This week, Skye Learning is excited to spotlight Ronald Couming, an expert in search engine optimization (SEO) and digital marketing. He’s also a subject matter expert who appears in numerous courses within Skye’s Certificate in Digital Marketing.

Couming is CEO and Founder of RCS Online Solutions, which helps business owners and entrepreneurs find, convert, and retain clients. He also hosts a weekly radio show called Internet Marketing and Business Solutions with Ronald Couming. Learn more at RCS Technology Solutions.

Each year, Google answers more than two trillion search queries — which translates to more than three million searches per minute. This means that for every minute a business is not properly optimized for search engines, it is missing out on thousands of potential visitors and customers. Search engine optimization (SEO), the process of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through search engines, is a must for small businesses that engage in marketing online.

Here are 5 best practices for maximizing your results using search engine optimization.

The terms search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) are widely used in the marketing industry. Digital marketers define both terms as the marketing of a business online, using both paid advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (SERPs) as well as unpaid methods (SEO). Search engine marketing is a strategy for promoting increased website traffic and visibility. The bulk of SEM is conducted primarily through paid advertising.

In December 2000, 20th Century Fox released the inexplicably successful Dude, Where’s My Car?, a motion picture so puerile that the Chicago Tribune suggested audiences would leave the theater exclaiming, “Dude, I can’t believe I sat through that movie!” During that same week, a tech startup named Google released its toolbar extension, integrating its cutting-edge “page rank” search engine into browsers.

Google’s subsequent meteoric rise gave us the industry of search engine optimization, whose practitioners soon discovered a principle long embraced by Hollywood: You’ll never go broke giving people what they want.