Optimizing for Image & Video Search

The Internet holds the future for medical and dental marketing, and is a critical means of reaching both existing clients & new prospects. Unfortunately, establishing a website for your health profession business does not guarantee that high levels of traffic will reach your site. Indeed, most website developers are paid only to do design, and consequently, do not invest effort in directing visitors to your domain. Even when developers do put effort into time and effort into optimizing a dental website to rank high with the search engines, they still have to deal combat a significant level of competition from other local dentists and oral health providers.

Therefore, novel methods for optimizing a dental website for searchability are needed to make sites unique in the “eyes” of search engines, which determine to which sites will prospective dental clients get sent when they type in the name of a city and the word “dentist.” Fortunately, Google (which currently dominates search engine functionality with over 70% dominance) recently launched Google 2.0, a more advanced function that provides search results with “Image Results” at the top and “Text Results” underneath. This has opened up a novel opportunity for dental professionals to optimize their sites to generate higher volumes of traffic flow.

The opportunity results from the fact that images are content too, and dental websites tend to be image-rich. Dental & medical websites tend to contain pictures of past patients, images of services rendered, and images of staff and office facilities, among other mages. All of these can be optimized such that they are searchable by the major search engines – and this can potentially drive much higher levels of traffic to your site than text alone, especially since Google is now prioritizing Image Search Results over Text Search Results by displaying them prominently at the top of results pages.

Here's what helps you get found during an image search...

1) File Name: Your page’s keyword should be in the image's file name. Search engines will also recognize stemmed versions of words in a keyword, but it is preferable to use your keyword exactly whenever possible, using dashes in multi-word keywords as needed.

2) Alt Tag: It helps to use your keyword in the “alt tag” of your images. (The “alt tag” specifies the text that appears as your images load and if they fail to load.)

3) Nearby Text: Your page’s keyword should appear in text near to an image, ideally in a headline, if appropriate, or as a bolded text directly next to an image. If this is not possible, then it is acceptable to include it in the general text, as long as it is located adjacent to the image.

4) Optimize Your Image’s File Names using Supply & Demand Data: Use Google Adwords, online software, or a parallel data-generating program to choose high value words to use within your image filenames. High value words are ones for which lots of online searches are conducted but little few content providers are available.

5) Page Context: As most small business owners know, Google's search engine algorithms use dozens of factors to assign a website a “page rank,” and these factors often penalize small business websites. The reason is that Google’s algorithms take into account factors that can be unfavorable for smaller product/service-oriented websites, including number of inbound links, number of outbound links, and time that visitor spend on the site. Fortunately, Google’s Image Search algorithms seem to be much more lenient than its Text Search algorithms, positioning small business websites with much high page ranking in Image Search Results than in Text Search Results. The reason is likely that images more cut and dry – they are either on a page, or they’re not. Consequently, your dental or medical website will benefit when “location” + “dentist” is queried if you optimize your site for image & video search.

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