SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the term that refers to the things that can be done to improve a website’s visibility in the search engines, especially Google. The goal of search engine optimization is to ensure your website appeals to search engine crawlers, or bots. The search engines will take note of your site and its content, categorizing it in a way that will allow it to show up in the SERPs (search engine results pages) when certain keywords are typed. For example, a dentist in Canberra would expect that their practice website would be optimised to appear for a term like “Canberra dentist”.
Search Engine Optimisation is achieved through a wide variety of methods. Many webmasters or SEO professionals will focus on proper keyword research, clarity in the setup of your website’s headers, tags, file names and descriptions, external back-linking, internal cross linking, and quality content creation, both for the practice website and for distribution throughout the internet.
While we don’t know every component of Google’s algorithm for determining the ranking of every page that is indexed, we know that it is possible to increase your rankings by making your site informative and visible via both On-Page and Off-Page techniques.
On-Page refers to what can be done directly to your website: this is easily controlled by your webmaster and should always be optimal. Off-Page refers to strategies used elsewhere in the internet to help make your website visible. Off-Page strategies often change, and one needs to proceed cautiously: while many strategies are legitimate and in fact encouraged by Google, others are definitely ‘black hat’ (unethical) and must be avoided at all costs!