Recent Google algorithmic updates such as Panda and Penguin have caused confusion among many online dental marketing experts regarding their approach to dental SEO. Dentistry marketing has come to rely on search engine rankings for a dental website in a major way.

In this situation, any confusion regarding dentist marketing and SEO strategy can prove to be costly for the dental practice. Here are four important dental SEO facts that should help dental marketing experts redefine their strategies in view of the latest search engine updates.

Fact 1: Dental Keywords Need Not Match Precisely

Leading search engines such as Google repeatedly emphasize in their guidelines that keyword optimization must not be done at the cost of reader experience. It is not necessary to fit in exact dental keywords in situations where the content loses its meaning for the reader.

Keyword overstuffing is completely unnecessary and annoying for many readers, and ill-fitting keywords can also drive away readers from the dentistry website. This will hurt the page rankings far more in the long run than a reduced keyword optimization strategy.

Fact 2: Social Networking Impacts Dental SEO

Dental Internet marketing experts should encourage dentists to have a greater focus on social media networking. Dental blogs, discussions and columns on prominent dentistry websites, and regular social media activity on networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ can make a key difference to the fortunes of a dentist website.

Dental web marketing strategies must include promotion through social media. The integration of social media and SEO strategies has been occurring at a rapid pace. Search engines are increasingly giving weight to dental sites that find frequent mentions on various social networks, and are well integrated with social media activities.

Fact 3: Dental SEO Tags are No Longer Influential

While Google and other search engines continue to guide webmasters to use SEO tags, but it is more from the point of view of helping readers choose a website from the search results than from a page ranking point of view. Therefore, from a dental web strategy perspective, title tags and description tags do not make a key difference anymore.

The quality of dental web content, on the other hand, has become more crucial than ever before. The dentistry website must include original, relevant and regularly updated content that addresses the common dental search queries. Powerful content is fast becoming the most important SEO driver for a website.

Fact 4: Quality of Links Matters More than Quantity

One of the oldest online dental marketing ideas has been to have a large number of backlinks for the website. However, with the improvements in search engine algorithms, only high quality one-way backlinks can add value to a dental website now.

Purchasing backlinks in bulk or having poor quality links through dubious link directories, and even creating multiple domains to achieve backlinks are strategies of the past that will not result in any SEO benefits for your dental website any longer.