Tips For Webmasters

The Importance of Prominent Contact Information
Almost every day I come across beautiful websites with rich, well-written content, but they overlook some mighty important things and therefore fall short of their potential to generate new patients. Since people who are searching on the Internet for a surgeon proceed in a "scan mode" until a website can draw their attention into more of a "reading mode," it is vital that your website include prominent displays of practice’s location, contact information (especially a phone number), as well as graphic and textual links to a main practice contact form.Getting your website to the first page of Yahoo!, Google, MSN, AOL, etc. search results is critical, and will certainly increase your practice’s exposure to people looking for an ophthalmologist. But too many practice’s websites neglect to register as high up on the page as possible the fact that their offices are in the locale that matches the consumer's search, and fail to display their phone number in the field to which the consumer's eye is initially drawn. If I need a surgeon and conduct an MSN search for "eye surgeon San Diego," and then click onto one of the first page links in the search engine results, it gets my attention to find immediately that the website on which I have landed represents a practice located near me. Having a phone number prominently displayed in the header of the landing page increases the odds that I will contact that practice.It is also important to provide graphic and textual links on every page of the website that navigate site visitors to what should be the primary target destination page of your site: the main contact form. Graphics with human images of surgeons or other office staff begin creating the bonding with site visitors that evolve into actual relationships, and if these graphics are associated with mini-contact forms or link directly to a main contact form, odds are greater that site visitors become practice contacts. Links within the text of every website page are essential. If the goal of having a website is to help generate patients for your practice, or if you are only interested in being as helpful to site visitors as possible, providing prominent location and contact information is fundamental. Prompting site visitors to your main contact form via purposeful site navigation is indispensable to getting the information and developing the relationships that will bring you new patients.