Fellow Coronado Toastmasters:

For the past year, I have striven to learn more about HTML, search engines and related topics to improve our Club web site's standings in search engine results. The purpose was to help increase visitor traffic to our web site and ultimately, to help maintain and grow our membership.

Since, statistics show the majority of web surfers select one of their first 5 results, my goal was then, and now remains, to keep our Club website listed among those first 5. Web page size, keyword and subject relevance, powerful keywords, mulitple directory listings, reciprocating links, and regular maintenance were all important steps to achieve better rankings.

Today, I am happy to report we are consistently lsted in the Top 5 results on Google, Yahoo!, Ask, AltaVista and MSN when search terms like "albuquerque toastmasters" or "toastmasters clubs albuquerque" are used. Of course, the work continues and your feedback is always welcome.

In one more change to maintain our web prominence, today I removed the link for the District 23 Events Calendar for 2 reasons. You can see it at:  www.geocities.com/coronadotm.

First, our Club website's visitor traffic data indicates few visitors used the link. Further, the calendar is easily found on the District 23 website. The District 23 website link will remain on our Club website.

Second, by removing non-reciprocal links from our web pages increases the probability of better search engine rankings. In short, it can drive more visitor traffic to our Coronado Club web site.

I hope I have answered your questions which may have arisen due to this myriad of recent changes. Again, please contact me if you have suggestions or questions at our next meeting or by email:  [email protected].

Have a great day!

John Kirk, Webmaster