Business Shifts to the Web
81 million people, or 63% of daily Internet users, report they watch broadband video at work or home. That has increased by 16% in six months, according to A Barometer of Broadband Content and Its Users. 33% said watching video via the Internet increases their overall viewing time, while 13% said they were watching less TV in favor of broadband content.

Savvy business owners know that now is the time to shift their marketing focus to their websites and that includes making time for SEO. Below are some SEO 101 tips for newbies.

What is SEO?
SEO is “Search Engine Optimization.”
SEO is the process where business owners enhance the content of their web sites more visible for search engines, thereby increasing traffic to their sites.

A web site owner can make changes to their site by themselves or have their webmasters make changes to the html (hyper text markup language) for them. Don't be afraid to learn HTML. Even SEO 101 newbies can learn this simple markup language for the web.

Small Starters
If you haven't already purchased a domain name (URL) consider putting what your business is, or does, in the name.

Example: DreamXtremeDance.com lets visitors know instantly that they are a dance school of some type.

When internet users type in a search query into a search engine, they will probably use the word "dance". Domain names that actually have the query name in their web name will be some of the first to show up in search engines. Therefore, your company will have an automatic 'leg up' for the life of the business.

What Internet users are looking for:
"Small Starters" is the most basic SEO 101 tip I love to give out. It's simple, yet you'd be surprised to find how many companies are called "NNRDX.com" and noone has a clue what the site is about. How many people will type "NNRDX" into a search engine...? Answer: most likely- none!

Title Tags
Easily one of the most important (and oft forgotten) tag on a web site. In the HTML code, you will see this: <title>Your Domain Name here</title> You'd be surprised how many companies just ignore this tag, or just put the name of their firm on each and every page of the site. Don't make this mistake!

Search engines' robots visit your site and go from top to bottom looking up info about each page. Information on the top of the site are considered most important. Make sure your titles reflect what is truly on your page though. Don't put "Britanny Spears" in your title if you are selling baseball gloves. Google, Yahoo! search directory and others can see this and don't like it. It's their business to give searches qualified information on sites. Serving up bogus info doesn't reflect well on them, and you could get banned from their indexes.

Don't Overstuff Tags
Title tags are generally 75 characters long. Don't overstuff them. But do leave out colons, commas and the like. They are wasted real estate. You might even consider putting your company name at the end of the tag and lead off with what servers are looking for: shoes, hats, services.