Once you've managed to get your website into a search engine, that's when the fun really begins. You can type in your church, ministry, or business name to make sure that you're in there. Hopefully, you'll be near the top of the list. And why not? There aren't many web sites out there about the 'East Timbuctu First Baptist Church.' You ought to come out near the top!
But being near the top when you type in the name of your organization is not really an impressive feat. After all, one of the purposes of the website is for people who don't know about you to find you! And people who don't know about the 'East Timbuctu First Baptist Church' AREN'T going to type that into a search engine.
So you need to step back and take an objective look at the situation. What sorts of people do you hope to attract to your website? Pastors? Christian Education directors? People in your community? People in your state? Newcomers to your community?
Now, pretend for just a minute that you aren't part of your organization. If you were one of the people you are trying to attract, what kinds of searches would you be likely to do? Make a list of the searches you think your potential visitors would do, and then go to the following web page:
Keyword Tool. This is a great free page for webmasters; it lets you type in a keyword or phrase, and then tells you popular search phrases related to the phrase you typed. Jot these suggestions down in order of popularity.
When you're done with the suggestion tool, go to your favorite search engine. (Naturally, at this point, your favorite search engine is the one that your organization is listed in!) Try typing in some of the keywords and phrases you obtained from the suggestion tool. Do you show up? If you don't, there are a few things you may want to consider:
Can I change my page title, description, or keywords to include some of these popular keywords? Can I change the text of the page to include some of these popular keywords in the first paragraph? Does my page title NEED to have my organization name in it? (The homepage for my software company no longer contains the name of the company. The downside of this is that I may lose a little bit of name recognition--the upside is that I was able to squeeze a couple extra important keywords into my title.)
Carefully recraft your your title, description, and page text to include as much 'meat' as you possibly can. Now resubmit, wait two months (that's about how far behind many of the search engines are), and try again.
A disclaimer: as you play around with your keywords, descriptions, etc., please remember that keywords are not the only thing search engines look at. If you can't get high rankings, it may not be the fault of your web design; link popularity is also a crucial part of your rankings, so start looking for people to link to you!
Douglas Twitchell
Biblical IlluminationsLabels: Search Engine Optimization
