Take advantage of search enhancements, schema.org support, more ways to shape your SEO strategy, and tools to help split test your content and optimize performance.
Last week our engineering team released VitalSite 6.7. It contains a slew of new features, fixes and enhancements focused on helping consumers find your site and the content within it. This release includes enhancement to site search, schema.org support, and a range of tools for webmasters.
Site Search Enhancements and Schema.org Support
Your content is important to your bottom line, as ultimately it’s what converts (or fails to convert) a site visitor to revenue on your balance sheet. The numbers are quite staggering: Provider Detail pages accounted for about 6.25 million views on our client sites last year. That’s over 17,000 views of providers each day across healthcare organizations! And some of these views convert directly to appointments with your physicians, visits to your facilities, and inquiries about your services.
With numbers like these, we want to make it as easy as possible for site visitors to find your doctors, locations, and services. One way to do this is to ensure your content is optimized for search engines and is structured using schema.org semantic markup.
VitalSite has a long history of supporting SEO best practices, and with this release, we begin supporting schema.org semantic markup in your provider directory. While search engine optimization aims to improve the rankings of your content in search engine result pages (SERPS), the goal of semantic markup is to help search engines (and other services) better understand your content so that they can provide more accurate results and incorporate your content into new apps, like Knowledge Graph.
Better rankings in external search engines. More accurate results in search engines. These are both important, but we also know from site analytics that external search is frequently just the beginning of the visitor’s journey. Visitors continue refining their search once they arrive at your site. This means your site’s internal search engine has to perform as well as – or better – than the third-party search engines site visitors are familiar with.
For this reason, we’ve made significant improvements to your website’s internal search for providers, locations, and services. First, we’ve enhanced the advanced search algorithms used to determine which content is displayed in VitalSite search results. Second, we’ve built in sophisticated mechanisms to help shape and customize the search experience based on your organization’s unique needs.
VitalSite Webmaster Tools
In addition to search enhancements and schema.org support, VitalSite 6.7 has a lot that hospital webmasters will love. It includes more ways to shape the SEO strategy of your websites, and even tools that can help split test your content to optimize performance. In support of these objectives, this release includes:
- Robots.txt Editing – From time to time, webmasters need to tweak their robots.txt files to support custom directives that help determine how search engines index their sites. With VitalSite 6.7 this is easier than ever. Now you can edit the robots.txt file for your site from within the VitalSite administration interface.
- Noindex Robots Metatags – In addition to robots.txt, the noindex robots metatag is essential for telling search engines not to index your content. With this release of VitalSite, you can add this metatag on a page-by-page basis.
- Sitemap.xml Inclusion/Exclusion Control – Your site’s sitemap.xml files are an important way of promoting your content to search engines. With VitalSite 6.7, you have fine-grain control over which pages do and do not show up in this file.
- Custom HTML on Pages – Whether you’re optimizing content with split tests or using special analytics services to understand how site visitors interact with your pages, many advanced tools require webmasters to add special code to the HTML source of their pages. A new feature in VitalSite 6.7 allows you to add custom HTML to the head section and bottom of pages, all from within the VitalSite administration interface.
Release Schedule
Excited about trying out VitalSite 6.7? Geonetric clients will be hearing from their client advisors soon regarding the deployment schedule. If you’re not yet a client but would like to learn more about how VitalSite can help your organization lead in your market, contact a Geonetric consultant to schedule a demo.