This is the third article in our series on promoting your church website. You really should take time to read the first and second articles before you continue. This article will be a bit more technical than the first two...but vitally important for you to consider as you prepare your site for submission to the major search engines.
One of your first steps in making your site visible to the waiting world is the use of META tags. While META tags cannot guarantee you a good listing on a search engine, they certainly can help. Please make sure that you put good META tags in your site before you start submitting your URL to search engines.
There are two primary META tags that are important for you to put on your site. META tags are often indexed by robots and spiders that visit your page in order to identify the content of your site, and the keywords that most effectively describe your site. I would suggest that you put META tags on every page within your site. Below, are some good tips you can use to help make your site more likely to get a good search engine result.
TITLE - Using the TITLE tag, make sure you give your page a good title. It doesn't hurt if your title is descriptive, and contains a few keywords that would describe your site. The TITLE tags should be the first tags in the HEAD section of your page.
META DESCRIPTION - Using the "description" META tag provides an accurate description of your site for the search engine to display in its results page. Write one or two sentences that are descriptive, compelling, and utilize your important keywords. All META tags should be placed after the TITLE tags, but before the /HEAD tag.
META KEYWORDS - In this tag, you'll want to include a number of keywords that someone might use to perform a search. You might also want to consider variations and common misspellings. Also, you should try to use a few of these keywords in your TITLE, H!, any ALT attributes, as well as within the main body of your document. All of these things could help your rating with the search engine.
Beware of "search engine spamming." This practice simply uses keywords repetitively within the document, and while you might fool a search engine or two, you might also lose your listing with them.
There are other META tags you can use (name="copyright"; "author"; "generator"; etc.); however description and keywords are the most important ones to help you with search engine listing.
A special note for users of Microsoft FrontPage: You can edit META tags either by using the "HTML" tab, or by right clicking on the page, choosing "page properties..." and then choosing the "custom" tab.
Make sure to go through your site and develop your META tags before you start submitting to search engines. While it is tempting to just start telling people about your site, make sure you do things in the right order.
Lastly, remember that this is equal parts science and art--you'll have to do some experimenting with your tags and see how they affect your listing and your traffic. You might also want to consider using a product like Traffic Facts to help you analyze how well your site is accomplishing its goals.
Labels: design, Search Engine Optimization, Traffic Facts
