Get more patients with backlinks

2. Press releases
If you are writing press releases, make sure they contain keywords that someone would use to find a business like yours. Also ensure that they include links back to your site.

Once the press release is written, submit it to all the news agencies. Then you must wait and see if any of them pick it up and publish it.

You may want to consider having a press release professionally written and distributed by a public relations firm to boost your chances of having the release picked up. PRWeb.com has an excellent reputation. Its distribution network includes the search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing; media outlets such as USA Today, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal; Associated Press distribution through major newspapers; and health and medical digests such as the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, Women’s Health, and many more.

3. Article directories
By writing and distributing articles through high-traffic article directories, such as EzineArticles.com, Articles.org, and Hubpages.com, you can attract valuable inbound links from a high-traffic site. Craft an effective link at the close of your article to drive traffic back to your site. An example of what your link might say is, “To view a short video on Kegel exercises for pelvic organ prolapse, visit our Web site at www.neilbaum.com/videos.”

4. Social bookmarking
Like Web browser bookmarks, social bookmarking sites such as Digg.com, Reddit.com, and Del.icio.us.com store individual pages (bookmarks) online and allow users to tag (with keywords), organize, search, and manage these bookmarks as well as share them with others. If you bookmark your content on these sites, you get a link from the service. By producing content that your readers enjoy and bookmark to their friends, you gain a link that increases in search engine optimization (SEO) value.

5. Blog comments
To find blog posts on which to comment, you can use blog-specific search engines such as Google Blog Search. Make sure these are blogs read by your target market, not your colleagues. Brand yourself by always using the same name and remember to link back to your site. Always leave a comment that adds to the conversation.

6. Social media
Google also indexes your Twitter updates and social networking profiles. Add that to Web 2.0 hubsites like Scribd or HubPage and you’ve got a way to create many inbound links in a very short time. Scribd is a digital library featuring an ebook and audiobook subscription service that includes New York Times best sellers and classics. HubPages is a user-generated content, revenue-sharing Web site.

7. Video syndication
YouTube is one of the most visited sites online, and the number of sites that syndicate videos is growing every day. These sites often allow you to link to your site in your video’s description, on your profile page, or both.

The importance of being consistent—and honest
For best results, you need to build these links monthly with regularity, and over time, you will reap the benefits of improved rankings. While it is fairly easy to modify your Web pages to make them more SEO-friendly, it is harder to influence other Web sites and get them to link to yours. This is the reason search engines consider backlinks such an important factor.

Moreover, search engines’ criteria for quality backlinks have gotten tougher, thanks to unscrupulous Web masters trying to achieve these backlinks by deceptive techniques, such as hidden links or automatically generated pages whose sole purpose is to provide backlinks to Web sites. These pages are called link farms. Not only are they disregarded by search engines, but linking to one could get your site banned entirely. This strategy is often referred to as “black hat” linking and is to be avoided.

“White hat” methods to increase backlinks
Blog posting is one of the easiest, least expensive, and most effective ways to garner links from other sites. However, to reap this benefit, you must post blog entries consistently. We suggest posting at least once weekly. Your blog will gain more attention if you have something newsworthy to report. For example, if you attend a meeting where a revolutionary new development is reported, and you write about it before the media, you can be sure others will want to connect and link to your site.

Conduct a survey and share your results on your site. Others will want to link to your report.

Share any templates your office uses to be more efficient and productive. For example, Dr. Baum has a template, or checklist, for starting and ending every day in the office. It is shared on his Web site so that other sites can link to it and make use of it.