Put away those white shoes (it’s after Labor Day) and the mosquito repellent! It’s time to take out your boots and get yourself a flu shot.

See ya, summer! Revisiting our top 5 blog posts from this past summer.

Say goodbye to the warm summer season and hello to the (looming) crisp autumn air.

As the weather in Atlanta has been rather cool and cloudy lately, and although I do love it at times, I’ve been feeling slightly nostalgic and missing the warmth of the sun.

So, with the changing of the seasons, let’s revisit this past summer’s top 5 blog posts.

• How Long Keyword Phrases Can Play to Your Strengths

• Hospital Mobile Strategy: Best Practices for Quick Response (QR) Codes

• Learn it, Know it, Live it – 7 Link Building Strategies for your Hospital

• Quick Tips on PPC Ad Writing

• AVID Design Gets Mentioned in Ragan Communications’ eNewsletter

So long, summer!  It’s been a hot one.

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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Finding link prospects for your hospital or healthcare system’s Website may be a tricky task if you let it be.  Links are essential to improve search engine ranking and to help bring visitors to your site.

Quick tips on finding good link building prospects.

Here are 4 quick tips to follow and questions to ask yourself when seeking link prospects:

• Relevancy: Is the site you’re looking at relevant to hospitals, healthcare and/or the medical industry?

• Frequency: Is the site updated with fresh content frequently or is the content stale and old?

• Online Presence: Does the site have an online presence? Do they have good inbound links? Has the site been around a few years?

• Policies: Is the site easy to contact? Do they publish resources? Do they invite guests to contribute?

Here are some links to check out on how to find good link prospects:

• How to Find and Identify High-Value Link Opportunities

• 13 Ways to Assess a Link Prospect

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I recently sat in on a Wordtracker link building Webinar where it reiterated what I already knew about link building, as well as taught me a thing or two about the strategies one, such as hospitals and healthcare systems, can take in order to build links.

In the wise words of Brad Hamilton to Jeff Spicoli and company, "Learn it, know it, live it!"

In case you’re not familiar with Wordtracker, it’s an excellent tool that we use at AVID Design for much of our keyword research. They also have a link building tool and a strategizing tool that focuses on keyword niches.

Benefits of Link Building

Links have many benefits to your Website. They often:

• Improve page ranking

• Position you as a leader and can even function as a “vote” for anchor text on your site.

• Offer competition. The more quality links you obtain, the harder your organization will be to compete with.

Link Building Strategies for Hospitals and Healthcare Systems

There are several different strategies your hospital or healthcare systems can take to build links, among them:

• Blogs: blogs are very diverse and easy to get links to and from, plus there is a plethora of them out there. Examples include patient blogs or health-related blogs

• News/Media: direct links from press releases or articles can be picked up by several sites, like local newspapers, etc.

• Social Media: It’s not just a fad, it’s a business/marketing tool and many hospitals and healthcare systems are embracing it.  Check us out on: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, StumbleUpon,

• Job Sites: portals that publicize medical jobs. These sites often have links to featured employers, such as mdjobsite.com and medhunters.com.

• Directories: be wary of “link farms,” and aim for top directories with human editors.

• Trusted Sites: education sites, such as medical schools, or organization and government-run sites

• Business Sites: medical trade associations

Some good sites to check out on link building:

• 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity

• The Professional Guide to Link Building: Section II: Professional Link Building Strategies

• 10 Most Effective Link building Strategies

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Inbound linkbuilding is a critical part of any hospital Website’s success—starting with the benefits it provides for SEO and search engine page rankings, (SERPs) and ending with increased traffic and all it implies (e.g., conversions).

A well-written and strategically distributed release can be a very effective way to build inbound links to your hospital’s Website.

As more hospitals and healthcare systems continue to embrace online communications, resources and efforts to produce new content are often shifted to blogs, videos, Twitter messages, etc. Although they have tremendous value and potential (as we’ve certainly covered in this blog over the years), the problem is that efforts should not be shifted to these techniques as much as they need to be integrated with traditional techniques.

In particular, this means the classic release. No matter whether you call it a press release, news release or media release, releases still have tremendous utility—even in today’s online-centric climate.

Feed Google’s Thirst for News

Regularly publish a news article on your Website—especially if it uses RSS—and you can almost expect it get picked up immediately by Google’s search engine spiders.

You’ll know this by the announcement from Google Alerts in your e-mail inbox that can arrive within minutes after your article goes live. (Of course, if you aren’t using Google Alerts to track your hospital’s name on the Internet, make it the very first thing you do after reading this blog).

It’s no mystery why this happens: Google values relevancy, and news articles are not only often relevant in terms of content, topics and themes, but also often in regards to be fresh and new.

Repurposing for Social Media

Every time you publish a release, it’s a reason to fire up your social media apps and start distributing your link. Twitter (including key #hashtags), Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, social bookmarks (Digg, Delicious, etc.):  All are excellent ways to get attention for your release—and as a consequence, links to your Website.

Take this a step further and encourage discussions about the release—either as footnotes or parenthetical statements when you share your content’s links, or even in abridged and more casual versions on your blog.

Are you regularly publishing news on your Website? If so, how often—and about what topics and subjects? Does your news page support RSS? How else are you using and distributing releases, especially in terms of an integrated inbound marketing strategy for your hospital?

Do you need an experienced healthcare marketing consultant that can help you develop a successful online strategy and effective content for it? Contact AVID Design today for a free Website and social media assessment.

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In the scope of online healthcare marketing analytics, conversions—or more specifically, conversion rates—are perhaps the most critical metric.

Our next newsletter feature will examine different types of hospital Website conversions and strategies for improving them.

Which hospital Website conversions are the most challenging for you to improve conversion rates? On which do you spend the most time and resources? With which conversions do you think most hospitals struggle or most often overlook completely?

Cast your vote in on our online poll and share your thoughts in the comments section. We’ll publish and review the poll results next month.

By the way, don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter!

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