Search Engine Optimization, otherwise known as SEO, is possibly the most important aspect of your website. It is unseen to the viewer of your site, but is the magic, which will bring your website to the top of Google’s rankings – if the SEO is done well.
SEO is often referred to as organic search; in other words through good SEO the pages are found naturally by the viewer searching for a specific keyword and receiving the result, which is your webpage. The opposite to SEO is Pay Per Click (PPC), where you pay to have your webpage appear in the advertisement section of the search results.
Search Engine Optimization is a wide-ranging science. It is not just the optimization of a page using keywords, but also encompasses images, videos, social media, backlinks to authoritative websites elsewhere and other objects on each of your webpages. To optimize a page well takes much time, thought and effort to get it right. This is where Cotswold Websites can help you. We are specialists in SEO and will help you bring your website to the top of the Google rankings for your chosen keywords.
What Are Keywords?
Keywords are either individual words or phrases which you want your webpage to rank for.
Taking the time to choose good keywords is one of the most important things you can do to make sure your webpages consistently rank highly in Google and other search engines.
There is a wide variety of tools available to help evaluate which are good or bad keywords. A good starting point is Google’s Keyword Tool and Google Trends. Using these two online tools, by entering your chosen keywords, you will be able to see how they are likely to rank and with what competition. You will also be able to get a list of other suggested keywords, which may be preferable to the one you initially tried out.
Peppering the keywords naturally through the webpage, the search engines will pick up the patterns and rank your webpage accordingly.
Keywords are not the only type of optimization needed for an excellent webpage. Images, videos and all sorts of other elements on your webpage should also be optimized.
For images and video, giving the file a descriptive name, using your keywords in the title and alt descriptions, will help the page rank higher, as Google catalogues images and videos as much as the webpage itself. Therefore, if the images and videos compliment the text, the search engine algorithms will give a better score and thus ranking.
Getting backlinks to your site from authoritative websites is also important to improving your ranking. Therefore having a link from another website, which is a known authority in its field, to your webpage will denote to Google that your webpage is therefore likely to be an “approved” resource, which is competent in its field. Once again, this will add to your page’s score and help increase its ranking.