Most people use the internet when looking for local businesses relevant to their requirements. They do the same when they need information pertaining to healthcare. 55% of consumers use the internet or mobile apps to compare between providers when looking for healthcare services, according to the United Healthcare Consumer Sentiment Survey for 2020, a drastic increase from the 32% that did so in 2017, clearly illustrating the rapid increase in reliance on the internet for healthcare.

Any practice looking to improve traffic to their website will need to rank highly in Google search results. You might already have done some optimization for this; search engine optimization for written content and mobile formatting do help but they are not enough. There are other parameters used by Google and other search engines for indexing and ranking websites. Three of the most important that are often missed are:

1. Title Tags
2. Meta Descriptions
3. Alt Image Tags

Read on to find out how these optimizations can boost the traffic on your website and improve your ranking in search results.

Title Tags

Title tags are the title of the web page. This is what appears as the headline on search engine results pages. The optimal length for title tags is no more than 60 characters. These 60 characters should utilize as many of the most important key words as possible, yet also be clear and concise to be understood by the most readers.

It is important to remember that while the full 60 characters might not be displayed in the search results, Google’s AI will account for all of them when it crawls the page. The presence of important keywords will improve your rankings in the search results.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are a brief summary of the web page. This is what is displayed as a part of the snippet that is displayed in the search results page along with the title tag. A well-written Meta description will concisely summarize all of the information contained within the page in an attractive manner, to generate the most clicks.

While meta descriptions are not factored into Google’s search results ranking algorithm, they do affect the click through rate of the page, which does factor into the ranking. The descriptions should be between 50-160 words, though the word count is not extremely important. Since these do not factor into the ranking algorithm, the descriptions should be written to appeal to searchers and to entice them into clicking on the link.

Pro Tip: If you face difficulties in crafting SEO-friendly meta descriptions, employing an AI writer can aid you in producing high-quality content that enhances your search engine rankings.

Alt Image Tags

Alt image tags are descriptions of the appearance and purpose of an image. Search engine crawlers can use these to ascertain whether or not the image is relevant to a particular search, and they also assist visually impaired searchers fully understand the content of the page. Visually impaired internet users make use of screen readers to fully understand the contents of their scree and most popular screen readers limit alt text to roughly 125 characters, making that the optimal length.