Sarah Austin at Search Engine Journal has written a great post about creating magnetic content for your site.

Hands down, content is the most important part of your web site because it’s why visitors stay on your site. They may come to see a great design, watch a new video, or research an idea, but they stay when your content is magnetic. Magnetic content, though, can be difficult to write even if you’re an experienced writer, so what do you do when you’re not a great writer? Write anyway; keep your content strong, tight, right, and easy; and you’ll be writing magnetic content in no time.

It is not quanity, it is quality. The four “writes” according to Sarah are:

1. Write strong
2. Write tight
3. Write right
4. Write easy

Is the content that you put on your site there to build trust in your patients and their families, or is just some marketing jargon that has been white-washed by risk management? The content that is created on a hospital’s web site needs to be able to build trust and give the patient a sense of confidence in your organization. Can they trust you with their lives? You will need to be able to answer that question when people come to your site looking up information about their most recent health diagnosis.

Here’s a way to test… Would you trust your hospital based on the web site’s content? If not, you may want to rethink how you portray your organization to your patients.

Stop dehumanizing your web site. Open the virtual and real doors to people and let them build a relationship with you through trust.

False.

Hospital health content is not about seeing who can act like they are the smartest and most informed. I do not think anyone has won awards for the amount of pages of content on their site, but I do know that awards have been given to sites that are engaging and improve a hospital’s communication efforts with patients.

People visit web sites looking to be engaged and informed, not to inundated with massive amounts of academic babel that means nothing to them when they are trying to find the best place to take a loved one to be cured, or to healed themselves. Health content needs to be engaging. It needs to reach out to the visitor, and tell them your organization is the best choice and that you will provide the best possible care. You can use video, Flash interactive assessments and even actual textual content to engage these people. Remember, it is most likely a very stressed time of their life, and the last thing they want to do is dig through content that is not relevant or engaging. If your bounce rate (if you don’t know what this is, contact us, it is a very important measurement) on your site is over 50%, most likely you have content that is not engaging and actually pushes your visitors and ultimately patients away from your institution.

Sprout is the quick and easy way for anyone to build, publish, and manage widgets, mini-sites, mashups, banners and more. Include video, audio, images and newsfeeds and choose from dozens of pre-built components and web services.

People are expecting easy access and to be able to interact more closely with healthcare organizations. Tools such as this allows this sort of interaction to happen. As you can see by their description it is more than press releases. You can include videos, forms, audio and maybe even interactive health assessments. These “widgets” can be placed on your site, blog or other sites that your healthcare organization is affiliated with. It can even be given to bloggers, and other industry thought leaders so they can put your content on their site.

The web as it is meant to be…

We created one for our own site:

Here are a few *great examples of hospitals using video:

• Brooks Rehabilitation Hospital
• St. Dominic Hospital
• Rehabilitation Hospital of the Cape and Islands
• Southwestern Vermont Health Care

*We don’t want to brag, but these are our clients…

What’s all this have to do with SEO and online marketing? Well, the best SEOs don’t talk to their clients about rankings; they talk about the process of making great web sites that earn traffic and convert visitors into customers. They talk about the process of creating great content that attracts links like bees to honey.

That is absolutely true. It is not about ranking, it is about quality content and making great web sites that people want to link to and share with others. If someone is only talking about rankings, they really do not have your best interests in mind.

 In its simplest form, there are 3 types of social media content:
1. News Content
2. Sensational/Entertainment Content
3. Resources/Educational Content

 Most hospitals can develop content for one and three, but would want to avoid two unless you get visits from celebrities.

Once you develop your new content, make sure you “socialize” it by providing social bookmarking options on your site.

People are experiencing video on about every site that they go to now, and it has become an expected feature on most consumer driven sites. Here are some stats to back this up:

• Over 9.2 billion video streams were initiated in the month of September in the US – comScore 2007
• 75% of all Americans during that month watched video online.
• Average video viewer watched 68 videos per month; three hours per month

What is the most interesting about this research, is what people do after they watch the video. According to research done by The Kelsey Group, more than half of the people watching video online “ said they engage in some sort of response activity, such as visiting a website, going to a physical location or making a purchase.”

This is a lot of people watching a lot of video. Why would you think they would not want to watch video on your hospital’s site, if they are going everywhere else to watch video? Patient testimonials, doctors talking about research, community interaction all are powerful video sources.

Besides people, Google likes video as well. Especially if it is well tagged, and surrounded by relevant content. We are starting to see more and more searches come up with video results mixed in with the typical results scene when someone searches. Actually, we have helped one of our clients with that very thing. When typing in their organization’s name, their website comes up first followed by a video about that organization. Very powerful.
Hospital’s are in the people business, so it is time to start giving people what they want.

A URL that looks like this is not helpful to your visitors or to search engines: www.example.com/body.cfm?id=204

A URL that looks like is helpful to your visitors and search engines: www.example.com/search-engine-marketing

The second URL let’s the search engines and spiders know what your page is about. This information comes up in the search engine results.

Here is an example:

Notice how search engine marketing is highlighted not only in the top link, but it is also highlighted in the URL. This is just one more piece that needs to be considered when developing your health content and search engine optimization strategy.