SEO – back to basics

The layperson’s guide to search engine optimisation

I’m prompted to write this article following discussions with dentists who are seeking to improve their search engine positions, primarily in Google which continues to dominate UK search. It became clear that there is still an awful lot of confusion as to what SEO actually is and virtually no understanding of how SEO is being redefined following huge changes made by Google in 2011 and 2012. So I will set out a few basic definitions and guidelines which will hopefully act as a useful reference for those wondering about the best ways to optimise their dental website.

On-site and off-site optimisation

There are two fundamental aspects to SEO – the on-site factors are the structural elements within the web pages that influence how the the search engine will interpret your data and how this contributes to your ranking. Elements like the page title, url structure, use of ‘heading’ tags, content, navigation structure, contextual relevance etc are all very important.

Off-site factors govern how third party websites influence your ranking, primarily by linking to your site. However, “social signals” e.g. friends, followers, re-tweets etc are now also considered to contribute – more on this later.

The relative importance of these two factors is a major point for debate in the SEO community but the true fact is that no-one really knows. In fact anyone who tells you that they have a fully accurate insight into the workings of the search engines is talking nonsense. For a start, Google in particular makes thousands of changes every year to the algorithm it uses to rank websites and some of these changes are quite dramatic. As you’d expect, Google keeps all of this a closely guarded secret. Consequently the best we can do is test, observe and try to identify what works and what doesn’t.

What we do know is that the importance of off-site factors, up until recently thought to contribute 60%+ of the weighting, has decreased over the last year or so. Currently, off-site and on-site are considered to be balanced 50:50 in their overall contribution and it pays to get both elements right.

On-site factors

This is the bit that you must get right first. It still amazes me when I talk to guys who are paying out for off-site SEO but it’s clear that the website has not been optimised for on-site factors first. Pretty pointless and a good indicator that you’ve got the wrong guy! The key on-site factors are:

• page titles
• url structure (the ‘www’ web address stuff)
• use of ‘heading’ (h) tags
• quality and relevance of your content
• quantity of content
• ‘freshness’ of content
• keywords (well sort of – more below….)
• inter-site linking

All of these need to be configured correctly and in a non-spammy way. Just on keywords, it used to be the case where SEO’s looked at factors like keyword density and tried to shove just the right quantity into the various page elements. This is no longer the case as Google is much more adept at spotting contextual relevance (look up ‘latent semantic indexing’ if you get really bored) – so now we are a lot more subtle in the inclusion of keywords and more importantly the contextual relevance of the supporting text.

Off-site factors

Links back to your site are still very important but they must be of good quality and relevant. Bad links or simply lots of poor quality ones that have been deliberately for SEO will likely get your site penalised by Google. Good quality link-building is now more difficult than ever before and must not be treated lightly. A few good links are way more valuable than a lot of mediocre ones so it’s very worthwhile to seek out and earn the good ones. Take a look through the rest of this blog to see what constitutes a good link and recommended ways to acquire them.

Social “signals” – evidence suggests that the search engines are now starting to use social profiles and reach as a ranking signal. We cannot quantify this (no-one can) but what we do know is that websites that are supported by active social media and regular blogging, tend to fare better in Google than sites that don’t. Consequently our dental SEO projects are now always under-pinned by “social” and blogging to work in conjunction with back-link earning.

Recent trends in SEO

Even is you are outsourcing your SEO, it is important to have a working knowledge of the dramatic changes introduced by Google in 2011 and 2012 which really changed the search landscape. This is so you can make sure your SEO provider has repositioned their tactics accordingly so that you don’t get a search penalty.

In 2011, Google introduced its “Panda” update which was primarily aimed at low quality sites that existed simply to provide back-links without really adding too much value. Many of the “article” sites were demoted in the rankings and many even removed completely. Links from this type of site became worthless virtually overnight. Early in 2012, Google followed up with “Penguin” (gotta love those guys!) which was aimed at penalising websites that had over-optimised i.e. deliberately built a plethora of low quality back-links to boost their ranking. This really was a massive change and sites that had been ranked well disappeared.

Google’s purge on poor quality link sites has continued and many of the old directory sites and more recently poor social book-marking sites have been de-indexed.

The sad fact is that many SEO companies haven’t changed tactics and still peddle this out moded and dangerous form of link-building. Some of these techniques worked 18 months ago but no longer as Google continues to move the goal-posts to make forced optimisation harder.

The future of SEO

Some say that SEO is dead now that Google is clamping down. However, the truth is that SEO will never die, only the poor practitioners who will finally be caught out.

The best path now is under-pinned by “quality”, whether this is quality content for your website and blog, outreach via social media or good quality link acquisition. Perhaps the phrase “search engine optimisation” is itself outmoded and would be better replaced by “user experience optimisation” or similar. Google’s objective is to present the best and most current information available to its users so if you keep that firmly in mind when optimising, you will not go far wrong and your website ranking should prosper.

If you would like more information about how to improve your dental website rankings, please call us on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion.