I’ve been hearing commercials on the radio for Real Life Dental in Blacksburg, Va. Naturally, my first thought was of the infamous “Is this real life” YouTube video of the kid still loopy from the Novocain. And that connection got me thinking: did the relatively new Real Life Dental office take it’s name from the popular video with more than 81 million views.
David After the Dentist: Is this real life?
I went to Google and searched for “real life dentist” and the first two results were the aforementioned videos and the first two non-video results was for Real Life Dental in Blacksburg, Va., with the page title “Blacksburg Dentist – Welcome Real Life Dental Care.” Real Life Dental even topped the official davidafterdentist.com Website.
Was this pure coincidence or a stroke of genius by the folks who founded Real Life Dental Care? As an SEO, I’m thinking that it was a calculated and shrewd business decision by the local dentist. How long will that link to the “david after dentist” video last? Who knows, but in the short term, why not take advantage of hugely popular search term?
I decided to look at the site, www.realifedentalcare.com, and its source code. Almost instantly, my warm SEO fuzzies quickly dissipated. For starters, there was no meta description. Boo! Secondly, there was a random line of text at the bottom left of the page that reads “PARAPHRASE SEO FILLED SENTENCE HERE”. What? Would a client of a template-based Website service even know what that meant?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not a complicated concept to understand. The basic principle is to provide relevant text-based content on your site that people find interesting. Within that content, link to other pages on your site and to other websites that offer similar content that may supplement yours. And if you are successful at providing interesting and relevant content, other sites will link to you.
The bottom line is that it would appear that this site made a smart move to capitalize on a viral YouTube video and its keywords. I’d love to see their analytics and find out how many people come to their site using the key words “real life dentist.” But, it would also appear that they stopped short of fully optimizing their site. It could use quite a bit of help.
