Dental Websites & Photos

Do you have a web­site for your prac­tice?  If not.….….what in the world are you wait­ing for?????  If yes.….….does it gen­er­ate a steady flow of New Patients and Rev­enue for you?  If yes, that’s awe­some, and if not, what are you doing to change that?

Den­tal Web­sites and YOUR Pic­tures are a Necessity

As I pre­vi­ously men­tioned in a post about Dr. Mike Barr’s Web­site Owner’s Man­ual for Den­tists, I am not an “expert” on web­sites by any stretch of the imag­i­na­tion, although I’ve cer­tainly worked hard to learn a lot since early 2009.  But yes, my web­sites are in toto the Num­ber 1 source of New Patients and Monthly Rev­enue for my prac­tice (in March 2011 alone, over $40,000), so I cer­tainly have some suc­cess.  Part of that suc­cess IMO, is the pic­tures of my own patients and my own work that are plas­tered all over them.  And yes, I make it quite clear by my water­marks and state­ments that those are my own, not stock images that any­one can get, nor images stolen from a col­league.

Your Pho­tos Cre­ate Instant Credibility

Why do I believe it is so cru­cial to have your own pic­tures online, whether your web­site, your Face­book Fan Page, a Flickr gallery, etc?  Cer­tainly, one of the biggest rea­sons is cred­i­bil­ity.  Remem­ber that a new patient vis­it­ing your site has absolutely no idea how good (clin­i­cally speak­ing) a den­tist you are.  You, or your web­site copy­writer, may be amaz­ingly elo­quent and gifted with words, but as they say, “A pic­ture is worth a thou­sand words,” and if a new patient stum­bles on your site and sees work clearly marked as yours, if they’re impressed, then you have auto­mat­i­cally gained author­ity in that person’s eyes.  They can see what YOU do, not some­one else.  Take the 2 exam­ples below:

What do you think a patient thinks when s/he sees these?  “Wow, that doc­tor does some pretty nice work!  That’s just want I’m look­ing for.”

In com­par­i­son, read Mike’s humor­ous but on-target post about the most com­monly seen women on the web, and after a patient has seen those pic­tures on 5–10 sites, what will that prospec­tive patient think?  “.….…..NEXT!!!!”

Web­site Opti­miza­tion with Photos

Besides the credibility/authority that you gain by show­cas­ing your own work and pic­tures, there’s another key func­tion of pho­tos in your web­site: get­ting found by the search engines, or “opti­miz­ing” them.

So how do you “opti­mize” a pic­ture to aid in improv­ing your web pres­ence?  As with most any­thing, it has to do with key­words. At the moment, though, you are prob­a­bly think­ing, “Where in the world do you put key­words in a pic­ture!?!?!?” right?  Well, they go in the code “behind” the pic­ture, so-to-speak.  So what does that look like?

If you really want to see what all the code looks like that makes up a web­site, in most cases, all you have to do is click “Control-U,” and a new tab or win­dow will open in your browser with what looks like a for­eign lan­guage, and really, that’s what it is.  As you scroll down, you will occa­sion­ally come across some code like this:

<a href=“cosmetic-dentistry.htm”><img src=“images/porcelain-veneers-before-after-1.jpg” alt=“Porce­lain den­tal veneers, by expe­ri­enced cos­metic den­tist Dr. X, cre­ate beau­ti­ful new smiles.” width=“150” height=“105” />

There may be more, but the high­lighted texts are the parts you want to know and use, because that’s where you add the rel­e­vant key­words for Google­bots to find as they are scan­ning your site.  More infor­ma­tion on each of them can be found in my recent blog post on boost­ing your den­tal SERPs with image optimization.

(More to be added soon )