Fall is officially here, and for many retailers, this heralds the beginning of the 2017 holiday season. According to Fortune Magazine, Americans spent $8.4 billion dollars on Halloween alone in 2016, but even that was just a drop in the bucket compared to more than $1 trillion dollars spent on the most celebrated holidays in America – Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Hanukkah.

Do you have a brand-new website? Ensuring your web pages are optimized for search engines is the first step in the search engine optimization (SEO) process. Choosing relevant keywords, making sure those keywords are repeated through your content, and specifying title tags, meta descriptions and more can give your website a solid foundation to build from, but did you know that there are blogging tips to improve SEO?

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, should be a top priority for any business as we enter the new year. Beautiful website design is one way to attract customers, but if they can’t find your website to begin with, then you’re out of luck. SEO, the most important aspect of any website, helps others find you on search engines and can really improve your online exposure.

Here are a few tips for better SEO in 2017:

Off-page search engine optimization (SEO) plays a huge role in your website's potential to be 'discovered' online. The more relevant, authoritative inbound links you have on other websites, the higher your page will rank with Google and other search engines. All SEO is a process, however, and success doesn't happen overnight. Here are a few ways to get started with an effective off-page SEO strategy:

Create quality, engaging content. Any content you post online be it a blog, article, image or video should be relevant and interesting to your audience. More importantly, it should provide value. Readers engaged by your content will more likely want to link back to your website to learn more about your brand. Don't add content just for the sake of having more pages; focus on adding real value.

1. Know the aim of your site. Are you trying to sell products or services? Provide information? Create a web portal? Whatever your goal, every page on your site needs to serve that common purpose.

2. Lay out logical menus and organization. Great content is meaningless if no one can find it. Take the time to outline your sitemap and menu and structure your pages in the best way possible.

Is your website working 24/7 for you? If not, it should be! If your site isn't performing the way you would like it to, here are a few tips to help you start getting more from your online presence:

As we enter week three of our first annual marketing clinic series (Giving Back to Our Community: Free Marketing Guidance for Local Small Business), we're continually amazed by the positive attitude our visiting businesses hold toward the New Year. However, though many small entrepreneurs often know where they want to take their businesses in 2013, they aren't always sure how best to get there, or aren't familiar with the tools. To that end, we've put together few helpful tips for any business to create a successful marketing strategy.

Most people have heard of the term Search Engine Optimization (or SEO), and understand its impact on the effectiveness of their website through improved search engine rankings. A site with no SEO is much more difficult if not impossible to find if you do not already know its direct URL.

The most important element of any SEO campaign is something known as link building. Each website that posts a link to your website acts like a vote for your website on search engine rankings. This helps make your website more visible and easy to find when people search for related queries.

Link building must be employed for every page of your website, as Google assesses each page individually and assigns it a page rank not the overall website. This process is called deep linking, which refers to the fact that some of your inbound links go to the inner pages of your website, rather than simply to your home page.

Having a well-designed website doesn't mean that your organization has secured a visible web presence. In order to ensure that your website is highly 'discoverable,' you must invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of improving the visibility of a website in search engines via 'natural' or unpaid ('organic') search results.

SEO is an ongoing process, not a one-time deal, and it requires maintenance in order to remain effective and ensure a return on your investment. Measuring the success of your program on a regular basis will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses, as well as ways to address them. Therefore, it is important to run regular stats reports on your website's traffic so that you can compare its performance each time you make any changes to your program.

Ultimately, as with any other marketing undertaking, the goal of an SEO investment is to increase conversions whether your goal is to sell a product or service, recruit followers to a cause, or distribute news.

Pinterest is a fast-growing social platform that can be used to store and share images associated with your brand. It can be also helpful in driving traffic to your website, and can serve as a powerful link building technique to support your current SEO program.

The cool thing about Pinterest is that it is overwhelmingly positive in nature. People don't pin complaints, or negative interactions - they pin their passions.

According to a research conducted by Internet Marketing Inc, 80 percent of Pinterest's users are female. Seventy-five percent of all users are between 25 and 54 years of age; they are well educated (85 percent have some level of college education), and with an average annual household income of $50k or more.