Some clubs may be oversubscribed and simply have a web site just for the benefit of their members, but for most, the web site is also there to attract visitors and new members, if so read on.

Bridge players wishing to find information about a club will use a "Web Search" such as Google, Yahoo etc. and enter something such as "where can I play bridge in Anytown" or "bridge club anytown".

Once a web site has been created, then you will need some patience to wait for these "Web Search" companies to find and "crawl" your web site. This can take a week to a month or more. They use a program called a "robot" which spends all day, every day, going through their index of web pages and having a look at web sites "crawling" and finding new ones. The "crawl" consists of extracting each page, indexing the words and any "web address" that it finds on the page and adding them to the billions of pages and indexes that it has on its own computer. Then it will visit each of the "web addresses" it finds and index those pages, thus eventually "crawling" over the all the pages on the site.

For performance and other reasons, this happens periodically and over a period of time. Eventually the "robots" will repeat the process picking up new or modified pages. If you had a new web site of your own, then this could take a little while, but Bridgewebs is already known to the various "Robots" and each day, the robots, in total, read some 1000 pages and index them.

The Bridgewebs software has been designed to put all the correct title, tags etc. into the web site to allow it to be picked up and indexed correctly. However, there are some things you can do to help, especially on the home page, you may want to attract visitors from neighbouring towns or the county so will need to add something like

"ABC Bridge Club is a friendly club, is the premier duplicate bridge club in Anytown, has members from Town1, Town2 and is one of the top bridge clubs in Anyshire. ABC Bridge club meets on ..." etc.

Repeating words can help, but do not go mad, too many may penalize the page. Also use singular and plural where appropriate e.g. "club" and "clubs". Add words that may be appear on a search such as "duplicate bridge" or "EBU bridge clubs in Anytown".

It is even more important if you play in a village or your club has a name totally unrelated to the location you play. If you have a domain name then this does help. Make sure you register your domain name with your county and the EBU and anywhere else you want, remember, those sites will be "crawled" and it will come back to your web site from those addresses.

Initially a page is likely to appear quite low down but as it gets used or referenced it will move up.

Remember, it takes time to get indexed and it takes even longer to get removed from an index. Just to see what might happen in time try typing "shrewsbury bridge club" or "evesham bridge club" into Google and see what it brings up.

P.S. this is only a potted version of what happens, there are many tricks and complications