SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is how search engines rank your business with others based on similar content. Your rank depends on different factors such as design and content. Some hosting providers have built in SEO. It is a main pitch of Squarespace’s marketing. By implementing relevant tactics and practices to your website you can keep your website up to date, link your social media, and can optimize your search engine ranking.

• Keywords-choose keywords that are relevant to your business-what customers might search for online to find you. Research the search keywords to optimize your targeted results. Images and videos uploaded to your site can contain tags and captions embedded in the metadata to take advantage of keywords.
• Regularly updating content to your website or publishing a blog. Link your social media to your website, regularly post fresh content on your social media pages.
• Links-Use internal links to keep users clicking to other pages on your site. Use external links that are applicable to the content of your website and make sense with your content, and external websites that lead to your site.
• Site Speed--You site should have fast loading times on mobile and desktop. Optimize content, images, and videos used should be compressed for fast loading times. Check your loading speed on a free site speed checker such as PageSpeed Insights. 
• Positive online reviews-think Google and Yelp-good reviews improve your SEO. Customer testimonials are also a great way to publish fresh content on your site.
• Having a mobile-friendly website. Most reputable subscriptions based web hosting/content management systems will automatically include a mobile ready site with their templates. This can be tweaked separately from your main desktop site to better fit phones and tablets.
• Install Google Analytics or other webmaster tools on your website. These tools track and analyze your site’s traffic. You can use data to learn about your audience, potential customers, and website visitors. Fun Fact: Google controls the lion's share of the market when it comes to search engines controlling 90% of search engine traffic. 

• Want to go a bit more in depth with videos? Check out One-Hour Guide to SEO - 6 Free Videos, it is a useful one hour video broken into 6 parts. This beginner level video is split into categories and breaks down the different parts of SEO from desktop vs. mobile, keyword research, and how Google shows searchers their results. Section 5 gets a little too technical for most viewers unless you are super into websites, URLs, and technical SEO.

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