You have a church website, but no one ever visits it and it has never actually enticed someone to come to your church - rendering it useless and therefore not worthy of updating.
Over 90% of your church website traffic will likely come directly from search engine results. Therefore, it is absolutely essential to optimize your site for search engines. You could have the greatest church website in town, but if no one knows about it your efforts are wasted.
This brief introduction to "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO will allow you to makeover your site and increase your sites traffic. Since applying these principals to our church website we have actually seen many new visitors to our church who found us on the internet. In fact, we do not have a yellow pages ad, but still receive new calls every month entirely from our website.
Know your Keywords:
The first thing you need to do is identify the keywords and phrases that are relevant to your church. A good tool for this can be found on Google, Yahoo or one I have specifically wrote for churches here: Church Keyword Tool.
Research shows that 31% of people enter 2 word phrases into search engines, 25% of all users look for 3 word combinations and only about 19% of them try their luck with only a single word.
Next let's look at the HEAD tags of your site:
Three things you can do to improve your search engine ranking can be done within the HEAD tags, they are: The title tag, the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag.
The Title Tag on every page should contain the key words you want to be found for. It should not be longer than 60 characters, including spaces and should not contain your domain name.
Examples of Good Title Tags:
- Christian Community Church, Nowhere, OR: Contemporary music and Casual Attire.
- First Christian Church, Nowhere, MT: About our Contemporary Service
- Second Community Church, Nowhere, Iowa: Relevant Bible Teaching Notes
Meta Description & Meta Keywords:
These tags help the search engines decide what your site is all about and should contain your keywords and phrases.
The Meta Description is used to describe your web and some search engines use this information to summarize your website in their search listings. This should be a short concise sentence describing your church and include your keywords and phrases. The description should not be more than 100 characters long and should not contain repeating words.
The Meta Keywords should include the keywords and phrases that you are targeting in order of importance. Start with the most important and then proceed to less important but still relevant keywords. Do not include keywords that are not relevant to the theme of your site as this will be looked at as "spam". The keywords shouldn't be longer than 250 characters, should be capitalized and separated by a comma and space (Word, Phrase Here, Another Phrase). You should not use any word, not even within phrases more than 3 times and you should not use words that do not appear in the body of your page.
Back Links:
Perhaps the biggest contributing factor to a successful web site is incoming or "Back Links". Back links are like references, they give your sight credibility. The more your site is linked to from other sites the more search engines will view your site as an authority. The keywords used to link to your site also help determine its authority for that keyword. For instance: if you have 1,000 links to your site that all say "Sioux City Church" you will rank very highly when someone searches for those keyword terms.
Here are a few examples of how to get back links for your site:
- Forums: Public forums where you can place a link in your signature are a great way to get lot's of back links. Be careful to join a forum that is relevant to your ministry and make sure you participate (most forums require a certain number of posts before a signature is displayed.)
- Directories: Submitting your link to various directories can really improve your site ranking. Make sure the directory or category are relevant to your ministry. If your denomination or district has a website make sure your church link is somewhere on their site.
- Blogs, Personal Sites or Other Business: Try asking your people to place a link on their website declaring they are a member of your church. Offer a small graphic or text link that allows them to share their church with others.
- Write Articles: Pastors can write articles for other sites and receive credit in the form of a link to their site.
Content, Content, Content:
The content of your site will provide an abundant amount of traffic if done right. The more original content you have the better chance you will show up in searches that you may never have intended to show up in. This will help more people find your site and reference it on their site adding to your credibility.
Do not use too much content on the front page. Let the content flow throughout the entire site and salt the every page with your keywords and phrases.
NEVER use hidden text or pages filled with gibberish text! These will be considered span and can get your site banned from search engines.
Up-to-date:
Today's web savvy culture HATES a website that is out dated. You need fresh news, fresh content and an updated calendar! I suggest using a content management system such as WordPress, PHP Nuke or WebAPP in order to make updating your content easy and give others the ability to manage sections of the site.
More text, less mess:
Counters, pictures, search boxes, weather reports and other tidbits only clutter your sight and make them less attractive to the surfer and to search engines. Text is king! The more original text you have in your site that appears between the paragraph tags the more you will turn up in searches.
Wrap up:
To sum it all up: update your site regularly with quality text content: keep sermon notes, events, articles and information up-to-date and filled with lots of great text! Make sure your title and meta tags are detailed and get your site link on as many pages as possible.
In my next article I will discuss the use of a Robots.txt file, Site Map, Optimizing Images and how to validate your site for errors.
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