A New Site launch experiment - day 27…..

The last few days the hits and exposure has been steadily in increasing for The Soccer Tournament Directory

MSN (My new friend) now has indexed all our pages and continues to supply 90% of our search engine traffic. YEA. We are number 1 for the Term: youth soccer tournaments and very close with soccer tournament and soccer tournaments.

Yahoo is running up second as far as referrals. Currently only 5 pages are listed so I am totally optimistic about the future.

Google has indexed all our pages (minus the “Submit Us Pages”) but since we must be in the theoritical “SandBox”, I get very little traffic from them.

Recently updated tournaments can be found in:

• 2005 tournaments, Connecticut
• 2005 tournaments, Ohio
• 2005 tournaments, Texas
• 2005 tournaments, British Columbia, Canada
• 2005 tournaments, Pennsylvania
• 2006 tournaments, Nevada

As a personal Soccer Mom note: - We are attending the PA West Open Tournament this weekend. Good luck to all the Norwin Soccer Teams who will be competing this weekend.

There are lots of feature updates planned for The Youth Soccer Tournament Directory . In the next few months you will see changes to the following:

• Hotel Links - We would like to place links to hotels nearby the tornaments. I don’t know about your team but hotel choice has been one of the most import issues next to which tournament you are going to. Most of our favorite tournament moments have happened by the pool or in the hallways of the hotels we have selected. As much as I am sure these hotels like making money from us, I bet they cringe when they see these groups of roudy boys/girls and equally roudie parents (You know who you are) :>)
• If possible we would like to add map links to the cities where there tournaments are to take place. This may arrive a little later than a few months, but hopefully it will happen.

MSN traffic for our Soccer Tournament Directory is steadily increasing for terms like Soccer Tournament, Youth Soccer Tournaments, and individual searches for states that have been indexed.

Status for backlinks/site links as of today.

Google, 135 pages indexed. Twice daily hits are being done on the SiteMap. 0 backlinks.
MSN, 28 pages indexed (up 14 from yesterday), 62 backlinks.
Yahoo and Altavista, 1 page indexed, 43 backlinks
Teoma, 0 pages listed, 2 backlinks

New Tournaments added for:

• 2005 tournaments, Michigan
• 2005 tournaments, Utah

Today on a whim I redesigned the Soccer Tournament Directory. I never really liked the first design so after only two weeks I totally revamped the colors and changed the header.

Having some trouble with the curved banner heading. In FireFox the site looks great. On IE. The curved corners have the background image peeking through. Maybe in the morning I will have the energy to fix it. Not exactly sure what the matter is but I am sure it has to do with padding or a margin difference between IE and Firefox.

Updated Soccer Tournaments for today:

• Illinios - 2005 Soccer Tournaments
• California - 2005 Tournaments
• Delaware - 2005 Tournaments

Search Engine Status:

MSN - No changes. 14 pages listed. Lots of deeping crawling in my logs but no published results yet.

Google - Lost two pages listed for a total of 68. I have no clue what went away. No real traffic from them yet. My SiteMap was crawled once today.

As of this morning: My Tournament Directory :

• Google - My sitemap has been downloaded a few times a day but has not made a difference - 4 days. There are 70 pages listed in the directory. 0 backlinks
• Msn - Ranking well for soccer tournament, and youth soccer tournamant. As of yesterday and today there are 13 pages listed in the directory. The 2005 and 2006 category pages were picked up within hours of me deep linking from my local directory. 83 backlinks
• Yahoo - Still listing only the index page. - 35 backlinks.
• Altavista - Still listing only the index page. 28 backlinks.
• AskJeeves - The bot has visited, no listings, but 1 backlink.