Mastering SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the major buzzwords in online marketing at the moment, and chances are you’ve heard it used, even if you don’t quite know what it means. Put simply, SEO is a series of processes or steps that you take in order to optimise your website’s performance in natural searches online. This may include the use of specific key words in your web content, using social media to boost your page views, and ensuring your content is as relevant and up-to-date as possible. All of these factors and more besides influence the perceived quality of your website, so that when someone searches for a dentist in your area, your practice website will rank higher than websites that aren’t rated so highly by search engines such as Google and Bing.

Times are changing

Before investigating the ways you can improve the SEO of your website, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider exactly how search engines work. It is often easiest to think of a search engine as a program that scours every website on the web and rates it according to a check list of criteria (this is also known as a search algorithm). When a search engine visits your site it will look at your website, it will note how long it takes to load, the quality of the content, how many people have visited your site, and how long on average they spend reading it.