Your Practice Online providing Integrated Web Marketing
17 June 2006
For most of your visitors, your web site will provide the all-important first impression of your practice. If it is clean and professional, chances are they will stay and look around a bit.
Integrated web marketing is an online marketing approach in which an orthopaedic practice portrays a consistent image and delivers important practice and educational patient information.
A good Orthopaedic website is educational and promotional. It is intended for prospective as well as current patient s and involves a blend of the following:
1. Web Development 2. Multimedia Patient Education 3. Web Promotion
1.0 Web development
Web development involves one time website design and ongoing website maintenance.
1.1 Website Design 1.2 Website Maintenance
1.1 Website design
Your practice website will provide an all-important first impression of your practice. There are a few points to consider with regard to your website design.
Websites should be of clear design, maintain visual consistency throughout the site and be user friendly with easy navigation and fast page download (minimal graphics). There are a few design basics that need to be considered. These include the use of "Alt" tags (alternative tags for image description), users with different platforms (PC/ Mac), cross browser, screen resolution, graphic compression, title & Meta tags for all the pages, minimal animations and appropriate font size.
The content or writing style is also very important in keeping your visitors interest. Use short sentences, short paragraphs and bullet points to convey your information. The visitor reads from top right to bottom left of the screen as you would read a book, and to shift to the next page, visitors always notice the top right of the screen first. Hence, one might notice why the practice logo always goes on the top right and the designer logo on bottom right or top right corner of the screen.
It is not advisable to use offers from hosting companies to build a website in a few minutes or to use software with templated websites. These allow little flexibility and may not be cross browser compatible. Although it is tempting to design and maintain your practice website in-house, it is always advisable to hire a professional to design and manage your practice website.
1.2 Website maintenance Along with the website design, you will have to choose the following 1.2.1 Domain name 1.2.2 Website hosting 1.2.3 Emails including web mails 1.2.4 Search Engine Submission 1.2.5 Newsletter (optional)
1.2.1 Domain Name
A domain name is basically a Web site address and is nothing more than an alias for the IP address of your website. It is always prefixed by "www" and should not be confused with email addresses which contains the symbol "@" e.g., www.alabamaorthopaedic.com is a domain name and info@alabamaorthopaedic.com is an email address.
Domain names can be a very useful marketing tool. It is advisable that you select a domain name that represents your practice and also contains a descriptive keyword for search engines. E.g., For Alabama Orthopaedic Institute, I prefer www.alabamaorthopaedic.com to www.aoi.com
Top level domains come in two types: * Generic top level domains. .com (for commercial organizations but is available to anyone). .net (for sites directly related to the Internet but is available to anyone). .org (for use by non-profit organizations but is available to anyone). .edu (used by educational organizations). .gov (for agencies of the United States government). * Country Code top level domains. These include .com.au for Australia, .co.uk for the United Kingdom, .co.nz for New Zealand, etc. Registering Domain Names
In order to use a domain name, it must be registered with a registry. The domain name is registered for a specified period of time. i.e. one year, up to a maximum of ten years, and is renewable on an ongoing basis. When you purchase a domain name, it only belongs to you for the specified time you stated.
1.2.2 Website hosting
Website hosting is like leasing or renting a space in the service provider s computers. Web hosts or web servers store all your website files and link to your domain name so visitors can access your site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Disk space This refers to the amount of hard disk space the hosting provider sets aside for your exclusive use.
Data Transfer / Bandwidth Bandwidth, traffic, data transfer refer to the same thing - the amount of data transferred to visitors as they view your web pages. If your site becomes extremely popular and generates enormous traffic, it could result in network congestion that will make your pages harder to reach or slow to load.
Once again it is not advisable to use companies that offer free website hosting or offers from companies to build a website in a few minutes
1.2.3 Emails
Email or electronic mail is the process of sending and receiving messages over the internet. An email prefix to your domain name is one way of marketing your website. E.g, info@alabamaorthopaedic.com
Email forwarding
Email forwarding is an automated forward (pass on) all your email from your new email address to an existing email account. This is helpful in case you have a large number of email addresses and don't want to check all of them separately.
Web Mail
Web mail uses your internet browser and lets you send and receive your email from any computer, anytime, anywhere you have access to the internet. Most website hosting packages include emails and web mails.
2.0 Multimedia Patient Education
Multimedia is dynamic, interactive visual presentations that catch your audience's attention. These animated surgeries, conditions and anatomies will enhance your site s image and improve the practice-patient relationship through education.
The multimedia patient education web movies feature animation, voice narration and interactivity to help make difficult surgical procedures easy to understand while delivering maximum user experience.
Visit www.orthopaedics.com to view orthopaedic multimedia patient education.
3.0 Web promotion
Web Promotion is the process of making your web site and its address known to those who might be interested in what your site has to offer.
Web promotion is online and offline.
3.1 Online Web promotion
Online promotion basically means getting a good ranking in major search engines and directories.
A search engine is a searchable online database of internet resources. The search engine software is dedicated to indexing Internet Web pages, storing the results and returning lists of pages to match user queries. Some major search engines are Google, altavista, AOL, Ask Jeeves, etc.
Search engine indexing varies with different search engines and most commonly optimization elements are Page Ranking and Key Word density.
Page Ranking is to and fro links (reciprocal linking) from your site and key word density is the number of times a keyword is used on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page
Directories provide similar services to search engines but maintain an ordered lists of websites. World Wide Web directories include, Yahoo, Lycos, etc. Yahoo is both a search engine as well as a directory.
3.2 Offline Web Promotion
Offline means using traditional media such as print and broadcast, or speaking at conferences, etc. Some tips for offline marketing are including your website address in your letter head, brochures, biz cards, invoices, telephone on hold message, etc.
Visit (www.yourpracticeonline.com.au) for more info
Source: prleap
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