Online marketing for dentists is fraught with challenges. Considering the stiff market competition and a growing awareness among practising dentists to use the power of dental SEO to promote their websites, it is not easy to achieve marketing success. In this scenario, it becomes critical to follow the current search engine marketing trends and follow the direction that Google is taking in its quest to give top rankings to most deserving websites.

Social media networking has emerged as a major force that dental marketing experts cannot afford to ignore any longer. Facebook, in particular, has not only become an extremely popular medium of communication and networking across age groups, but it also plays an increasingly crucial role in website optimization for dentists and other professionals and businesses. That makes it very important for a dentist website to integrate its homepage with Facebook.

The advantage of such integration is that the visitors to the website will be able to cross over to the dentist’s Facebook page seamlessly. This helps improve the dentist-patient engagement levels in the long run. Similarly, potential patients who visit the Facebook page of the dental practice are likely to visit the dental website as well. A significant number of professionals and businesses are already reaping the benefits of such integration.

A research study conducted by Pingdom indicates that 24.3 percent of the top 10,000 websites have already integrated their website homepage with Facebook. Furthermore, Facebook also dominates in terms of back links from the homepage to the social network. Twitter and Google+ are also not in the fray, with 10 and 13 percent of the top websites having official Twitter and Google+ widgets on their homepage respectively.

In addition to using the official widgets for homepage integration with social networks, dental marketing experts can also make use of a broad range of other buttons and links to direct their target readers back to their social network and help enhance the reader engagement levels with the dentist’s website and social media presence.