Medicare.gov
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Medicare.gov - The Official U.S. Government Site for People with Medicare
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Privacy Policy
A cookie is a small piece of information that is sent to your browser when you access a site. There are two kinds of cookies. A session cookie is a line of text that is stored temporarily in your computer's memory. Because a session cookie is never saved, it is destroyed as soon as you close your browser. A persistent cookie is a more permanent line of text that gets saved by your browser to a file on your hard drive.
Certain applications on the www.cms.hhs.gov and medicare.gov websites require session cookies to function correctly. If you have session cookies disabled, you may not be able to use these applications or features of our sites.
Where they are used, CMS's session cookies remember your selection criteria. For example, if you use the "Screen Reader Friendly" version of medicare.gov with cookies disabled, you will need to choose this option for every page. If you have cookies enabled, this preference will be remembered for the duration of your visit. Similarly on www.cms.hhs.gov, the Local Medical Review Policy (LMRP) application will keep a listing of your previous searches during that visit if you have cookies enabled.
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- Alexa: Medicare.gov
How visible is your website?
Home Page Analysis
A better home page will help you show up in search results.
| Titles & Headings |
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| Links & Images |
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| Search Engine Friendliness |
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Competitive Edge
See how your digital marketing stacks up,
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Web Presence Analysis
How easily can your site be found around the Web?
| value for Google crawl date | |
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| value for Bing indexed pages |
Home Page Analysis
The Home Page Analysis helps you understand how a site's home page appears to both search engines and site visitors.
Medicare.gov Home Page Analysis Summary
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Titles & Headings
The title and headings on the home page tell people and search
engines what a website is about. Analyze the title & headings of the home page for free or the entire site. |
Warning |
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Links & Images
Relevant links to other sites are good for people and search
engines. Images on a web page should be described for visually impaired
visitors and search engines. Analyze the links & images of the home page for free or the entire site. |
Warning |
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Search Engine Friendliness
A few simple technical fixes can make any site show up better in
search results. |
Good |
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Title
The title of a web page appears in search results as the link to that page. Learn more ...
Purpose
The title of a web page appears as a clickable link in search results and bookmarks. A descriptive, compelling home page title with relevant keywords can increase the number of people visiting the site.
Search Engines
Search engines view the text of the title tag as a strong indication of what the page is about. Accurate keywords in the title tag can help the page rank better in search results.
Length
A title tag should have fewer than 70 characters, including spaces. Major search engines won't display more than that.
Content
The title tag of your home page (and any other page on your site) should not contain the site’s domain name or URL. These will appear near the title in search results, so use your 70 characters to tell people what the page is about. The title tag should not contain any HTML, because it will be displayed incorrectly or not at all.
- Good: This web page has a title tag.
- Good: The title tag is a good length.
- Warning: The title tag should not include the website’s domain name.
- The title of this site's home page:
- “Medicare.gov – the Official U.S. Government Site for Medicare”
H1 Headings
The H1 heading is an important sentence or phrase on a web page that quickly and clearly tells people and search engines what they can expect to find there. Learn more ...
Just one H1
In most cases, a web page should have just one H1 heading. Using multiple H1 headings is okay if that is a logical way to organize the page, but they should be used sparingly. That’s because search engines can view multiple H1 headings as an attempt to signal that all the content on a page is equally important, a tactic that’s seen as an attempt to game the search engine algorithms.
Purpose
Search engines look for an H1 heading to determine what a page is about. Human visitors do, too.
Content and placement
The H1 heading appears on the web page itself, unlike the page title, which people will see mostly in search results.
The H1 tag (which contains the H1 heading) is usually listed first among the other heading tags for a page. None of the major search engines, however, will penalize a site for listing H2 through H6 tags ahead of the H1 tag.
The H1 heading for a page should be different from its title. Each can target different important keywords for better SEO.
- Warning: This page has more than one H1 heading. It should have just one.
- H1 headings for this site's home page:
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- “Finding Plans”
- “Stay Healthy”
- “Top 6 Services”
- “Medicare News”
- “MyMedicare.gov”
- “Medicare Benefits”
- “Need Help?”
Medicare.gov in search results
You can see below how most search engines will display this site's home page in search results. The title is used as the link to the page, and the meta description appears below the title.
Medicare.gov – the Official U.S. Government Site for Medicare
Medicare.gov provides information about the parts of Medicare, what’s new, and how to find Medicare plans, facilities, or providers.
medicare.gov/
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Links & Images
Sites You Link To
Outbound links tell search engines which websites you find valuable and relevant to your own site, and help your visitors find what they need…even if it’s not on your site. Learn more ...
Search engines
Including links to relevant sites is good for your website's standing with search engines. The Web is all about linking, and carefully chosen outbound links tell search engines that you understand their value to site visitors. These outbound links also help search engines classify your site in relationship to others.
Here, we identify only the outbound links on this site's home page, but outbound links add value to any important page on a website.
Site visitors
Outbound links tell people that you want to provide them with good information, even if it’s not on your own site. These links can also prompt other people to link to your site, which can boost its reputation and ranking in search results.
Here, we identify only the outbound links on this site's home page, but outbound links add value to any important page on a website.
| Site | Number of links |
|---|---|
| USA.gov | 1 |
| cms.gov | 4 |
| es.medicare.gov | 2 |
| hhs.gov | 3 |
| hospitalcompare.hhs.gov | 2 |
| mymedicare.gov | 6 |
| plancompare.medicare.gov | 3 |
| questions.medicare.gov | 4 |
| secure.ssa.gov | 1 |
| service.govdelivery.com | 1 |
| socialsecurity.gov | 1 |
| ssa.gov | 1 |
Image Descriptions
Image descriptions - also called alt text - are the best way to describe images to search engines and to visitors using screen readers. Learn more ...
Help for visitors with impaired vision
People with impaired vision use screen readers to help them “read” websites. If you provide descriptive alt text for images on your site, people using screen readers will know what the images are about, and will get the same full understanding of your site that others do.
Good for search engine rankings
Describing images on a web page with alt text can help the page rank higher in search results if you include important and relevant keywords. Do not be tempted to stuff irrelevant keywords into alt text just so a page will rank well for those words. Search engines can recognize this ploy for what it is: an attempt to game results.
Writing image descriptions
This is what an image description looks like in HTML:
<img src="image.jpg" alt="This is the image description">
You can write image descriptions, or alt text, by writing the HTML directly into the code for a web page. If you’re using a content management system or online commerce software package, it will probably have a feature to help you quickly create alt text for your images.
Caution: While some software packages automatically generate alt text, they don't always do it well. Always check the quality of automatically generated alt text.
- Warning: Some of your images don't have descriptions.
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Robots
Your website's robots.txt file can tell search engines to ignore parts of your site. Learn more ...
Purpose
Website owners usually use robots.txt to let search engines know which pages or sections of their site shouldn't be indexed — for example, web contact forms, print versions of web pages and other content that's duplicated elsewhere on the site. Robots.txt can also be used to request that specific robots not index a site. For more information, read How To Use Robots.txt.
Be careful!
If you're going to use robots.txt, be careful not to accidentally exclude search engines from pages you want people to find. To learn more, read Don't Block Search Engine Crawlers.
Search engine robots
You'll need to know the names of specific search engine robots - or "bots" – if you’re going to exclude any or all of them from any part of your site.
- Google’s bot is called Googlebot. Google is the world’s largest search engine, and is where many people discover new websites.
- Bing’s bot is called msnbot. Bing also provides search results to people using Yahoo to search the Web. Together, Bing and Yahoo are the second largest search resource, after Google.
- Baidu’s bot is called Baiduspider. Baidu is a major search engine in China, and the number of people using it is increasing rapidly.
- AboutUs.org’s bot is called AboutUsBot. To create a Site Report, AboutUs uses crawling technology that’s similar to what search engines use.
- Good: This website’s robots.txt file is not blocking major search engines from crawling its pages. Your website can appear in any engine’s search results.
Canonical Url
This website can live at www.Medicare.gov or Medicare.gov. It's best for your site's visibility to live at just one URL, or web address. You'll want to create a 301 redirect to the URL you choose from the other URL. Learn more ...
Choose one or the other
Whichever of these URLs you choose, make sure your website lives ONLY at that location, which is called the canonical URL for your site.
Be careful!
If you choose www.MyWebsite.com for your site, make sure people who don't type www can get to your site, too. Create a permanent 301 redirect from MyWebsite.com to www.MyWebsite.com.
If the same web page exists at two different URLs, people can choose to link to one or the other. Links from other sites to your website are valuable — they tell search engines that your site is important to people. By splitting valuable links between two identical pages, you're diluting the power of those links to help a page rank higher in search results.
Learn more about why you should have just one home page: Read Twin Home Pages: Classic SEO Mistake
- Good: Your website resides at Medicare.gov and both www.Medicare.gov and Medicare.gov are permanently redirected to it.
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Web Presence
Search Engine Visibility
Check this site's prominence around the web and in major search engines.
Date Last Crawled
| value for Google | Feb 22, 2011 |
|---|---|
| value for Bing | Not Available |
Social Visibility
Check this site's presence on news sharing and community sites.
Social Media Visibility
| value for Digg | 0 |
|---|---|
| value for Dmoz | 9 |
| value for Google Groups | 26,300 |
| value for Yahoo Answers | 538 |
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Redirectory
Below we show domains that redirect to Medicare.gov.
We survey every domain on the Internet ending in .com, .net, or .edu to see if any redirect to this website. Large or famous websites like Amazon.com often have many sites redirecting to them.
Domains that redirect to the home page of Medicare.gov
A website owner can point one domain to the home page of another. Learn more ...
Capture visitors who type the wrong name
It can make a lot of sense to redirect a domain to an existing web page. For example, many people are likely to type wikipedia.com when they are really looking for wikipedia.org. Creating a redirect from wikipedia.com to wikipedia.org helps these people get to the site they want.
We have not found any domains that redirect to the home page of Medicare.gov.
Domains that redirect to a page within Medicare.gov
A domain can point to any page within another website. Learn more ...
Get people to a specific web page
Creating a redirect from a simple domain name helps people find an existing web page that has a long, hard-to-remember URL. For example firefox.com redirects to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/.
- gotphr.com
- redirects to: http://medicare.gov/phr
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