Technical SEO

• On the Backend Server Side of your medical practice website, you must continuously monitor and remove bottlenecks that impact connection time, SSL handshake time, DNS lookup time, and server-side script loading time for PHP and Python.  This essentially requires that your site is run on a powerful hosting platform.
• On the Frontend Side  of your medical website, you must continuously monitor and remove bottlenecks that impact the loading and processing of basic structure (HTML), presentational style sheets (CSS), interactive behavior elements (JS), other client-side scripts, images, videos, graphics, animations, and text.

• Site structure (overall organization of pages and internal links) indicates to search engine robots like GoogleBot how to crawl your medical website and rank and index each and every page and post using taxonomies (tags and categories), internal links, navigation set-ups, and breadcrumbs.
• Your medical website’s Robots.txt file is a highly-sensitive coded file that tells browser bots what your site should look like and provides it ‘directions’ to crawl your site.

Eliminate non-directive links, links with 404 error pages, and links with broken embedded image/media errors, generally stemming from changes (iterations, additions, deletions, etc.) by retrieving dead links and building redirects.

Duplicate content confuses search engines as they don’t know which page on your medical website to rank higher, resulting in self-competition wherein all pages with duplicate content getting lower search engine rankings.  Eliminate unnecessary duplicate content and establish canonical link elements to hierarchically prioritize and rank pages where duplicate content is necessary and appropriate.

Google has made HTTPS an important ranking signal as it ensures that a browser user’s data is not intercepted when accessing your website from the browser and it prevents cyber-attacks by authenticating web servers. To establish your website as HTTPS, you must add an SSL encryption certificate to your website.  Securing your website with an SSL certificate is an essential practice to help prevent potential patient data breaches and save you from catastrophic HIPAA violations.

Structured data tells search engines what medical services, products, ideas, etc. you are presenting and offering on your medical website. Properly formatting your schema markup to optimize structured data enhances search engine understanding of your site and enables your site to establish rich results, wherein browsers will populate your website’s search result snippet as well as highlighted data like star-ratings, images, detailed information, etc.  This helps push you to the forefront of search results for patients to be able to easily find your medical practice over competitors.

The XML sitemap is a roadmap of all of your medical practice’s website pages that serves as a backup to your internal linking site structure for search bots to follow in order to prevent search engine crawl bot confusion.