2.01 Fitting into the web

You mustn't think of your practice web site as standing alone. The power of the internet comes from the way that all the information contained in its billions of pages is interlinked.

Yoo - hoo – here we are!
Your aim should be to create an online resource which will, figuratively, wave to the precise groups of visitors you hope to attract. There are an enormous number of sites out there, all waving. It isn't easy to make your site visible but you have to do all you can. If you don't you certainly won't attract the right visitors by chance.

Content, content content
The first essential is content. Generous quantities of useful, accurate, high-quality, text-based content. The second essential is content as well, and the third essential – that's right, content. The usefulness of your site is almost entirely defined by the quality of the content you provide – rarely by the whizzyness of the animations and graphics provided by your web designer.

They're pointing at me
Your aim should be to provide the kind of resource that makes other sites want to point at you, that makes them want to provide links from their site to yours. The quality of incoming links is much more important than their quantity. You need links from the kinds of sites that your clients are likely to visit. You need to provide complementary content so that the owners of such sites want to show their vistors the way to your site.

Getting found
When a visitor first arrives at your web site, they will most probably have arrived having found a link to your site in one of the major search engines. If not then they will probably arrive through a link from some other web site – that they found in a search engine. Very, very few first time visitors arrive having typed your web address into their browser address bar.

Getting indexed
If your site has incoming links from another web site, already in the search engine index, then you will get added quite quickly. You can submit your web address, every search engine has a form to do so somewhere, but the search engines seem to prefer to find you through their own resources and seem to be much slower to include sites without incoming links.

Getting listed
There are thousands of online directories. There is a handful where it is worth checking that your practice is listed accurately. There is one, the human edited Open Directory Project, where being listed can help your web site ranking in search results. There is another, our own Any UK Vet directory, where being listed will bring you clients directly as well as directing visitors to your site,

Paying for it
If you decide to pay to get your web site noticed then there are any number of companies all ready to take your money. You can pay to be submitted to thousands of search engines. You can pay to be included in some search engines. You can pay for links to your site to be presented to potential clients – pay per view. You can pay for each time someone clicks on a link to your site – pay per click. You can pay to be included in a directory. You can pay for an enhanced listing in directory results. If you got serious then you could spend huge sums of money – and potentially not see a single new client at the end of the exercise.

We'll come back to all these topics later in this section but, first, lets take look at the major search engines in more detail

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