Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Put your hands up and step away from the terminal
Introducing Photoshop Disasters . . .
hat tip to Dreaded Purple Master.
Y’know, it’s really not that tough to do a good Photoshop. All it takes is a decent concept and a modicum of technique. The nightmares posted on Photoshop Disaster all seem to be advertising/publishing tasks gone horribly wrong. One question, really: where was the editor — drunk, suicidally depressed, blind?
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I’m thinking of hosting a new contest, one which would promote my medical website. What sort of contest would achieve the best results, though? Maybe Dan can tell me the most effective way to boost some of my pages on Google. I already have a lock on ear wax (look at the number two spot!) but I’d like to snag a similar high rating for something like sinusitis, dizziness, or snoring.
Any suggestions?
D.
I don’t know anymore. I’m ranked #5 for “pictures of men wearing kids underwear” and I don’t even have any pictures like that. Look for photos of hot naked chicks and I’m #6.
I think at this point, Google is just screwing with me.
Then again, I’m #2 for one doesn’t need money to achieve dreams. Now, if only people were searching for that…
Anyway, on to your problem… Take a look here:
Who links to Dr. Doug’s Ear Wax?
That’s how you’re getting a high rank for ear wax.
Look here:
Who links to Dr. Doug’s Snoring?
That’s why you’re not getting a high rank for snoring.
The simple answer to your question is to get more people to link to you. 😉
One thing you can do is make it easier for people to find the pages you want to rank better on. Most people browse. They’re not going to use the search function on your page, especially when they have no idea what kinds of topics are going to be covered. And your pages listing all your Q&A’s are just too unwieldy to look through.
I’d add a section that lists what you consider to be your most important pages. Maybe you could have a FAQ block where you’ll link to the Ear Wax FAQ, Snoring FAQ, Dizziness FAQ, Sinusitis FAQ and whatever else you want to draw attention to. Make that stuff easier to find! You could add that section right beneath the Home link and above the ? link.
Also, did you have an attorney write your disclaimer? If not, you might want to consider having one do it for you, just to be sure you’re fully covered.
I don’t know that a contest would be the best way to promote your medical website. What would the prize be?
What is your objective with the site? Do you plan to try to make money off of it? If not, I would guess you probably wouldn’t want to spend a lot of money promoting it. You could buy ads on different places, but how much would you really want to spend on that?
Alternatively, if you don’t want to spend any money on it, but are willing to spend a couple hours a week promoting it, send me an eMail and I can give you some advice on that.
Hi Dan. THANK YOU. The initial purpose of the site was to be helpful — to put information out there for those who needed it. Now, however, I find I need to promote a practice, and since I’m near a big population center it makes sense to promote the blog.
Thanks again for the great advice. As for the contest, the purpose would be to generate more links to a given page, one I’d like to boost in the google rankings. Or does that no longer work?
It can work, if you do the contest the right way. You could do something where a link gets you one entry, a blog post (with link) counts as 5 entries. If they subscribe to your RSS feed, that might be two entries. Check John Chow’s blog and search for contests to see how he’s done some of his.
Something else to consider – Teh Google loves dynamic content, so it will rank blog content as somewhat more relevant than static HTML. Some links are valued by Google more than others…
By way of an example, remember that bogus ‘country living’ site? Because I kvetched about them on my blog, and because my blog is updated semi-regularly (*cough* *cough*), I am now the #2 and #4 Google result for that site’s name (#2 with .com, #4 without…). Why? Because I’ve blogged about them more than once. My paltry amount of dynamic content crushed his paid-for static SEO links because Google’s magic indexing scheme thinks my results are more relevant.
Another problem you’re facing is that there’s a lot of competition for the keywords you want – how many snoring remedies are there, for instance?
How funny that you post about your medical website.
I was sitting on my hands not wanting to bother you, but since you asked…
Another small bug flew in my ear and died there (as far as I can tell). I’m not dizzy this time but don’t know how to remove it. I can hit it with a q-tip but it totally weirds me out when it crinkles.
M
I know you’re having a life and moving and working and all, but I need you to come back and say something about Palin. thank you.