Requirements
Objective
Description
Most people find your web site by looking for your exact camp name, or for
specific terms, such as those they would use for the Yellow Pages. You can do
a few simple (and a couple advanced) things to get your site ranked highly on
Google for terms that will lead people to your site.
- Choosing & Using Key Words
a. First, think about how people would look for your camp. For example,people looking for day camps most likely type in “Summer Camp Anytown, CT”
or “Camps in Anytown.” Terms like “camp” and “summer camp” are good, but return
thousands of results, making hard to find you. Being more specific guarantees
that users looking for more narrow results will find you.
b. Next, use your key words (ie, YourCamp Summer Camp in Anytown, CT) as follows:
c. In your title tags (one of the only meta tags Google considers) – Title
Tags display the title at the top of your browser. d. As the first heading
of a particular web page, preferably as an H1 tag.
- Inbound links
a. Find partner sites (like findymcacamps.org) that will link toyou with your key words in the actual link text. For example, a listing this
way YourCamp Summer Camp Anytown
CT is better than Yourcamp Summer Camp at www.yourcamp.org.
b. Google uses inbound links to “test” if your site is really about what you
say it is.
c. Submit your site to dmoz.org. Dmoz is a human edited web directory, and
more importantly, the source provider for Google groups. Once you get listed
on DMOZ, you will get picked up by Google, and the rest is history.
d. Create a friends of
link on your page, and list the sites of vendors that you work with. Ask them to link back to you
in a format that you specify (see tip a).
- Other Resources – Search Engine Optimization is a very
complex topic, and these tips only scratch the surface. Luckily, competition
for summer camp in your town is relatively limited (compared to searching
for “computers”) and following these suggestions will make a significant
difference. For more information see the following sites:
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