Month: April 2015

Why CMS should get out of measuring health quality

This is important to you. Trust me. If you’re young at heart, it matters because it’s your tax dollars this April. If you’re wiser in years, it directly affects your health and the system you’ve been pumping money into for decades. This is the same medical system that you thought would take care of you later in life. […]

When a CT scan misses cancer

A female patient came to see me with some difficulty swallowing, a very routine issue for a gastroenterologist.  I performed an scope examination of her esophagus and confronted a huge cancer occupying the lower portion of her esophagus. I expected a benign explanation for her swallowing issue.   She was relatively young and not particularly […]

Stay away from doctors: From a patient who listens

Earnest Tipp was very overdue for his blood pressure follow-up. Almost a year and a half overdue, as a matter of fact. The last few times I had refilled his medications, I had added “needs follow-up” to the signum on his scripts. The other day I finally saw him in my schedule. I thought about […]

So you want to be a female surgeon.  Here are 10 tips to make it.

I am lucky enough, from time to time, to be invited to speak to young women who want to be surgeons when they “grow up.” I always have a hard time striking a balance between what I should share that is positive and inspirational and what I should share that is a little harsh and […]

How Murphy’s law applies to medical students

If the analogy between medical training and a fraternity is true, then medical students are the pledges. For many, the most grueling part of this pledge process is the third year surgery rotation where the modified Murphy’s Law is applicable almost daily: Anything a medical student can do wrong, a medical student will do wrong. […]

Dealing with doubts in medical school

For me, hepatitis B booster shots feel pretty much as pleasant as being sucker punched in the arm. You can imagine that it didn’t inspire much elation when I scrolled through my calendar to see, spelled out in big red letters, a reminder for “Hep B #3.” Now, as I reflect, this reminder feels like a […]

MKSAP :46-year-old woman is evaluated before a dental cleaning

Test your medicine knowledge with the MKSAP challenge, in partnership with the American College of Physicians. A 46-year-old woman is evaluated before undergoing a dental cleaning procedure involving deep scaling. She has a history of mitral valve prolapse without regurgitation and also had methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) aortic valve endocarditis 10 years ago treated successfully with antibiotics. The […]

Can hospitals tell workers not to smoke at home?

I practice gastroenterology in Cleveland in the dark shadow of a large medical institution whose name contains the name of our city.  They are a world class medical institution whose reputation is largely derived from its cardiovascular department.   Presumably, these practitioners, like all doctors, advise patients who smoke that cigarettes have deleterious health effects. […]

Knoxville SEO – The Search Experts

Are you struggling to get the phone to ring? Well Marble City SEO can make that happen!local seo knoxville

You could be the most ambitious person on the planet when it comes to creating a website with all the bells and whistles that people will love, but unless your visitors can find your site when they search specific terms, your efforts are just going to be wasted. Read these tips and make the most of your efforts.

Knoxville SEO is ideal for businesses that conduct their business locally. Google and other search engines offer ways for you to edit your own business listing, making it ripe for search engine optimization. This way, people searching for specific keywords on a local search will be more likely to find your business.

With Google’s approach of not focusing intently on Meta tags, you should pay a lot more attention to title tags on your homepage. Your first 66 characters are displayed in the search engine rankings, so this is where your focus should lie. You need to sum up what your business is about right from the start. Save the fluff and get straight to the good stuff.

Try to get your site mentioned on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus and popular blogs. Social media can be a great search engine optimization tool as networks of people can make a website very popular, very quickly. Every time somebody links to your site on a social media site, the chances of your website showing up on the first page of search engine results increase.

Keep your content updated. If a reader logs onto your site and reads about offers that are expired or information that is outdated, they will likely back right out of your site. Take the time to update your content quite often to keep it as fresh and up to date as possible to keep readers engaged.

Research what your customers are searching for and respond to their needs. It is important to create content that relates to the keywords your visitors are actually typing in when they use a search engine. Generate additional content for searches that are top choices among your visitors and create new content based off of popular queries you have not yet covered.

While proofreading is often overlooked, it’s vital to the quality and respectability of all websites. Your website should be very clear and easy to read by your readers, as well as the search engines. When you have mistakes in your content, search engines will skip over you.

Try to use a static URL. Dynamic URLs appear to search engines as duplicates, so your site may not place as high on their rating lists as you would prefer. Static URLs appear as multiple different sites, allowing the search engines to see that you actually have multiple pages, instead of just seeing a duplicate.

A popular way to optimize your search engine results is to use Google AdWord’s own keyword tool. Using it, you can examine what keywords people are using to search for specific things. With this data, you can then begin adjusting your own keywords to match what other are using, to generate more hits.

When building your web presence, don’t forget to add your website to the niche link directories. Whatever product you sell, from knitwear to financial services, there’s bound to be a specialized website that caters to people interested in that type of business, so look for those sites and get your links listed. That will, of course, help boost your search engine rankings and bring in more traffic.

As mentioned at the start of this article, it’s very important that you do not allow your efforts to go to waste. Learning the proper optimization tactics for the search engines out there is how your site or business goes from a simple start-up to being a legitimate and popular brand online. Use the tips you’ve just read to your advantage in SEO, or give Marble City SEO a call today and we can help you get your phone to ring!

Obamacare re-enrollment: What can patients do?

As the Obamacare machine continues to grind forward, many patients have re-enrolled in a second year of coverage. While most have not had to use their insurance (the young and healthy crowd), others have found their newly minted coverage to be far less than promised. High deductibles, and up front out of pocket expenses, forced […]

Disease can humble any doctor

I remember being more confident that most of my peers.  The look of dread on my fellow interns face pre-call, and the fatigue post-call always seemed unnatural to me.  Maybe it was on account of my lifelong pursuit of medicine.  I felt nothing but elation at the newly branded “M” and “D” that came after […]

The Uber lessons for medicine

As the rugged beauty of the Pacific Coast unfolded in all of its splendor, I was in awe of the entirely different experience: the one created by our Uber driver, Calvin (name changed to protect anonymity). My friend and I, attending our annual cardiology meeting in sunny San Diego, carved out a few hours of […]

A global perspective can change how you diagnose patients

“Doctor, I have trouble breathing when I walk up stairs, and I cannot lie flat in bed, so I have to sleep sitting in a chair. I feel much worse than before I got pregnant.” I recognized the diagnosis at that point, but I continued the appointment to confirm my suspicions and to revel in […]

The Match 2015: A grim prognosis for international medical graduates

There were a lot of happy faces on March 20th as depicted in this brief video of the excitement on the campus of the University of Rochester School of Medicine. Similar scenes took place at every U.S. medical school because 93.9 percent of the 18,025 graduates of U.S. allopathic medical schools matched in a specialty. […]

With the EMR, you have to work backwards from the superbill

Sometimes, after crafting an important or complex plan of care with a patient, I say: “Let me type all this into the computer so that, in case I run into that big bull moose up on Vaillancourt Hill on my way home tonight, the next doctor who sees you will know what we were thinking […]