Now that digital marketing has been around for more than a decade, most people are familiar with the term “search engine optimization”, or SEO. Even if they don’t fully understand what it means.

SEO is critical to the success of your business website. Without SEO, it’s practically impossible to get your web pages ranked high on the most popular search engines.

And if your customers can’t find you, they can’t spend their money on the products and services you offer.

On-Page and Off-Page

Here’s something you probably didn’t know about SEO: There are actually two different types, on-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO includes the things you do within the content of your web page to improve its rankings. It includes things like including keywords in the optimal places.

Off-page SEO means doing things on other people’s sites to attract visitors to your pages. This includes things like participating in forums and promoting your web pages on social media.

SEO Basics – Page Titles Are Primary

If you do nothing else to promote your page, make sure your page title includes the optimal keywords that best describe the content you offer.

Search engines will look at all of your content when assigning a page ranking. But the element they look at first and give the most weight to is your page title.

The page title can be found at the very top of your browser on the tab. It’s also what pops up on  Google when people search for sites like yours.

SEO Basics – Keep Meta Descriptions to 155 Characters

Like Twitter postings, meta descriptions for your web pages need to be limited to a certain number of characters, in this instance 155, including spaces.

Meta descriptions also need to be persuasive and compelling because these are what appear under your link on Google and other search engine results pages.

Use these SEO secrets to improve your page rankings and you should see an immediate improvement in your traffic flow.