Dental SEO Basics

Owning and operating a dental website is a time-consuming job if you’re doing it right. Having a successful website for your practice isn’t just setting up your website and letting it sit there. You won’t get any traffic out there, because there are hundreds of dentists just like you with websites who put time and effort into their website. Those dentists usually reap the benefits of Search Engine rankings.

Fortunately, that’s why we’re here for you. Our team of highly trained optimization experts will do all of that work for you. As you’ve read in previous posts, a major component to successful SEO is of course content. As we say, “Content is King,” and we say that with good reason. Solid, quality content has won our SEO campaigns over fierce competitors many times over.

However, in addition to quality content, you need to learn the basics of SEO. If you’re a part of one of our SEO packages, then we’re going to take control of this stuff for you. Perhaps you recently designed your own site and you’d like to know some Dental SEO basics.

Header Tags

These H1, H2, H3, etc. tags are used to split up sections of content. Search Engines know that these tags represent the theme of content for that section. They’ll cross-reference the header tag with the content below it to see if the content is truly valuable and has quality. Ensuring that your important keywords are in your header tags is very important.

The H1 tag offers the most weight in significance, but it doesn’t mean you can use H1 over and over and over and hope to get high rankings for all the keywords. Use a mixture of all tags.

Hyperlink Anchor Text

When you link to another section of your site, use one of your target keywords as the “anchor text”, which is the word or phrase users click on to go to another page. This gives a significant weight to the page being linked to!

Title Tags

Those words that you see at the top of your browser window is the title tag. For this page, it’ll be something like “Intro to SEO: The Basics | Dental Marketing Ninjas.” See how we added the term SEO in the title? We also added our brand name, Dental Marketing Ninjas, because we’d like to have a good branding presence on Google.

What not to do with SEO

So now you know that these few basic elements of a site give a little extra power. Combined with frequent content updates, it’s a very powerful advantage in the world of SEO. But don’t over-do it. You might think, “Oh if I add more keywords to my blog post I’ll rank for more terms!” While this may be true, it is indeed very possible to over-do it and penalize yourself. That is called Over Optimization, and we’ve personally seen many other SEO Business’ websites suffer from that penalty.

Of course we always encourage you to give us a call so that we can help you create the perfect SEO campaign for your dental practice.