SEO when you can't toot your own horn

02.01.09

Veterinary hospitals in Ontario are limited by their licensing body in what they can say about themselves. Words like "spacious" and "friendly" are out. Even testimonials from clients have to be password-protected. So, improving search engine ranking on their sites can be an interesting challenge.

I worked with CAH to make their site search-engine friendly, and to give the pages a more modern look and intuitive architecture.  So how do you do search engine optimization (SEO) when you can't seek out links or say anything nice about yourself?

• Make page titles and URLs meaningful
  suenovotny.com/about will do better in a search than suenovotny.com/347.php?id=8.
• Keep the text rich in keywords
• Add meta tags and a site description on each page.  To be honest, this isn't as important to search engines as it once was.  It does give you a little control over how your site is listed, though.
• Use a good analytic program to track how and why people visit your site.  I installed Google Analytics, a great, free tool for measuring every aspect of a site's traffic.

Design-wise, I worked for a friendlier, more organic feel, with photos of people and pets throughout.  The old site was a bit cramped, so I opened the design up with added whitespace and reduced the section links in the main navigation from 10 to 5.

It's too early to tell how the SEO improvements are working, but stay tuned!