Manipulating the search engines

One of the projects that I recently completed was a goodie. Good meaning, the outcome surpassed even my own expectations.

I've been working with a really nice orthopedic group, Orthopedic Specialists of Seattle, for the past year. When I met them, one of their priorities was to "optimize" their site. Essentially what they wanted was more traffic, because theoretically more traffic equals more patients, right?

As it turned out, their old site was not only outdated looking, but it was built in a way that wasn't search engine friendly. It was all Flash and image-based, unreadable by The Spiders. They were absolutely invisible to the search engines - I think the only way to find the site was to type in the company's exact name into Google. So I had to tell them that they needed a completely new website.

Then I partnered with some nice, smart people to actually build the new site. I wrote some original content with search engine optimization in mind (trying as hard as possible not to make it too noticeable) and recently launched the site.




And voila! Within one month of launch, their site was located on the first page of organic search results for almost every keyword that I identified.

It felt really great to see those kind of results. And even though I feel like I only scratched the surface, I still feel like I learned a lot about online marketing over the past year.

Thank you to Adam, a Claremont alum who I recently met and who helped this project work!