I’ve had a client of mine for about the last year who happens to be an MD.  When he first hired me to help his website rank higher for his target keyword (his medical area of practice), his website ranked in the low 70′s to high ’80′s in the Google search results and wasn’t getting any traffic.  In addition, it appeared that his website had definitely been hit with the mythical Minus 60 Google penalty because no matter what I tried, the most I could get it to climb was between the 65 and 69 spot in the Google search engine result pages (SERPS).

After a lot of research to his website’s code, his host, his server and IP address, I found out that…

• His previous webmaster had embedded links on his site for the benefit of the webmaster, not our mutual client.  The wrong kind of outbound links can hurt you in the Google rankings if you’re linking out to unrelated websites which offer no value to your visitors. However, having the right kind of outbound and inbound text links can help you rank higher in the SERPS drastically.
• His webmaster was hosting the site on a shared server using a shared IP address with thousands of low quality, under performing or at least less than professional sites. As a result of the shared server and shared IP address, Google associated my client’s site as being part of the same ‘bad neighborhood’ group of sites, and was definitely penalizing his site with  ‘Minus 60′, which by the way, Google denies it’s existence – it is the Area 51 of the SEO world.
• His webmaster had not done any kind of search engine optimization to the site – ever.  AS if that wasn’t bad enough, the actual site architecture was not search engine friendly at all.  There was no regard to internal linking structure and there was no strategy or concept on how a search engine should be able to easily crawl the site and index all of it’s content.

When finding a professional and reliable website designer, make sure you choose one that has at least some basic idea of how SEO works and why a great site needs to have at least the basics of  SEO incorporated into the code from the ground up.

Either way, none of this was good at all… and I knew this would be one of the most challnging campaigns I had ever managed.

The ‘Game Plan’ -

1. Clean up all of the code, remove any unrelated outbound links, and optimize the code for his target keyword phrases.  So, I followed up by optimizing the site for his target phrase when applicable and in moderation. When working on the internal SEO aspect of a site, it is important to avoid over optimization of the code as over optimization can often be considered spamming of the search engines with black hat techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, etc… An over optimized site can be worse than having a site not optimized at all.
2. Switch hosting to a reliable hosting company, and upgrade the account to include a dedicated IP address.  The majority of our clients have no idea what a big part the hosting company they’re using and the location of those servers play as the search engines analyze the thousands of pages in their index and decide what order they should be listed in.
3. Add a blog and merge it with his site, allowing the client or anyone one of his employees to add new content to his previously static site without having the need to know any programming language or HTML.  Search engines love fresh, keyword rich content that is unique, which links out to quality, relevant sources found in your own site or on other relevant, external, authority sites – they will use that page of content or hosted article and the ‘in-text links‘ to evaluate what keywords your site should rank higher for.
4. Continue to improve his website’s link profile by acquiring lots of quality inbound links from as many relevant sources as I could find while using his target keyword phrases as anchor text for those links.  Lucky for me, our inventory of partner sites includes more than 50,000 quality sites and I don’t know how many more thousands of blogs (the number grows by 50 to 100 per day)… As a link broker at SEMA, finding quality sites for just about any topic is not a problem!
5. Monitor progress weekly and make adjustments as needed twice a month.  On any SEO campaign, you do the changes, you monitor the results, then you adjust to keep it going.  SEO techniques are always changing, and what worked six month’s ago may not work today.  Also, some SEO agencies will charge you by the hour – not good considering SEO is a full time job.  When hiring an SEO agency to help your website rank higher or if you’re considering outsourcing SEO, make sure and ask all the right questions first.

The Results – After executing the above plan I am happy to say that my MD client has sent me several emails in the last few months saying that his site is (and has been ranking at #1 in Google) for his keywords.  However,  anytime I check Google for his keyword I see him at #3 – although he’s getting more business than he can handle being listed at #3 is great (and much better than the 70 to 80 spot he was at when he first hired me) – it’s still not #1 and by all means, his site should be!  I’m a bit of a perfectionist and couldn’t really help but think about why he had climbed to #3 but not to #1 and today, it finally hit me!

Google knows I’m in the DFW area based on my IP address, my client and his site are in Minnesotta.  When I search using his keyword, the first two results are major hospitals that are nationally known, then his clinic is on the #3 spot.  However, when he searches, Google knows he’s in the same area as his clinic is (Minnesotta) and therefore Google IS showing his site at #1 as I thought they should all this time!

So, although I guess I wont be seeing his site at #1, and instead will have to be happy seeing it at #3 in the Dallas area, I’m happy to know his site climbed up to the top spot as a result of all of my hard work and dedication to his website’s success over the past year.  Nothing generates more referrals and loyal clients than when they get results that meet or exceed their expectations!

To get your own website ranking at the top of the Google Search results, send me a quick email.