While working on a white paper about hospital and physician marketing, this analogy popped into my head. Now, I’m not trying to play to anyone’s ego here, but this comparison really does lend some insight to positioning your facility in a competitive market.

Living here in Raleigh, North Carolina, there is rarely a day that I don’t drive past the RBC Center. For those of you who are not familiar with it, let me share a few facts:

• It has called Raleigh home since 1999
• It houses over 770,000 square feet of entertainment and sports space
• It seats up to 19,500 fans and has 66 luxury suites
• It has 8,000 parking spaces and is easily accessible from any direction
• It can transform from hardwood court to ice rink in under 6 hours
• It has hosted numerous events from Rodeo to Rock and Roll
• It is home to both the NC State Men’s Basketball team & the Carolina Hurricanes

These are just a few of the things that make the RBC Center a great venue. Unfortunately, none of these things are remotely of interest to the majority of people who descend upon this location each and every week. Well, with the exception of the last two.

It’s not the features of the RBC Center that bring in the crowds. It’s the rock stars, the rodeo riders, the on-ice excitement, and the buzzer beating three point shots that pack this stadium. People come for the events and they come to engage with their idols. They want to be part of the very best doing what they do best. Hmmm…sounds a little bit like the expectations of selecting a hospital.

As healthcare consumers we appreciate convenient locations and ample parking. We appreciate the beautiful façade of the building. We appreciate all the life improving technology that is housed inside. But, what really draws us there is the need to see our own type of rock star, the highly skilled medical provider that is going to make whatever ailment we have better. We are here to engage with a physician.

Keep this most important fact top of mind when developing your presence. Align the strengths of your facility with the skills of your physicians. Make them both inseparable to your community. Insure when someone is searching for either a facility or a physician in your area, both of those searches lead to your front door with a unified message.

While we do appreciate all the features you have to offer, what will really bring us in is the talent. Specialties are great, but we connect with the specialist. If you want your “venue” to stand out from all the others, focus on the connection between the physicians and your facility. Promote the talent within!

I would love to hear your feedback on this.

Google has pioneered the principle of “blended search,” or “universal search,” which means that search results from a variety of content categories – including video, news, images, shopping results and more – are brought together on a results page in an attempt to bring the user the most relevant possible matches.

A search for something like “landscaping” in Google will return not only regular web pages, but also images of landscaping ideas, local business listings pinpointed on a map, related news articles and more.

If you search for something more specific like “growing a pumpkin patch” videos will appear as thumbnails directly in the results page. See how it stands out on a results page otherwise dominated by your basic blue links and black preview text.

Although it is possible to earn a thumbnail spot like this from any online video service, you’re likely to see better results if you host your videos on YouTube. Google tends to rank YouTube videos more favorably over Hulu, Metacafe, etc. Google also tends to favorably rank web pages with embedded video content. Notice the top results for our search for “landscaping” all have embedded video content on their page.

Signal has found excellent results from adding and optimizing online video for numerous clients. YouTube specifically outperforms the rest. It’s easy to use, it offers cool ways to embed and share your videos online, and it greatly amplifies your chances of being found by web searchers. Not too shabby a deal.

Keywords in the URL String
www.fakedomainname.com/widgets/
Say you’re trying to rank for the keyword “widgets.” Having “widgets” in the page URL string (after the .com) may affect rankings slightly. The real benefit is click through rate. Since search engines display the keyword you searched in bold in the search results, more people are likely to click on your listing. The key is that you have to be ranking well in the search engines for people to even see your listing. This is probably not worth rewriting all of your URLs for, but definitely worth considering for a new website.

Keywords in the Domain
www.widgetsrus.com
Choosing a domain that contains one or some of your keywords can have slightly more of an effect on your SEO efforts than just having the keywords in the URL string. In fact, if you don’t already have an established brand or domain, it’s helpful to even work keywords into your brand name and/or any tag lines associated with your brand. Just like people will begin to associate your brand with your keywords, search engines will recognize the relevance of your website to those keywords.

Exact Match Domain
www.bluewidgetsraleigh.com
If you don’t already have an established brand or domain, choosing a domain that is an exact match to a top industry keyphrase can have a major effect on your SEO efforts. Keyword choice and finding a domain that is available is the hard part. We can only speculate why having an exact match domain is worth so much, but it’s likely search engines think someone searching for “blue widgets raleigh” is actually trying to look up the bluewidgetsraleigh.com website.

It’s also possible that having a domain that is an exact match to a top searched keyphrase in your industry means that you were an early presence on the web for this topic and possibly a leader in the eyes of the search engines.

Why is duplicate content even an issue?  From a user’s standpoint, duplicate content is a nuisance. Google tries to filter out duplicate documents so users have a good, diverse selection of information relevant to their search query instead of a poor selection of duplicate articles or even slight variations of the same article.

Having duplicate content can be a headache for a web site owner too.  Certain types of duplicate content can have a negative effect on your site’s performance in the search engines.  Oftentimes multiple versions of the same URL are created accidentally by category URL systems, session IDs and other basic site development issues, as well as some marketing tactics. See Google Webmaster Central to learn more about duplicate content caused by URL parameters.

In many cases this new tag is the best way to communicate your preferred URL, but a permanent redirect is still necessary if the duplicate content is on a completely different domain, or if you need to transfer page history or consolidate link credit.  Check out SEOmoz for more technical details on how the new Canonical URL tag works.

Tom Wilde, an expert in search engine optimization (SEO,) explains this shift in a recent blog post on SearchEngineLand.com. A short time ago, consumers had to buy an entire album to listen to their favorite song, flip through a magazine or newspaper to read a certain article, and tune into a television network to watch a beloved show. Today, with the introduction of iTunes, Hulu, and countless other web sites and tools, users can find the exact object that they are looking for while bypassing their usual containers.

This presents an interesting challenge to publishers, who must now consider how web users discover their material and cater to this when they publish. Also, how will Web 3.0 affect Internet giant, Google, if the search engine provides links to containers (web sites,) rather than specific objects?

Read the post to learn more of Wilde’s thoughts on the future of the web.

What does this mean for a company looking to gain more visibility in search engines? On one hand optimizing web pages for organic visibility in Google has gotten more and more difficult, particularly in cases where the much-sought-after real estate of the first page results has been divvied out into some of these other categories.  On the other hand, blended search results mean there are now more opportunities for visibility.  To take full advantage of all blended search has made available, today’s search marketing strategy must be all-encompassing, from claiming your Local Business Listing in Google Maps to optimizing press releases and more.

Of these opportunities, online video is predicted to show huge growth in 2009.  According to a survey by PermissionTV, 67% of US Marketers plan to focus their online marketing budget in online video in 2009.

Online video major focus for marketers in 2009

Adding video to your marketing strategy or repurposing existing video for increased online visibility could be the right move for your company. For one, adding videos to your website can help increase conversions and convert visitors faster.  In addition, videos actually stand a much better chance of ranking in the top ten than any given web page.  When done right, adding videos to your website can even make your site more relevant to users, which helps you rank better in Google. The sooner you can get started the better.