There are several things that you can do to increase your online presence.

The first step is to be sure that you have a website that is customized for your industry in your geographic area. There are several companies that offer a "free website," however these site-builder sites will never perform very well on search engines.

Once you have a website customized for your business, then you would want to register and verify the site on the various search engines. There are virtually 150 search engines out there, depending on the industry. For example, a studio can't register with UrbanSpoon or Angie's List. Keep in mind that about 75% of all searches are made on Google, and that is where I would focus 75% of your efforts.

Google requires physical verification. In other words to access your Google search listings, you will need to get a verification code emailed to you. After you verify that code, you will then have access to your Google My Business page where you can enhance your listings by adding hours, photos and such.

Once you have completed the design and verification processes, then you can move to optimizing the website.

The search engines no longer use "keywords," but rely on the meta-tags and content of the page. If you search for trainers in your area, you can see which companies populate the highest. If you click on their page, and then hit Control and U at the same time; you can access the source code of their website. You can then see how they have their on-page SEO set on their page, and tweak yours accordingly. If you do this every month, you can consistently improve your placement on that search engine.

For Google specifically, there are three types of search results. The first are the paid listings, or AdWords. There are two strategies when marketing through AdWords: Brand Awareness & Call To Action.

Brand Awareness strategy is buying exposure. You pay for your ad to be seen by the bulk. Each time your ad appears on Google, it costs you based on what you are willing to pay per thousand exposures.

Call to Action strategy is a Pay Per Click program; therefore it doesn't cost anything for the exposure, however each new click from Google will charge you based on what you are willing to pay for that lead. Ad placement is determined by the highest bid per click for that given search term, and is only incurred once per IP address. This means that your competitor can't set there and continuously click on your link to cost you more money.

The next type of search result is Google Maps. Google Maps is populated strictly by location, and has nothing to do with your website. The listings are populated by relative distance from the user. For example, if you were to search "hamburgers," Google would return the closest McDonald's, then Burger King, then Wendy's, etc. So that it is return business results based on closest proximity.

The last type of search results are what's known as "organic results." Organic results are ranked by how the website is setup. No one knows the exact algorithm that the search engines use, however we do understand the criteria used when determining organic search results.

The criteria used to determine who comes up in what order are as follows:

1. IP Address

2. Data Content (Page count, photos, videos, etc)

3. Traffic

4. Maintenance/Updates

5. Mobile Compatibility

6. Domain Longevity

7. Reviews & Followers

There's no magic secret: the more you cater to this criteria, the higher probability to have of being ranked the highest; and the less you do, the less probability.

The last element of the mix is what is known as off-page SEO. The intent of off-page SEO is to enhance the criteria above to increase your ranking. For example, social media is a good way to drive traffic to a particular service page if you want to be searchable for that particular service. And you can create a page for any product or service for which you would like to be found when users are searching online.

This is not a hard process, it is just very time-consuming. We have a full staff of people, and it still takes us several months to complete the initial processes; and we have to diligently work on sites to maintain the achieved placement.

I know that this is a lot of information, but I think that it is important to understand how it all works. There are a lot of people out there that use terms like "optimization" to get people to pay for nothing. Once you understand how it all works, then you can begin to value how products or services can effectively enhance your online placement.

I hope this helps!