To gain higher positioning at various search engines, church marketing personnel need various methods of SEO (Search Engine Optimization / Optimisation).
Website Viewers
Some churches and parishes aren't really interested in having their website visited from people all over the world. These worshipping communities are more interested in their local congregations. For these people SEOs are not needed.
Various communities might like their website to be easily accessible to people from various parts of their particular country but not necessarily beyond their borders. This allows for people transferring to their parish to preview what their parish has to offer. A suggestion for these communities would be to select a domain name which ends in their countries code e.g. United Kingdom .uk, for Australia .au, etc.
Other communities may be interested in having their church and their website open worldwide. SEOs would likely suit these churches.
Suggestions for SEO Improvement
Some ways I have found which I believe help with Search Engine Optimization are:
* The Domain name includes the church / parish name and suburb.
* Key Words such as the church / parish name are regularly used throughout the site, particularly in titles / headings, first sentence and last sentence on each webpage.
* Each webpage within the website would highlight something different about the parish and hence also include other key words associated both with the parish name / suburb and that webpage's emphasis.
These other Key Words may be: sacrament, parishioner, visitor, Baptism, Marriage, mass times, contact, parish priest, priests, parish kit, open day, school or welfare groups within the parish, etc.
* Each Blog's title, first and last sentences would include key words associated with that individual blog‟s message and that it eventuated from your parish.
*The more links coming to your website from other sources, particularly .gov, .edu and .org the better. Having other sites point to your website helps SEO i.e. having other sites have your Domain / URL linked live on their website.
However, it is best not to swap links with others of similar level e.g. .org. That is, if each site has the other‟s site linked from their site, this usually causes it to neutralize the impact for both sites.
Yet swapping these links may improve traffic to your site, just not higher SEO.
* Include links within your own site to various other webpages on your site.
* Another way of achieving the links from other sites may be achieved by developing various Blogs elsewhere which include the link to your website. (More on this in Blogs later.)
* Be careful not to overdo all these links and key words as search engines may penalize you for being overambitious in gaining notice for your website.
* Age of the website. Older sites have more credibility. Develop your website as soon as possible.
* Update your site regularly. A fresh, updated site is appealing to both visitors and for SEO.
These suggestions come from Church Marketing Manual for the Digital Age (2nd ed), 2010, by Bryan Foster
No comments:
Post a Comment