When Lois gets back from her first term at Durham Uni she will probably sleep for two days, but then she wants to start offering tutoring for GSCE and A level students at schools in Brecon and the surrounding area (Crickhowell, Builth Wells etc). She designed a great poster which has gone up in the schools, but I reckon it's normally the parent who look for tutors not the kids. So I offered to set up a website.

In two hours I had a domain registered and the site established (using mojoPortal CMS) at http://brecon-maths-physics-tutor.org/  running on hosting from exeGesIS SDM.

It's super basic, but gives the essential info, with social sharing, and an enquiry form. I need to do some work on the cosmetics, but that is very time-consuming and I don't have time at the moment.

Now to get it visible on the internet!

First we added a QR code to the poster so people could easily open the site on their phones.

But what about the search engines? The problem with common services like tutors, dentists, driving schools etc is that the search engines seem to be flooded with the national chains and agencies, plus pay-per-click ads for these. I'm not sure how, but they spoof local relevance so that when you search for "brecon car hire" they make their results say "Car hire in Brecon - best prices" even though they may be a national chain without a branch in Brecon.

So with more optimism that expectation I made the site content and metadata as sensible as I could with the limited material, and set up the site in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

To my amazement, the following morning the site was on page 1 of Bing when searching for "Brecon maths tutor". Nowhere to be seen in Google. Wow for Bing! Or so I thought.

A week later, after changing absolutely nothing, the site has vanished without trace from Bing, for reasons I cannot fathom, and is appearing high up page 2 in Google. Interesting, watch this space!