A few tips on how to boost your status with Google, Yahoo and other major search engines.

How it works
Congratulations, your site is live! You have a new home on the web and you want everyone to know, our first tip: TELL YOUR FRIENDS! Get local sports supply stores, newspapers, camp directories and your best buddies’ business to link to your site, increasing your inbound links.

Inbound Links
Many search engines rank pages based on the number or the relevance of inbound links. While you may gain many inbound links, the relevant links are the most important.

Relevant Links: You’ve told all of your friends, now which of your friends has an organization that is closely allied with yours? For example, if you have a soccer camp, you would want to get linked from local, regional or national soccer organizations, soccer supply stores and possibly summer camp directories.

Valuable Inbound Links: It is also very valuable to have reputable inbound links, an inbound link from a .EDU, .GOV, .MIL or State provided URL, such as a high school (www.highschool.k12.stateabbreviation.us) is very valuable, much more valuable than links from .COM, .NET, .ORG.

OK, now you have inbound links set up, our next tip: BE PATIENT. Web crawlers must now crawl the sites that hold your link, see your hyperlink, and then visit your site. Web crawlers may crawl as frequently as many times per day, or a few times per week… here are some more details:

Web Crawlers
Web crawlers are programs used by search engines that browse the World Wide Web in an automated manner. Search engines use web crawlers as a means of providing up to date information. The web crawler starts with a list of familiar URLs and as it visits these pages, it identifies all of the hyperlinks in the pages and adds them to the list of URLs to visit, this secondary list is then visited and sent to search engines to be indexed.

How do I know if I have inbound links?
Try this, go to the URL provided and type your domain name, it will show you everyone that is currently linking to your site:
http://www.online-utility.org/webmaster/backlink_host_ip_analyzer.jsp

How do I know if and when I am indexed?
For Google results, go to www.Google.com and type “site:yoursitename.campslive.com” (Do not use spaces or quotation marks) The results will tell you how many pages of your site have been indexed by Google.

Now that you know what you can do, know that we are doing our part too. We are using the best technologies possible to get our site and yours ranked well on all of the search engines. We are constantly researching and developing new methods of increasing your chances of being number one!