Search Engine Marketing
When it comes to search engine marketing, here at the LMU Klinikum we want to limit ourselves entirely to search engine optimization, which can be achieved free of charge.
Search engine optimization is a permanent optimization process that takes time until results become visible. In addition, search engine optimization can be very intensive (costs/resources) and you are still not on the safe side of ranking high in search engines. The operators of search engines frequently change their strategy regarding the display of content and images (behind this are sophisticated algorithms and interests).
The actual optimization takes place on the pages themselves and is referred to as on-page optimization. Page popularity can be increased with the help of off-page optimization.
OnPage Optimization
On-page optimization refers to all measures that are taken directly on your own website to improve the ranking of the website. This includes improvements in the technical and structural area of the website (technical SEO) as well as in the content area (editorial SEO), for example by displaying meta data, fast page loading times, researching suitable keywords and SEO-optimized writing and structuring of website texts.
OffPage Optimization
Offpage optimization describes all measures and factors that are used externally to influence the ranking of your own website in the search results pages. It deals with the popularity of a page on the web, measured by the number and quality of external links from other pages to a web document.
The best-known example of off-page optimization is backlinks: The more backlinks from quality, external websites link to a (sub)page of your own website, the greater the chance that it will rank highly on the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).
In addition to backlinks, simple mentions of the brand name on other websites and social signals (i.e. likes, tweets, +1s in social media) also play a role in the calculation of rankings.
Keywords / Snippets
What are snippets?
The excerpt of a page that appears in the search results is known as a SERP snippet (SERP stands for "Search Engine Result Page"). These are primarily
- Title/Meta Title (about 55-65 characters long)
- Description/Meta Description (about 140-150 characters long)
- URL (is usually generated automatically)
With this topic, you will often come across the rule of thumb "offer + brand + location"!
The title/meta title is SEO-relevant because it tells the search engines what content a page has. Each page of the website should have a unique title that succinctly describes the content for searchers/search engines.
The meta description is not used by search engines to calculate the ranking in the search results. However, as a text excerpt in the search results (snippet), it is an important user factor. The meta description is the first point of contact for the searcher with a website and is therefore largely responsible for the click-through rate to the website.
Importance of keywords in search engines
Search engines do not use the content of the keywords meta element (keywords meta tag) for ranking purposes.
The search engines do not reveal which algorithms they use and which results are therefore displayed higher up in the search or not.
We therefore recommend that you take a look at the keyword analysis anyway, because we don't know whether the search engines will give the keyword meta element any importance in the future.
A keyword analysis helps to identify the search words or search phrases (keywords or keyword combinations) that best match the topic and content of your website and under which the website should be found.
Optimizing for a single keyword makes little sense in most cases. On the one hand, because most traffic usually comes from longer search queries and, on the other hand, because "one-word" search queries are often difficult to answer. Take a look at the following example: Instead of the single keyword "soccer", you should rather use combinations such as watch soccer, play soccer in a club, buy soccer tickets , etc.
You can find help from free tools that specialize in this, such as
- Soovle: This tool uses several popular search engines such as Google, Bing, YouTube or Yahoo. If the user enters a keyword in the search, he immediately receives additional suggestions from all search engines.
- SERP Snippet Generator: With this tool you can optimize your snippets and thus increase the number of visitors from google.
- Google Suggest: This is not primarily a tool, but a Google search function. If you want to find closely related search queries for a term, simply enter the main keyword in the search bar and immediately receive matching additions.
- Übersuggest: This tool uses the evaluation of Google Suggest.
At the end of a keyword research or analysis, you should have limited yourself to approx. 3-5 keywords/keyword combinations per website.
You have now compiled a list of keywords/keyword combinations for your websites. It makes sense to transfer these to a so-called "URL matching table".
First, divide your website into all the individual pages and arrange them according to the navigation levels (you can find an example here on the page below). For each page you then consider
- specific keywords/keyword combinations that describe the focus of the page
- additional terms that provide a detailed description of the offer of the individual page
- a page title (page title)
- a description (meta description)
- a first-order heading (H1)
- subheadings in second or third order (H2 or H3) if necessary
The page title, the description and the first-order heading should ideally contain as many keywords/keyword combinations as possible according to the rule of thumb: "Offer + brand + location".
Note: A cheat example including an automatic character counter could be the"URL matching table of this project website".
Download the
Empty example of a url matching table with integrated character counting functions
- Now the page title, keywords and meta description found should be integrated into the corresponding fields in the Fiona system under search engine optimization in order to set a keyword focus.
- Check the H1 headings to see if they contain "Offer + Brand + Location". If not, change the headings according to this rule of thumb.
You should not engage in keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the overuse of relevant keywords on the website.
Link management
Link management, especially backlinks, are an important criterion for search engine optimization. The rule of thumb"offer + brand + location" also applies here. However, the quality of the link partners is more important than the quantity of links.
You can find out what is important for your website and what approach you should gradually adopt from this point of view here on this page.
Important for your website
- are frequently linked to from other websites/partners
- are called up with meaningful link texts from other websites
- set meaningful internal links within the website
For us, "meaningful" in this context means that the link identifiers for external sites always follow the rule of thumb "offer + brand + location".
Make sure that these external links are labeled "follow". External websites like to set external links to "nofollow", which means that the link is not "crawled", i.e. not seen, by the search engines.
These so-called backlinks play a major role in the ranking of your website in the search results. To find out who is linking to your website and thus creating a backlink, you can use the free tool backlink-tool.org, for example.
How to proceed
You should use the following possibilities to obtain backlinks to your website with meaningful link texts:
- Websites of institution, project or cooperation partners
- Entries in local directories, e.g. Yellow Pages, golocal, Das Örtliche, etc.
- Entries in regional directories, e.g. Companies in Munich/Bavaria, Munich Business Directory, Bavaria Business Directory, etc.
- Entries in business directories, such as med.de, Deutsches Krankenhaus Verzeichnis, kliniken.de, etc.
- Answers in question portals and links to your own homepage. But be careful here - see menu item Question portals
Google My Business
We have set up the Google My Business service from Google for every facility at the clinic and for many projects. This is associated with improvements in Google search results or Google Maps, as well as a Google Plus account.
If you want to know what other benefits are associated with it and what options you have, go to Google My Business.
NOTE
Please do NOT set up your own Google My Business account (if this is still possible), otherwise we will have to transfer it to the main account of the hospital.
We have created a main Google My Business account for the hospital and set up all facilities and some projects as sub-accounts. We will manage all Google accounts until you wish to do so yourself. We can give you administrator rights for your sub-account so that you can do the following:
- Update your company data, e.g. for Google Search and Google Maps
- Share news, updates and photos on Google
- Retrieve statistical data, e.g. how often your business is displayed on Google
- Read and respond to customer reviews
- Subscribe to notifications about important activities for your business
NEW
If you wish to maintain and edit your Google account yourself, this must be reported to the Communications and Media staff unit in text form with a lead time of 1 month (see service instructions / usage instructions for handling social media from the Communications and Media staff unit - access to the intranet and thus to the service instructions / usage instructions is only possible from the hospital network for employees). Existing accounts must be re-registered with a notice period of 6 weeks.
If you have any questions on this topic, please contact our support team as usual.
With the help of Google My Business, your customers can reach you more easily via
- Google search
- on Google Plus (Google+)
- on Google Maps
This also improves your Google ranking, because Google naturally rewards this. It is interesting for both sides that the official registration makes more valid data and images available online.
