This information was prepared for our congregations’ webmasters. Your church probably has one! – A brother or sister who devote their time & heart to make sure you and those seeking God will get the good news and information about your congregation.
Please, let your webmaster know about this articel! And as you read it – think about the ways to improve your church’s website!
Goals: 1. Help the churches to develop active modern website to provide the members with the information to encourage and strengthen and to reinforce the connection between our churches.
2. Present our movement through the Internet through using SEO tips to improve the rank of our websites on Search Engines.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tips:
There are definitely things on SEO that can be done by a web-master, while there are still some things that can be done by a person who is not a professional. We tried to apply all these through the last 2 months and our website www.RIV.kiev.ua (Rejoice In Victory! – Website of Christian fellowship of Kiev Church of Christ) was ranked higher in Google – from the second page up to 2nd and 5th positions (depends on what area for the search is chosen). Here is what can be done to improve SEO for your website:
1. WEBSITE FOR PEOPLE
Even before we talk about the ways to improve the SEO – we need to say that the main goal of our website should be meeting the need for the information both of the members and of the visitors. And first of all it is our members who need all those useful things – news, stories and teaching – that can be provided through the worldwide web. So the first of all rule – is to create a website for the people and not for the search engines.
2. BE ACTIVE
The main way to improve the SEO is for the website to be active.
There should be new post regularly. Daily – would be a great ultimate goal. To start with we would recommend to set a goal of a weekly new posts.
Of course in reality it may strongly depend on the size of the church… But just as the church can have several regions with the news from each – the same thing can be done having news from each house church or a Bible talk… including news of different parts of our Christian life – baptisms, restorations, weddings, birth of children, death of disciples. Plus special events, powerful thoughts, audio-lessons, QTs, calendar.
Having you website changing often will make Googlebot go back to your site more often to index these new pages. So it will probably take time and effort to find and encourage someone to take this ministry into their hearts.
The way we do it in Kiev Church of Christ is we have a Media board that get together with the regional leaders once a month. And we get together with Shawn Wooten for an hour once in 2 weeks to discuss the needs of the church as for media materials, plans and cooperation with the leadership. We at media group present a draft plan for our work for the next 3 month – projects, goals for development etc. We started the work of the Board by preparing a presentation for the regional leaders (the leadership of the Kiev Church of Christ and Ukrainian Churches). It turned out that they needed more information and explanation on why it is so important to develop the websites of the churches to have all our news on the web and to make the website Search-Engines-friendly. Now as we have the support of our leadership – our next step is to develop a net of people who would invest their free time and talents to write articles, make pictures, slideshows, video clips.
At every meeting we announce that people can read and listen to the sermons and read the news on our website – we project a slide with the url on it. Altogether the amount of visitors for the RIV.KIEV.UA grew 6 times in 6 months from December to June – as we were investing much energy to it. And for almost 250 days we had there were altogether 28,479 visits by 6,324 unique visitors. And 78% of these were returning visitors!
Also we specifically asked every person on staff and every member of Kiev Church of Christ to make our website their homepage! You should visit our site too – we have Translator plugged in!
3. COOSE YOUR KEYWORDS WISELY
Fundamentals of SEO – Watch Video from Apogee Search:
3.1. Include the key words into your title tag. It is the #1 thing for Google spider to locate your page.
International Churches of Christ – ICOC – Kiev Church of Christ
the tags Title and H1 for every page.
Same for the tags div or P in the bottom of the page
Make sure that each page has its title that includes keywords and says what exactly is on the page.
Example:
Kiev Church of Christ | News
3.2. The key words need to be present in the text of the articles. For example if it says on Kiev church web: There was a baptism in the South Region. We should edit it for: There was a baptism in the South Region of Kiev Church of Christ. Or: Welcome to annual Married’s Retreat!The Kiev Church of Christ Married’s retreat.
The key words in the text should be used only when they correspond to the context of course. It is also useful to format the keywords within the text by Key words – the text will appear as bold.
It is our first priority that we would let other people find us when they are looking for Churches of Christ, Church of Christ, Disciples of Jesus etc… – we need to add –
However, our second step just as well might be to try to reach out through the worldwide web adding to the number of our keywords something like – seeking God, Faith etc. But to be able to go further we need to reach our present goals first.
4. LINKS
Create a god structure and system of links on your website.
The best example of SEO as for linking and site structure is Wikipedia website. They do not pay to Search Engines but they have 2,000,000 clicks daily. It all is due to their structure and a system of mutual links to all the pages of the website.
Take a look and try to imitate this with you church website!
4.1. HYPERLINKS: There is a rule – that there should be a hyperlink in a text to lead to every page of the site. Besides the menu. So we would recommend you to go through the articles on your website and add hyperlinks wherever it is appropriate. It is good as well for your visitors – since they may want to get more information on the topic. And it is more likely that they will not start looking through all the articles trying to find posts connected to what they have just read.
4.2. MORE LINKS: Make it so there will be several links to other articles under every article:
Under the article about the campus ministry such as:
More on this topic:
Plans for campus ministry
New ministers for our campus
4.3. SITEMAP: There needs to be Site’s Map on your website with the clear structure of the website for the visitors.
Structure of the website is very important – think it over thoughroughly. Then after it is ready you will have to change your system of links. Usually the need for change is obvous only after you write your sitemap. It is important that every page can be reached in three clicks from any other page of your website.
Writing your Site Map will help you see if your site is well structured.
Having a site map is useful for SEO as well – since Map consists of the links to the WebPages of your site!
4.3. LINKS of OUR WEBSITES! There should be a page with all the links for our churches of Christ websites on every site of ours. We need to help each other with that. Every link that points to your website from some other site is “a vote” for your website for SEO.
Build the links wisely – let the linking words to your website from the other websites be your keywords, your tag title.
SEO Link Building – Watch the Video
Knowing that we need to encourage the members of the church to post the link to our church webpage to their personal web sites. And if our church website is active, great looking (yes, it is also important) and useful – We are sure they will be happy to do it
As you are reading it – please take a minute and go to your page on Facebook or LiveJournal or any other webservice that you are using and do, please, post a link to your church website somewhere in your profile! It may just as well help someone to come to God!
4.4. It is also helpful to include your url into the online bookmarks resources.
More useful things:
Here are several videos to help you with SEO:
Google Analytics – Watch – Optimizing Customer Experiences
Google Website Optimizer Tips Video From Apogee Search – Use it after you created and worked some on your website ro improve it.
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And if you are not convicted enough that we need to put our efforts into WWW ministry – listen about it from the International Leadership Conference in Denver!
We love you!
The document was prepared by Justin Renton (Johannesburg) and Masha Lyashenko (Kiev) – ICOC Committee of Communication & Administration 2008-2009.
