Chiropractic San Diego

By Michael Dorausch, DC

This is a non-chiropractor related post, so excuse me for a few moments while I cover something webmasters may be doing some searches on. I was checking the stats for planetchiropractic.com earlier today, and I noticed an HTML file (rpc_relay.html) appearing in the list of popular URLs for the site.

I hadn’t seen this particular HTML file appearing before so I initially suspected foul play. The file was amongst the top 10 most frequently accessed URLs appearing on the site so I was obviously curious to figure out what it was.

After logging in to the server I remembered that over the weekend I activated Google’s friend connect which required me adding to HTML files to the website root dir.  One of those files is the rpc_relay.html files. I had not bothered to look at the content of the HTML file until now and it turns out it’s simply a JavaScript for the friend connect service wrapped in HTML. It’s a simple one line file.

It will be interesting to see at the end of the month how high that file ranks on the list of top page URLs for the site. I imagine the script is called every time someone visits the page, which will likely result in a lot of activity for that particular file.

So if you are checking your web stats and wondering where the RPC relay file came from, go forget you or someone else on your webmaster team may have uploaded the files when setting up your sites friend connect account.

As far as the service goes, nothing to report yet that’s really earth shattering, it works pretty cool and there are several members already signed up and appearing on the homepage.

By Michael Dorausch, DC

Add another project to the to do Whiteboard list, chiropracticmedia.com is now owned and operated by Planet Chiropractic.

I’ve been thinking about a domain that would fit well for delivering chiropractic video’s, chiropractic audio, and chiropractic photos, and the term media popped up a few times. Turns out the previous owner of the chiropracticmedia.com domain was done with it, so making the acquisition was not a difficult task.

There are thousands of photos like this one (not that anyone wants my face on their chiropractic web site) that I’d like to upload to one location for other chiropractors to use.

For more than 10 years, we’ve been collecting images, audio recordings, and videos, most of which are still to be posted online.

I think a simple site with three separate categories would work great. In one section, visitors could browse through and download photos from chiropractic offices. In another section visitors could browse video clips, and either watch them on the site, or embed them into their own chiropractor web sites. From what I’ve been hearing over the years, audio would be available in two options. One method would be listening to it directly from the web site, and the other would be to download the files in MP3 format.

Seems like a pretty simple project but it’s one of those things we just have to get the ball rolling on. I’d much rather post all the photos we have, and offer them up with some kind of Creative Commons license, rather than people ripping them from here without permission.

Video I don’t care about so much, and I don’t notice many chiropractors posting audio to their sites or blogs, at least the stuff we’ve been creating over the years.

With advancements taking place on the Web, templates for audio, video, and images are a plenty. Now we just have to take some action.

By Michael Dorausch, DC

Chiropractors are expected to keep tabs on how many new patients their offices get each week, how many total visits the office had for the week, what were over-the-counter cash collections, etc. Keeping logs is extremely important for any business, and paying attention to what’s going on with your chiropractic website, is important as well.

Moments ago I took a screen shot of the top 25 pages accessed during the month of November. I won’t review all of them, but I’m going to highlight about 10 (out of the over 20,000 different pages accessed) pages. We look at log files for various reasons, I’ll get into a bit of that as well.

The information above may not make any sense to you, but it’s part of my November wrap up summary, and if you want to learn what people are searching for in the world of chiropractic, it will help to pay attention.

There was a lot of traffic to the planetchiropractic.com web site during the month of November. Traffic was double that of the month of October. Topping out the most pages visited were people checking out classified advertisements, followed by people reading chiropractic news articles. 3rd most popular pages were the chiropractic seminars and events, followed by a visit to the homepage.

So looking at the top four, we have classifieds, news, seminars, and the homepage. After that, there is lots of activity in search, visits to the information pages, more search queries, and finally the media pages. The fact that there are so many search queries going on tells us we have a considerable amount of work to do in organizing content so it’s easier to find. That’s an important reason enough to be checking your site log files.

Amongst featured articles, assessing the salary of a chiropractor, continues to be popular, and results in lots of e-mails from practicing DCs and perspective chiropractic students. It’s impressive to see RSS feeds climbing in the logs, since only a year ago, they were not being accessed so frequently. The what it’s like to be a chiropractor in Los Angeles article continues to be popular with visitors to the site. An update on that post is overdue.

Lots of browsing taking place through the news archives (10 years worth of content) and direct browsing of the news pages. A post on pregnancy and chiropractic was popular for the month of November, as were visits to the godaddy girl Candace Michelle Playboy related post. Pretty safe to figure which demographic is visiting those pages, and it’s likely not the same group of people viewing both posts.

A chiropractic Christmas tree post from December of 2007 is suddenly popular again. That one will probably get a lot more traffic in December 2008. The particular tree shown in the photo is being lit this week at our LA based chiropractic office.

Nice to see so many searches for local chiropractors taking place. Perhaps there will be another chiropractors post taking place before May of 2009. I’d like to see that happen.

Finally, the office design article received a considerable amount of traffic as well. Photos and videos of chiropractic adjusting areas and other related office design posts would be nice to see in 2009. I’m thinking of incentivizing some chiropractors to share photos from their office, since there’s really some spectacular looking (and functioning) facilities out there.

Righty oh, that’s it for the November log round up of what’s hot, and what’s not.

By Michael Dorausch, DC

To the search keyphrases for the month of November 2008, are the craziest I’ve seen on the planetchiropractic.com web site, in the past 10 years. It’s amazing how different search results can be from month-to-month. A month ago today the October results showed people were reaching the website primarily with searches for the term chiropractic, chiropractor salary, chiropractic jobs, chiropractic classifieds, and chiropractic seminars. All of those terms relate to the chiropractic profession and stuff chiropractors would typically be found searching. That wasn’t the case for November. Far from it.

I took this screenshot earlier today, and while the month of November is not over yet, I’m not expecting to see too much change in the top 10 keyword list.

The eye-opening thing to notice is that for the month of November there are only two terms directly related to the field of chiropractic. The term chiropractic in position number three, always appears in top 10 search results, and planet chiropractic is often seen in the top 10 results as well. The rest are all newcomers, as there has been lots of craziness taking place, during the month of November.

The daylight savings time change was something Daria came up with after not being able to figure out which weekend the time change was taking place. She did some research and the post was created as a result. Apparently, she was not alone in knowing when to change the clocks earlier this month.

The search for 2010 Mustang is a one-time shot that we will probably never see traffic from again (aside from maybe a little bit in late 2009). I was fortunate to be invited to the LA Auto Show where I got to drive a few cars, and got to sit in the driver’s seat of plenty. I thought the Candy Red Mustang was wicked cool.

There was a search for voting polls which was related to the elections on November 4, so that term will likely drop out for the next four years. Not something we’d be targeting as a chiropractic web site. However, I was surprised to see how much Web traffic came our way for those seeking information related to the 2008 New York City marathon. As a chiropractor that’s been an avid runner for several years, we’ve actually covered quite a few posts on five ks, 10 ks, and marathons. In fact, I noticed that in November, there were posts for the Philadelphia marathon and the Pasadena marathon (which was canceled due to fires in Los Angeles County). But neither of those races returned results in the top 10, NYC was far more popular.

We even had news regarding a New Jersey chiropractor (Vincent Malba) running in the New York City marathon. Since that post, we’ve received e-mails from others who either ran the race, or volunteered at the event. I love the energy of a marathon, so will probably continue to cover chiropractic related news on those events.

One of the downsides for seeing such a dramatic change in key phrases is that the bounce rate for visitor traffic to the website in November has increased. Meaning, people may have been interested in an article regarding the time change, a marathon, or the new Ford Mustang, but they weren’t sticking around to check out chiropractic seminars, classified ads, and related sections of the site. Why would they? A large number of people visiting Planet Chiropractic during the month of November were not chiropractors, they couldn’t be, because we have more unique traffic than there are chiropractors on the planet. There has been a trickle effect though, with visitors on the site checking what chiropractors are listed in their state.

That’s it for November keyword phrases. If you’re interested, here are keyword results for October, keyword results from July, results on key phrases in June, and an explanation on story tieing, driving new traffic, and traffic topics.

Boring stuff for many, but I like to post it for the few that are paying attention.