We’ve all done it:

We suffer from a sniffle that lasts a bit longer than usual and we’re off to a search engine to self-diagnose our mystery illness.  Depending on the search results (and our levels of persistence and paranoia), either we are comforted that we’ve simply contracted the common cold…or we’re convinced that we’ve developed a CSF leak and the fluid that surrounds our brain is escaping through our nose!

Those of us who believe the second diagnosis are likely falling victim to cyberchondria:

“… the unfounded escalation of concerns about common symptomatology, based on the review of search results and literature on the Web.”

And as health content on the Web continues to grow, we risk becoming cyberchondriacs with every Google or Bing search query.

To help curb cases of cyberchondria, some believe it is the responsibility of the search engines to provide results the public can trust.  While I agree the search engines play a role, I believe the solution begins with healthcare marketers and Web writers.  We have the responsibility to work with physicians, nurses and other medical professionals to produce complete, accurate and understandable information for the search engines to deliver to the online community. Studies show this kind of quality information is not always available for certain conditions, which leads medical experts to warn against relying too much on the Internet for education.

Ultimately, however, it falls to healthcare consumers to do their part.  While it is important to be vigilant advocates for our health and make an effort to educate ourselves, we must be prudent in our research, both online and off, and remember to balance our findings with the first-hand opinions of medical professionals.

I absolutely agree with the comments in iHealthBeat’s article about the sub-optimization of the White House’s new health reform Web site. Why go to all the work of creating a new media-rich site and not optimize it for the masses to find?

Though the meta keyword tag is not used by the major search engines, a look at the Reality Check site shows that its writers are more worried about nabbing searchers who spell Barack Obama’s name wrong than getting folks who are curious about health reform to the site.  Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the staffers who threw the site together understand SEO – much less SEM – at all. They don’t even have ‘Barack Obama’ in text for the bots to find (the president’s name is only in a graphic and an alt tag).

Our SEO team’s recommendations?  Write a better title. Embed in the content common search terms like  “Obamacare,”  “health care coverage” and “health bill,” as the authors of the article suggest.  Deploy a suite of online analytical tools including AdWords, WordTracker, Google Analytics and others to identify additional popular search terms related to health reform. Create keyword-rich anchor text and cross-link to the various .gov sites.  If that sounds like too much work for our government friends, they could simply hire us to put Reality Check at the top of the search results.

Though it was actually available yesterday, today is the official launch of Bing, Microsoft’s evolution of its Live Search and – perhaps – its final attempt to become a major player in the search space. If Bing fails, a marriage with Yahoo or Twitter or some similar entity would have to be the next step (and it may be anyway).

Nonetheless, Bing has been deployed – and we think it is better than the Live Search engine previously offered by Microsoft. Not everyone agrees. And that’s the purpose of this post. Let’s take a look at what Microsoft says about its new product, and what some industry experts are blogging about.

Microsoft says that their research indicated that 72% of searchers thought the SERPs (search engine results pages) were disorganized, and that half of their search queries on any engine failed to meet expectations. So Microsoft set out to create a “decision engine” that helps folks complete tasks and make decisions.

For example, Microsoft says, data told them that 43% of people do healthcare research via search engines. So Bing is designed to “provide you with faster access to meaningful health information, including content from trusted sources such as Mayo Clinic and the American Cancer Society.”  A query on “epileptic seizures” brought up results divided into three or so results under these separate categories: News, Medication, Causes, Tests, Diagnosis and Images.

Read more about Bing on the Microsoft at the DiscoverBing.com Web site.

What are others saying? Search Engine guru Danny Sullivan weighs in with a long, long review at Search Engine Land and a companion piece about the State of Search. Here’s a forum discussion at Webmaster World and the Wall Street Journal weighs is with an article and a blog post from All Things Digital.

It’s only June 2, but Microsoft is already running a preview of Bing. So let’s continue our test, started with this query on Live Search a few days ago …

Today, we ran the same search, for the term “Children’s Hospital,” on the Bing preview. Beyond the new wrapper and some elements positioned in different places, the results are subtly different.

In the first position on Bing (or are we supposed to spell it bing?) are the local listings, while they were in the second position before. A funny note: Initially, Bing (and Live, too, for that matter) keeps trying to position me in Little Rock, Arkansas, so it shows me local results for that area. I have to go in and change my location each time to get Kansas City results to appear. Guess I need to log-in and update my info for Microsoft! (We really, really don’t know why the search engines insist on pushing their local listings on us when there have so many flaws in the results. And getting them changed is a bear … a topic for an upcoming post.)

After local results, the second listing on Bing is for Children’s Hospital Boston, which was the first overall listing on Live. The rest of the results seem to follow in the same order, so it doesn’t appear as if there is a major algorithm change. Related Searches are now on the left (they were on the right before) but again look to be the same listings in the same order. There is also a handy Search History group below the related searches entries.

Here’s a nice feature. As you mouse over a snipped from a site, a line with a circle in it appears next to that listing (I’m sure this has a name). Mousing over that listing reveals an additional excerpt from the site, with site-link-type links as well. This gives you further knowledge on whether you want to click on the site or move on to the next listing.

We still don’t see any sponsored results for our search. Perhaps a better experience with the search engine will lead to more interest from advertisers. Until then, it may be a good opportunity for inexpensive traffic for advertisers.

The changes aren’t huge, and in our small test we don’t see a new algo, but we are pleasantly surprised with B(b)ing. Let’s hope we continue to see good things from the engine.

On June 3, Microsoft plans to launch “Bing,” the latest iteration of its search engine. With Microsoft’s current engine, called Live Search, drawing less than 10% of the search market for most of our clients, Bing has an uphill battle on its hands to come close to Google, which enjoys 70-80% market share on our client sites.

Speaking to the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg at D: All Things Digital in Carlsbad, Calif., Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the name Bing was chosen because it “is short, it’s easy to say, and it works globally.” But for searchers, will Bing’s technology be easy, and will it work? And will it help Microsoft come closer to the $20+ billion in revenue Google earned from its AdWords program in 2008?

We thought we’d try an experiment with Live Search this week and Bing when it debuts. The search results to the right represents a Live Search query on the term, “Children’s Hospital.” Next week, we’ll run the same query on Bing and let you know the results.

For the search, Live returned Children’s Hospital Boston as the No. 1 listing, with eight site links below the URL and an option to “Show more results for childrenshospital.org.” The No. 2 position included three listings geared to my zip code. On the right-hand side was a listing of eight “Related searches.” Interestingly, there were no “Sponsored Results,” which is how the engines make their money.

Stay tuned for the same query on Bing ….

In a previous post, we discussed the meta keyword tag. This time, we’ll tackle the meta description tag.

The meta description tag is a 200-character (perhaps 25-30 words or so, don’t obsess) explanation of what your site or a particular page is about, It’s your elevator speech. You don’t have much time or space, so be clear and concise. For the home page, tell what you do and where. For interior pages, tell one or two most important ideas covered on that page or section of your site.

Here’s where the description tag is most important: If your tag includes the term a searcher types into Google, all or part of your meta description will be shown as the snippet on the Google serp (search engine results page). Usually, the engines utilize a few words on either side of the term where it appears on the page, and the result may result in a meaningful sentence. Oftentimes, it doesn’t. so if you include the most important keyword phrases for the page in your tag, you can control the snippet. Who doesn’t want that?

Here’s an example: The meta description for this site’s home page is:

<meta name=”description” content=”Dobies Healthcare Group, a health care marketing agency in Kansas City, has provided expert advice and marketing communications and advertising services to the healthcare industry for 17 years.” />

As the nearby screen capture shows, a search on Google for, “health care marketing agency in Kansas City” returns a Google maps listing for Dobies Healthcare Group, and then the standard listings. In the No. 1 position is Dobies.com, with the snippet being:

“Dobies Healthcare Group, a health care marketing agency in Kansas City, has provided expert advice and marketing communications and advertising services to …”

… which is a slightly truncated version of our exact meta description … with the keywords in bold. By placing the keywords for which we want to be ranked directly in our meta description, we’ve achieved a better snippet for our services than Google would have done for us.

Our next post will cover the all-important title tag.

Meta tags keywords used to be the be-all, end-all for website search engine optimization. Create a page, stuff a bunch of relevant (and irrelevant if you wanted) words into the keyword meta tag and, like magic, you ranked well in the fledgling search engines.

Of course, that’s no longer the case. So healthcare clients who engage us for search engine marketing purposes often ask if meta tags are even important anymore. And the answer is no … and yes. No, because the search engines virtually ignore meta tag keyword entries. Yes, spending time developing keywords to enter into meta tags focuses attention on what is most important on the page, what words appear naturally on the page … and what words should appear more often.

So, don’t spend an extraordinary amount of time populating the keyword meta tag. And don’t stuff it with irrelevant words. But do spend time focusing on what the main five or six keywords/phrases are for a page, create content that utilizes those words, and populate those words into the meta tag. You might even add synonyms and a misspelling or two to help the engines.

What about other meta tags (description and title)? We’ll cover those in another post.