Before addressing search engine results, there are two things you can do that will have a greater impact growing your business than any search engine optimization. 

• Use Email @ your domain.  If you have not already done so, please set up and use the email address that comes free with your TennisConnectDomain.  Using a business email address like "You@yourdomain.com", along with a signature line that includes your email address, phone number, hours of operation and web site address will do more to promote your web site than anything else you can do (when consumers see "ilovetennis@aol.com" they might relate to your passion, but they are not going to go looking for your web site).

• Use the eCalendar in TennisConnect.  eCalendar events are automatically turned in to pages that are SEO optimized in ways that you cannot accomplish in "pages" on your web site.  Not only is the eCalendar a terrific customer service and staff productivity tool for taking online enrollments (more), it is embedded in the industry search forms on prominent tennis web sites. 
  
  Click each link to see their implementation of the Find-A-Program function: tennis.com, tennischannel.com, mytenniscenter.com, playtennis.com, usta.com, etc... and more....

Six Tips:
1)  Submit your site.  You can get on radar much faster if you go to Bing and Google to submit your site (it's free).  MSN and Yahoo use Bing, and AOL uses Google behind the scenes anyhow, so the only 2 major sites that you need to go to are Bing and Google.

To list your site on Bing.com and related partners for free, click here: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx

To list your site on Google.com and related partners click here: http://www.google.com/addurl/

All you need to add is http://www.yoursite.com.  You do not need to add anything after the .com or .net

2)  Use your city name with the word “tennis” in your page titles, keywords, and throughout your pages.  The Page “Title” has special code written around it to call attention to the words.  Search engines place a higher “value” on those words.  They also place a higher value on Places, since most people search Google and other search engines using city names or even state names.

TennisConnect has already included “Meta tags” with the popular Tennis Keywords along with your city and state.  We have also included a file on your web site called ROBOTS.TXT.  This file instructs the web crawlers (known as robots) “how” to crawl your site.  Click here to download the sample text file (and update your site per the instructions above)

IMPORTANT:  Your keywords should not be specific that nobody uses them as a search phrase, but it is even worse to use keywords that are too broad.  If you use tennis, boston, head, prince, wilson... your page rank will sink to near zero.  "Boston" is just too broad for you to compete.  Use meaningful combinations that can affect your business in your market area, like boston tennis, boston tennis racquets, racquet stringing boston, racquet service boston... (for example)

3)  Increase your “relevance” by making sure your pages contain your keywords and are consistent with your page titles.  Google places a premium on finding what it expects to find.  So if your page title says “Junior Tennis Programs in Denver”, then make sure you page uses those words.  More than once.

For example, see the following “before” and “after” content:

Before:  Title: "Programs".  Page Content: "We offer lessons, leagues and tournaments.  We have the best facilities in town.  Our certified Pro’s can help you improve your game.  Please note, junior camps start next week"

After:  Title: Boston summer 2009 tennis"  Page Content: "We offer Tennis Lessons for Juniors and Adults.  Call the club house today at 617-123-4567 to join a tennis league or sign up for a tennis tournament.  We have the best Tennis facility in the Boston area.  Our certified USPTA and PTR Tennis Pro’s can help you improve your tennis game.  Please note, junior tennis camp starts next week.

Discussion:  In the “before” example, the search engines have no idea that you are involved in tennis.  There are a few finer points in the “after” example, such as the use of the word combinations Tennis Lessons, tennis league, tennis tournament, Boston, and other “key” words such as  a phone number and associations such as USPTA and PTR.

4)  Name your images.  When you place an image in your web site, you will see the TennisConnect editor has a field called Alternative Text.  Give your images names that describe them, like “Junior Tennis Tournament in Boston” and it will do two things for you.  First, when your visitors “float” their mouse over the image, it will show as the “callout” to tell them about that image.  But more importantly, TennisConnect generates the alt text HTML tag behind the scenes for you automatically.  Google can now index this image for their image search, so they award more “points” to your web site for your cooperation with them.

If you are going back after the fact to include Alt Text for your images, open the TCOEditor, and right-mouse-click on the image.  Choose image properties, and then you will see where to place your Alternative Text:


5)  Register or renew your domain for 3 years or more.  Google uses the duration of your web site registration as a measure of how serious you are about your web site.  The minimum a site can be registered is 1 year.  Many transient or spammer businesses use domain names to increase their legitimacy, but these businesses know that they will be constantly changing and morphing, so they rarely commit to more than 1 year.  If you are serious about your tennis business, a 3-5 year commitment will only you about $16.20./year on www.tennisconnectdomains.org.

6)  Use the power of the Press!   You probably have newsworthy events whether you are holding a "welcome to tennis" block party, or you are a retailer sponsoring one.  Every press opportunity creates an opportunity to become listed on that media outlet's web site, which in turn becomes even more searchable since most media sites are highly optimized and scored higher by search engines to begin with.  If you need help developing a strategy for Public Relations, please check out the services from MediaMoxie at www.MediaMoxie.com

There are many other techniques that we could explore, many of which have already been done for you.  Focus on these 6 points though, and your site will rise!

Related Articles:
META Tags and Keywords
Google Analytics and Site Verification
Traffic and statistics reporting