Most businesses aren’t going to always be able to hire an in-house dental SEO expert to handle their online content all the time— which makes outsourcing their SEO services an increasingly attractive offer for their practice– but there’s a catch.
1. You Need to Understand the Basics.
SEO is a tricky industry that requires a deep understanding of both the business the SEO specialist is trying to promote and the SEO industry as a whole. This can make hiring an outsourced SEO professional
rather tricky; and the best way to insure that a business isn’t going
in blind is just to make sure that that business has at least a decent
understanding of the SEO industry as a whole– they don’t need to be an
SEO expert (they wouldn’t need to hire a professional SEO firm if they were
experts)– but businesses should understand some of the concepts of SEO
before attempting to jump into the industry. I recommend hiring somebody
that specializes in your industry as each industry has different
nuances.
2. Understand What ‘White Hat’ and ‘Black Hat’ Mean
The first thing you should keep an eye out for is the distinction
between whitehat and blackhat SEO– if those two terms mean nothing to
you, then you need to research them before you continue on in your
business’s SEO endeavors; it’s important.
There are plenty of authoritative sources of what the difference
between those two – and their respective definitions actually are – but
the general distinction is a distinction of ethics. White hats are the
good guys who follow the rules as they were meant to be followed and do
things “legitimately”– but black hat SEO’s are people who understand how
to play the system and get the highest volume of traffic through abuse
of how search engines work. They use shady tactics and can go unnoticed,
but when they get caught (when), they can leave a website or campaign
in a worse-off position than it was when it started.
However… most people fall within some form of “gray hat”
classification in this area. The whole purpose of SEO is to get you
ranked higher on search engine results pages; and you wouldn’t be able
to achieve that if you didn’t read the rules and were willing to bend
your content at least a little just to get that extra boost in search
engine ranking. Generally go with a white hat; but understand that
anyone who calls themselves a white hat isn’t being entirely honest about it.
3. Understand The Premise of Backlinks
Backlinks,
or simply links are also another thing that you want to be sure to
understand. Links are like a referral or reference from one site to
another. If an industry leader in your space mentions your business and
ads your website address to their site, that’s a good think! That would
be considered a good link.
Links play a heavy role in how a website is ranked by search engines. While links are generally a good thing, bad links are definitely
a bad thing. Links should only be made if the thing they are linking to
is definitively relevant to the central theme of the website to begin
with. Spam-links are a sure-fire way to get downranked from search
engine results pages.
The nature of SEO in general is to have frequently-searched text in
the content of your website while still maintaining that every portion
of your website be consistent with an overall topic. A website should
have a theme, and should have relevant links and content relating to
that theme– anything else is to be avoided.
