Invisible to Google?

[LittleGreyCat]

I found the Suffolk DA through the CTC, not the other way around.
I knew that there would be club rides somewhere, and hoped they would be near me.

After reading some forum threads I wondered if there were any other non-CTC cycling clubs in the area.

I live in Felixstowe. The nearest location for club rides is Ipswich about 11 miles away.

So I Googled for 'cycling club Felixstowe' just to see what came up.
Nothing relating to the CTC.
A link http://www.clubs4uk.co.uk/cycling/suffolk-felixstowe-cycling-club.html which was initially exciting (but without contact details) until I checked other entries and discovered that there was the same boiler plate for all the major Suffolk towns but no links to a real cycle club.

I then tried 'cycling club Ipswich' and found http://ipswichbicycleclub.co.uk/ and http://www.wolseyroadclub.co.uk/ (which mentions the CTC) but still no hits for the CTC itself.

So the CTC seems to be invisible to Google at the local level in Suffolk. If anyone is looking they can find two Ipswich clubs, and a bogus Felixstowe club, but no CTC.

If the CTC truly wants to recruit at the local level to boost club rides (and perhaps even start new locations for club rides) surely it isn't that hard to structure the meta data associated with the CTC site so that major towns in each county will get a hit from a search and flag up the CTC.

If 'clubs4uk' can do it, why can't we?

Cheers

LGC

[NUKe]

Firstly Are you in Felixstowe ? If so there isn't a cycling club active, but the Sports and liesure council are looking for someone willing to start one and have funds for seed corn funding. p.m. me if you are interested and i will put you in touch with the relevent people. We used to have a club when Roger Millar had the cycle shop on the high road in Walton but this folded in the 1990's.

If you are looking for CTC organised events the nearest is Ipswich and their website is here.
http://www.greenlivingcentre.org.uk/ctc/

[LittleGreyCat]

Firstly Are you in Felixstowe ? If so there isn't a cycling club active, but the Sports and liesure council are looking for someone willing to start one and have funds for seed corn funding. p.m. me if you are interested and i will put you in touch with the relevent people. We used to have a club when Roger Millar had the cycle shop on the high road in Walton but this folded in the 1990's.

If you are looking for CTC organised events the nearest is Ipswich and their website is here.
http://www.greenlivingcentre.org.uk/ctc/

Already in touch with Ipswich, thanks.

I was flagging up that there was no visibility of the CTC as a cycling organisation in Suffolk, if you used a Google search.

Someone who was not aware of the CTC and the DA and the rides in Ipswich wouldn't be captured by the results of a Google search.

IMHO they should be.

Remember Roger - that was a true LBS.

I am not in a position to organise a Felixstowe chapter at the moment - if I graduate to riding with the Ipswich CTC and like it I may consider something in a year or so.

Cheers

LGC

[drossall]

The HTML page title is the bit in the (usually) blue bar at the top of the page. On this page, it's "CTC Forum - View topic - Invisible to Google?"

On the CTC Suffolk site, that's "CTCSuffolk". It's not been set up properly. That page title is really important to Google rankings because it's meant to be a (very brief and accurate) summary. For one thing, it gets used in search results in the page summary:

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=ctcsuffolk

Just adding the space would help for searches including the word "Suffolk".

The site doesn't mention Ipswich or Felixstowe, or at least not prominently, so a search using those words isn't going to work.

Even cycling could be mentioned more, ideally in the page title above.

Look at other clubs' sites in these basic ways (are the words you're looking for actually in the page title and in the page) and you'll get the beginnings of some insight.