Important Things to Consider When You SEO

Your website is your strongest communication tool to reach out to your customers. If you’ve done your homework, it should be dynamic, interactive, multifunctional, user friendly, and most importantly, it should be Search Engine Optimized. At AVID Design, we strongly encourage each of our clients to come up with an SEO management and maintenance plan, and we practice what we preach. As we look forward to a new year of experiences and relationships, we’ve looked back on what we feel are our most important SEO lessons and best practices.

1)      Content remains the most important tool your website has. No amount of optimization can make up for poorly written content that isn’t relevant, concise, and keyword rich. If no one in your organization is an expert on web writing, considering hiring a writing service that is.

2)      Long keyword phrases are king. Every year, keywords get used by more and more sites. General keywords like “Cancer” or “Heart Health” will never be effective on getting you to page one of a Google search. Try to focus on specifics that will help direct users to your unique services, such as “Non-Invasive Cancer Treatment in Atlanta.” There will be less competition for these phrases and you will help your future customers find exactly what they need.

I always think of tiny robots hunting through my pages when I'm focused on SEO.

3)      Know your location and make sure any outside sources that refer to you know it too. Local SEO is becoming more prominent every year, so it’s important that the search engines can see where you are. If you change your address, make sure to do it everywhere that you show up on the web.

4)      Always update your site. Just because you launched your site doesn’t mean you’re done. One of the most important things that you can do for your site is to consistently update it. Do you have a new employee? How about some research that recently got some attention? What events are coming up? Tell people what you’re up to and what makes you unique.

5)      After you’ve put your metadata in place (and DO use metadata; it’s not everything, but it will make a difference), monitor your site using a program like Google Analytics. Experiment with your metadata to see what works of you and what doesn’t.

6)      If you have social media of any kind associated with your site, update it regularly or don’t bother with it at all. Additionally, bother with social media. It may seem like a small step, but this will garner you a surprising amount of traffic if you use it regularly to let people know what’s going on with you. Use bitly or tinyurl to link your social media posts to your site.

There are many steps that you can take to make sure that your website doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. With time, effort, and sometimes a little financial investment, you can bring your website optimization to the next level. And trust me, it’s very satisfying to look at your Google Analytics Reports and see how your traffic jumps up.

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January 24th, 2012

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Holiday Greetings & New Year News!

We hope that 2011 has been a great year for you and yours and we wish you continued success and happiness in the coming year. We are so grateful for those that have made a difference to us at AVID Design during this past year – for new names and faces, both at our offices and on our client lists, growth of business and products, and the implementation of improved processes to keep us all on track and on task!

As we look back on this year, we obviously wouldn’t be where we are without each and every client. Thank you for your business and your confidence in our capabilities, but, more importantly, thank you for the time you’ve given us – the meetings, the calls, the continued discussions…to make sure we understand your vision and organizational goals as we go down each project path.

We’re looking forward to a great 2012 with some enhancements of our own…if you’ve missed our eNewsletter recently, don’t worry – a new design for AVID INSIGHT will be launched in mid-January. The heart of what we do and how we approach your business has not changed – we’re just updating a bit. We’re really excited about the new graphics of AVID Design and hope you will agree!

We hope you all have a wonderful holiday and enjoy some time away to relax and refresh. We will see you back around the conference tables in the New Year – both real and virtual – with lots of ideas, energy and a renewed sense of what’s possible in our ever-changing healthcare industry!

AVID Design offers full-scale written and visual communication services for hospitals and healthcare systems, including Web design,SEO and PPC content development and assessment, online videoand rich media, analytics and measurement, content management systems and more.

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December 23rd, 2011

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The Air Is Abuzz with the Sound of… Hammers

It’s that time of year! There are sleigh bells ringing and carolers singing, and oh wait, never mind; instead we have builders meticulously banging and crashing away as they build some new offices to accommodate our growing AVID Design team.

The framework of any company is in the organization

They mostly work early in the morning before work gets going so they don’t distract us, but the first half hour is always a bit noisy and exciting. We are looking forward to having new places for our team. We’ve had a lot of new players coming to AVID Design to help the company adhering to our mission to deliver top-notch web design services to our clients.

I’ve been here myself for about 3 months, having worked with AVID as a contractor for a few months before taking on the fulltime task of content writer/SEO go-to. I come from a background of technical and marketing writing and content management.

Our Project Coordinator, Meg, started a bit before me and brings a range of project management experiences from the overseeing of middle school students to the heading up of corporate departments. Her primary function at AVID Design is to streamline our processes and act as a bridge of communication between our team and clients.

Meredith is the new Director of Content Services, who started a week after me; she comes from hospital and academic medical center backgrounds with experience directing marketing and communication programs, including web content management. She will lead the Content Department as we help direct content strategies of hospitals and healthcare systems.

They are working very fast. And seriously, that mud smells atrocious.

Kier is our new Director of Web Development, wrangling the AVIDCMS™, AVID eTools™, and keeping up with all that is on the plates of our programmers. He has also worked in hospital and healthcare information technology and brings with him new ideas and solutions to keep AVID Design at the cutting edge of technology.

The AVID Design team is certainly growing, and we’re more than willing to make room for everyone, even if it does mean a lot of sawdust and some truly foul-smelling mud.

AVID Design offers full-scale written and visual communication services for hospitals and healthcare systems, including Web design, SEO and PPC content development and assessment, online video and rich media, analytics and measurement, content management systems and more.

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December 21st, 2011

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Counting our Blessings

Taking time to say thank you is something we should all do every day, but we are especially aware of gratitude as we approach the Thanksgiving holiday. We at AVID Design are especially grateful for our long-standing client relationships, and also some exciting new projects that have come our way recently. We are grateful for our team that takes good care of these clients, both those members that have been here for many years and recent additions to our team. We appreciate the blessings that are evident every day…both personally and professionally. And we hope you and yours have an abundance of blessings, too.

AVID Design builds cutting-edge healthcare websites that propel your marketing efforts forward in unexpected new ways.

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November 23rd, 2011

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15th Annual Greystone.net Healthcare Internet Conference…how was your experience?

AVID Design was pleased to once again, sponsor and exhibit at the recent Greystone.net Healthcare Internet Conference in Orlando – great experience at a beautiful venue, but what we enjoyed the most were all of the conversations among our clients, colleagues, and new Poken friends!

Improving experiences is our #1 goal with what we do – designing websites with interactive platforms that allow consumers to access information and get more involved with an organization. And this goal of improving experiences seemed to be a recurring theme at the Healthcare Internet Conference.

One of the best presentations I heard was Optimizing the Patient Experience by Debbie Kenemer, Strategy & System Development at Community Health Network and Nicole Nicoloff, VP, Patient Experience Group at Beryl. They discussed the role website and call center technologies play in targeting patients, creating loyalty among the patient base, and supporting strategies geared toward managing health.

The patient experience ranks in the top 3 priorities as patients navigate through systems, access care options, receive healthcare, and process through follow up care. I think The Beryl Institute does a great job of defining patient experience as “The sum of all interactions, shaped by an organization’s culture that influences patient perceptions across the continuum of care.” Yes, it is all of the patient or consumer interactions that influence perceptions and I’m afraid we sometimes focus on what is important to us or what the data indicates as important and not as much all of the different pieces that are important to THEM.

So let’s continue the conversations about how we can work together to improve experiences. Speaking of an improved experience, the winner of our giveaway had a much improved conference experience because she went home with a new iPad! Congrats to Barbara Thalassites, Project Manager at Catholic Health Services!

AVID Design builds cutting-edge healthcare websites that propel your marketing efforts forward in unexpected new ways.

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November 17th, 2011

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