Best SEO Practices
Checklist
SEO, or search optimization, is big business. Good SEO means our site appears when users search the internet for information. Bad SEO is far more complex, and damaging, to our websites. We’ve compiled this list of best on-page SEO practices for your use.
This checklist is for the following content items:
- Blogs
- Interviews/podcasts
- Press releases
- Patient stories
- Videos
- Images
Titles
Heading (H1)
Make sure your content has a title (h1) with a topic or keyword phrase in it.
H1 Heading Example
Subheading (H2)
Make sure your content has 2–3 subheadings (H2s) on the page to divide the content up into relevant sections.The subheadings should have keyword phrases in them.
H2 Subheading Example
Metadescription
Every piece of content you create should have a metadescription. A metadescription describes the content and is often pulled by Google to show SERPs (search engine results pages). The ideal length for a metadescription is 150-170 characters, including spaces.
Metadescription Example
Topic Summary Sentence
The first or second sentence of your content should provide a summary or use a keyword phrase. If a reader found your content in the search results on a search engine, you would want the first sentence to summarize the piece and hook them in to read more.
Topic Summary Sentence Example
Internal & External Links
You want your piece of content to have at least 2–5 links to other sources or relevant webpages within your site. Do not use the terms "read more" or "click here" in your link text. Those words offer few clues to the user and search engine about what they are about to see if they click on the link. You want to be as descriptive as possible.
Some examples of linking opportunities that you can apply to your content:
- Featured provider/specialist profile
- Service line or health library webpage affiliated with the content
Quality Link Examples
Video Titles/Alt Text
Videos should have user-readable titles. Videos embedded on pages typically show titles and we want them to be optimized for the user. There is typically a place to add alt text to a video. Alt text is for accessibility but also functions as a great indicator for search engines about what the video is about.
Dates: Published, Reworked, Republished
Blogs and other content marketing pieces typically have dates because they are commentaries or information pieces on smaller topics or questions related to pillar or evergreen topic webpages. Blogs are ephemeral with information fitting a time or place more specifically. They can be updated and republished.
You always want to indicate in a blog that you've updated the text and that it has been republished.
Google and other search engines use the date to determine how fresh a piece of content is. We can update content and republish it with a recent date to draw more traffic via the search engine to the content.
Content Author
Content marketing industry standards recommend transparency about content marketing authors. We could build links to our service lines, academic departments, etc. by filling in the author section with the program/service line/academic department name.
URL Structure
The url should be the title or a compacted version of the title. This ensures that if a user sees the url, they can see where they are at/what piece they are reading. The url also helps search engines see page classification and content taxonomy.
URL Structure Example