When people talk about website usability, the conversation usually gravitates toward website usability best practices like minimizing Flash, easy navigation, and the proper use of images and colors. However, it’s not often that the topic of the website’s introductions comes up, even though it’s one of the most basic of all usability guidelines. After all, if your visitors don’t know that they’re on a medical web site, you haven’t done a good job designing your site.

When designing a website for medical practices, one of the most important aspects is a clear and simple navigation system. Visitors to a medical website are often looking for specific information and they want to find it quickly. Being able to easily navigate your website leaves them with a good user experience, and the ability to easily use your site can make the difference when they’re looking for a healthcare provider they can understand and trust.

The word “blog” is the combination of “web” and “log.” While a blog can certainly increase your medical website optimization results, the blog itself can benefit from some of the website optimization tips that are out there as well.

Good medical website optimization requires a close look at the landing page. The landing page is generally the first page a visitor sees when they click a link that brings them to your website. Landing pages are broken into two categories: reference landing pages and transactional landing pages. Since we’re discussing website optimization, we’ll be taking a look at reference optimization and some of the website optimization tips that can help visitors stay on these pages.

Medical website optimization should start with a sound keyword strategy. Keywords, being the words and terms used when performing a search, are an essential part of website optimization because they are what the visitors are searching for. For quite some time, it was thought that simply filling your content with keywords would help increase your page’s rank in search engine results. Over time, however, the search engines became much more sophisticated and the way they view keywords has changed.

Medical website designers are charged with creating informative medical websites that all patients have the ability to access. In a day and age where technologies such as Flash and Rich Internet Applications can make a physician website aesthetically pleasing, using them is not always good practice, as these technologies can actually prevent some patients from being able to view the doctor’s website. To ensure that everyone can view a web page, medical website design services need to get in the practice of designing light web pages.