The first step in conducting Search Engine optimization is to determine what keywords your potential clients and employees might be using. By the term “keyword” we include both search terms of a single word as well as “keyphrases” of two or three words. It’s equally important to remember to “localize” your search terms.. using the “city” or “state” your service area covers.

It’s a good idea to focus on at least five or six keywords, but no more than a dozen. When you get rolling, you may want to extend this to addtional keywords.

There are 4 steps to this keyword research process. We will go over these 4 steps in our next post.

When putting together a Senior Services Marketing plan for the Internet, you must always first consider the search behavior of your audience - seniors, boomers, adult children, and family members - when developing content for your website, blog, article. 

Some business owners understand website metadata - and others do not. Primarily, the more relevant your site’s content is to a specific query, the higher it will rank. Metadata is best described - is data about data, allows you to describe your website - largely for the benefit of search engines, as some of them index websites according to your metadata.

If your website is for a senior home care agency, your metadata might include terms such as ‘elder care’, ‘home care, ’senior care’, ‘home health’, ’senior services’, ‘companionship’, ‘personal care’, ‘private duty assistance’, ‘non-medical home care’ or any other terms that best describe a senior home care agency.

To optimize your position on organic search engines’ results screens you need to ensure your title tag(s) is descriptive to senior home care and that you use keywords in the body of your document as well as in your metadata.

Search engine optimization relevance requirements are constantly evolving. Organic search optimization, also known as natural search optimization, is a continuing process which allows a web site to gain free listings within the major search engines without incurring ongoing marketing costs. Organic search listings deliver countless millions in sales to the Web’s most successful online retailers. Unfortunately most senior services’ web sites are not properly designed to reach their market.

Before we go into depth about search engines and how they work, there is an important distinction to be made between search engines search sites and search directories. Search engines have a proprietary way of indexing and catagorizing Web pages that they keep confidential. They build an index or directory you search through at a search site. These search sites are AOL.com, Netscape, EarthLink.com, and DogPile.com, to name a few.

Search directories are the third form of Web Page organizationon the Internet. Search directories use information that is provided by Web page owners and do not use indexes. There are a number of directories on the Internet. Examples are dir.yahoo.com, dmoz.org (Open Directory Project), and Aviva.com. Web Page owners submit their URL, listing and description to search directories, organizing the information within sub-directories. These submissions are edited by human editors who may shorten or reject a submission. Search engines sometimes use the data provided by search directories to help improve their search results, but directory listings can also provide valuable links to your Web page that can improve your page’s ranking. They are an important part of your search engine strategy.

Search engines have grown in importance over the years. It’s estimated that about 50% or Website visits originate at search engines. According to iCrossing, over 67% of people planning to buy something use a search engine.

Search engines have played a pivotal role in the growth of the Internet. Many of these search tools are now household names, like Google, Yahoo, Ask.com.

Their job is to sort through these Web pages in a process called “indexing”, to find the information quickly, and then organize the results of the searches when you ask for it. With billions of Web pages competing for attention, a business owner needs to ensure that search engines are able to find your local Web site, index it and place it high in the results for customers whose searches are relevant to the services you provide.

That’s your challenge.. making sure when people are searching for the types of products and services you offer, they visit your Web site.

When we first started working with home care, home health, hospitals, long term care, reverse mortgage companies several years ago, we were surprised! The first thing that we noticed - most providers of senior care services did not recognize the need to be visible on search engines.

Some providers purchased Googe Adwords which can be helpful. But the most part, they had a website.. and did not market it. I guess the reasoning is “we have a website and that should be enough”. So, is it?

Good questions to ask yourself when asking whether you need more search engine visibility:

1. Do a Google search on “your company” industry keyword term, add your local city, and click the search button. For example, if you are a home care agency, the keyword search would be home care, senior care, elder care, at home care, and then add your local city; home care chicago. Do your competitors show up on first and second pages of Google? If they do and your website is not found in the first 4 or 5 pages, then you (obviously) need more visibilty.

2. Do a little research, on the web, on “users on the web” - this will give you information on the number of people using the Internet.

3. Go to this site https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - and do a query on your industry and local city, i.e. home care chicago and see how many users are searching on the Internet for that keyword term.

I just did a query using the above tool on the term home care chicago - guess how many people in November 2008 searched that term? 3600!!!

You may not even realize just how many people are looking for you on the web.