.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, search engines don’t like when webpages are keywords stuffed. Typically when the pages are found, the web pages (and sometimes even the entire domain) are banned. That’s not to say that you can’t use words like the ones mentioned above on web sites. You just shouldn’t be developing all of your content as search engine feed.

Here’s a simple example of how this could have better been done…

Our Miami non-surgical spinal decompression center is open six days a week. The office has convenient hours for those that have to work late and those only available on weekends. We feature the latest in DRX spinal technology which has been shown to effectively reduce or eliminate symptoms of herniated discs, degenerative disc disease, lumbar spinal misalignment, osteoarthritis, and other spinal related conditions.

Besides offering the finest decompression services, our office offers Cold Laser Therapy, Massage Therapy, Ultrasound, Cryotherapy, and nonmechanical traction.

The result is less keywords on the page but the information is easy to read, still gets the most important words in, and above all is valuable to the consumer.

There’s your keyword stuffing tips from your friends at the chiropractic homepage project.