Two factors will maintain and increase the clinic’s website ranking in google for targeted keyword phrases people use:

• the optimisation of each page of the website for the keywords people are using in google to find each webpage’s topic(s)
• the creation of hyperlinks back to the clinic’s webpages from external sites; preferably from high-traffic, social media networking websites, as these are the places that people hang out

The clinic’s owner – the good Doctor McGrath – is in a fine position, now, as his rankings have been enhanced with the recent rebuild of his website on Joomla content management system; and the publishing of his localised Wordpress blog.

Some examples of google love include:

• #1,2,3,4&5 rankings on the web for “osteopath Dunedin“
• #2 ranking in New Zealand for “osteopath“
• #1 ranking on the web for “osteopath blog“

The clinic’s Internet marketing campaign continues with 1 to 2 hours per week of link-building; further enhancing the Dunedin Osteopathic Clinic’s long-term search engine and social media optimisation positioning.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is no longer enough. Now, to promote our website, we must build links to the website in unconventional and unique ways. An SEO colleague recently said “it’s much harder to get links these days.” He is correct. The old methods of link-building have become inefficient. It is now a requirement that Internet marketers have a thorough working knowledge and application of social media optimisation (SMO) techniques. This Internet marketing mutation – SEO to SMO – requires that Internet marketing experts “switch to a higher gear.”

Ignore social media and you shall be left behind!

15% of a website marketing campaign should be spent on our website optimisation: that is, properly configuring our webpages to match the actual searches our prospective customers do in google, yahoo and msn; and regularly adding quality content to our webpages

85% of the marketing effort must be spent on building links to our website: that is, employing social media techniques to attract social bookmarking, social networking, video sharing, image sharing, blogging and micro-blogging about our webpages.

These are the facts, my friend, in this rapidly-mutating world of Internet marketing. So grab social media optimisation by the horns and mutate with the rest of us!

The greatest thing about social media (e.g. social bookmarking, social networking, video, image and document-sharing) is that it is natural. It mirrors human nature. How? Well, by nature, we group ourselves into communities of like-minded people. In these communities, we get together, share about what interests us, and (hopefully) grow spiritually/emotionally/intellectually. Social media creates communites: electronically. And it’s even easier, because we can network in our underwear, at 3am, over an espresso we just made in the kitchen.

And social media has spawned an industry of Internet marketers – known as “social media optimisers” – looking for another way to get their client’s quality content out to the world. And the industry is indeed blossoming.

Gosh, technology is fantastic!