My Practice Locations
Specify exactly how you want the name of your practice to appear on your IDA web portals, dental directories and mini-portals in the “Practice Name” box below.
For example, your legal company name may be “My City Smiles, LLC” but you might prefer “My City Smiles” – it’s up to you. Or you may simply want to use your name and title, e.g., John M. Smith, D.D.S.
Dental Website Video Gallery
With so much video content available online, more and more dentists are adding video to their dental websites. With the Internet Dental Alliance, dental practices can do it easily.
You can add a Video Gallery page to your dental website. You can add your own videos to your website, or choose from IDA’s library of dental marketing videos.
In your online Control Panel, you can insert videos into specific places within each of your dental websites by clicking “Insert Videos” underneath “Customize Portals.” You’ll see a list of all the places in this website where you can insert a video.
Underneath “Customize Portals,” you’ll also see “Video Gallery.” This is a free-form web page where you can add as many videos as you’d like – and it’s totally separate from any videos you added using “Insert Videos.” To add a video to your gallery, click “Add Video,” select one from “My Videos” or “Stock Videos,” then click “Save.”
Once you add one or more videos, the “Video Gallery” page will appear on your website, with a link to it on the home page of your website. Your videos, their titles and descriptions will be displayed on this page.
It’s up to you what video content you want to display on this page. For example, some doctors use this space for dental patient video testimonials.
You can uncheck the “Display on Portal” box in the top right to hide this page on your website.
To increase the visibility of your Video Gallery, you can add a Home Page Feature to your website that highlights your Video Gallery. If you’re using that page for patient video testimonials, you might add a “Meet Our Patients” or “Video Testimonials” feature to your home page.
Remember, adding video to your website helps you attract more new dental patients.
My Dental Website Videos
There are many ways to incorporate video into your IDA dental website. You can upload videos you’ve made yourself, or you can embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or other video sharing websites. You can also use stock videos from IDA’s Video Library.
To get the most from their internet dental marketing, many doctors record their own videos. A short welcome video from you can really add value to your website by letting prospective patients get to know the doctor and the practice.
You can record more videos of yourself to use on the website. Tell patients more about yourself, your dental practice, and the services you offer. In addition to a short welcome video for your home page, we also recommend recording a slightly longer video that focuses on the website’s target dental market.
It’s also a good idea for each dentist at the practice record a short personal video for their “Meet the Doctor” profile.
You can also embed videos from YouTube, Vimeo, or other video sharing sites right in your IDA website.
If you have your own videos you’d like to add to your dental website, begin by clicking “My Videos” underneath “Photos, Videos & Files” on the lefthand menu. If you’ve already uploaded any videos, you’ll see them here.
The “Add Video” button lets you add your own videos.
If you have the video on your computer as an MP4 file (the most common type of video file), select “Upload MP4.” Then select your video from your computer. The Control Panel will upload the video and show you its details. When you click “Next,” you’ll be asked to choose a thumbnail image for this video. This is the picture that your video will display when it’s not playing. You might select the video’s first frame, or you might choose a good-looking frame later in the video, or you can even upload your own thumbnail image for maximum control.
Then it’s time to add some additional information to your video. Visitors to your website will be able to see the video’s title and read its description. So will the search engines! You can further improve your search engine results positioning by including tags separated with commas. These should be keywords that describe your video. In addition, IDA’s system will automatically tag your video with information about you and your practice.
Then click “Save” to finish uploading the video. Close the dialog box, and you’ll see the video has been added to “My Videos.”
You can also add videos that are already posted on video sharing sites elsewhere on the internet. YouTube is, of course, the most popular.
To import a video already hosted on YouTube, you’ll need to know the Video ID. When you go to YouTube and view the video, you can see the ID in the web address. You can also find it by clicking the “Share” button. Just copy the ID – that’s the part after http://youtu.be/ – and then paste this into the Control Panel. When you click “Import,” your video will show up below.
Next, you can review the video’s title, description and tags. The information from YouTube has automatically been entered here, but you can change it. However, you cannot change the thumbnail for this video, since it has already been selected in YouTube. Then click “Save” to finish.
IDA also lets you add videos that are on Vimeo, another popular video sharing website. This process is the same as for YouTube: paste in the video ID to import the video, edit the title, description, and tags, then save and finish.
You can add videos hosted on sites other than YouTube or Vimeo by selecting “Paste HTML.” Here, you’ll paste the snippet of code provided by that video sharing website.
Click “Download Video Specifications” to view a PDF that explains more technical details about how to produce, render and export your videos. We have instructions for Camtasia Studio, Adobe Premiere, and Sony Vegas, that include information like the recommended frame rate, bit rate and aspect ratio.
If you’re not satisfied with how your videos look or play on your website, check out the Video Troubleshooting guide to fine-tune your dental website video marketing.
Important Control Panel Settings
Publish Your Web Portals
By Julie Frey Clicking “Customize Portals” will show you a full list of all your IDA web portals. If you see a warning sign, that means that one or more of your portals have not been published to the internet. The “Domain” column lists the web URL for each portal. If the site has been [...]
Dental Practice Doctors
In this section you can provide a master list of information about all the doctors associated with this practice. In other sections of this control panel you will be able to associate any doctor listed here with a particular practice location or particular web portal. For each doctor, you can enter a wealth of information [...]
My Practice Locations
Specify exactly how you want the name of your practice to appear on your IDA web portals, dental directories and mini-portals in the “Practice Name” box below. For example, your legal company name may be “My City Smiles, LLC” but you might prefer “My City Smiles” – it’s up to you. Or you may simply [...]
Dental Web Portal Design
Select your web portal design from a wide range of style and color options. Plus, you can further customize your design choice by changing virtually all the images to anything in our built-in image library or to your own images that you have uploaded to your image file locker – click on the “Customize Images” [...]
Targeting Dental Markets
Your primary dental market is the single, specific dental treatment service you want to target with this web portal, for example, cosmetic dentistry, or dental implants. All the content on your web portal is designed to make it easy for patients looking for this particular service in your local area to find you on the [...]
Targeting Geographic Markets
Your primary geographic market is the city or town in which your dental practice is located. You can add up to four additional geographic areas in which to market your dental practice. Choose neighboring towns or suburbs from which you reasonably want to attract patients. In urban areas it may be adjacent neighborhoods or districts. [...]
Become a part of IDA
Log in to your IDA Control Panel to manage your internet marketing and websites at
www.idaportals.com »
Sign up for a complete new patient marketing plan at
store.InternetDentalAlliance.com »
Additional Resources
Read more on Julie Frey's internet marketing blog at
www.InternetDentalAlliance.com/blog »
Get Support for your dental practice's IDA new patient marketing program at
www.supportida.com »
