12 Steps to a Successful Website - OurChurch.Com

Search engines can be one of the most productive sources of visitors to your website. Therefore, it is vital to understand the implications of search engines BEFORE you design your website. That way you can incorporate strategies and techniques into the original design that will help give your website a good search listing.

When looking for your website, what words and phrases are people going to enter into search engines?

These words and phrases are referred to as keywords. Your chance of being found by people using search engines is largely driven by your ability to select keywords that are relevant to your website and your ability to optimize your website to prominently feature those keywords. Just like when we asked in Step 1, "What's in it for them?" you've got to put yourself into your visitors' shoes to think of what keywords they are going to use. Not only that, but you've got to imagine a variety of different scenarios in which people will be looking for your website.

The goal is to build a list of words and phrases you think are most likely to be searched for, beginning at the top and going down in priority from there.

Observe the thought process as we return to our example of the website for children's ministry leaders:

• What is the name of the website?
  
  
• What is the type or category of the website?
  
  
• What website content will people will be looking for (resources, activities, games)?
  
  
• What types of people will be visiting the website (children's ministry leaders, Sunday school teachers)?
  
  
• Does your organization service a specific location? Our example is not location specific, but most websites should include all the cities, counties, and states they serve (Clearwater, Pinellas County, Florida).
  
• Use a thesaurus to add synonyms of the keywords on your list:
  
  
  • children => kids, students, boys, girls
  • ministry => church, outreach
  • leaders => teachers, pastors, ministers, volunteers
  
  
• Search engines look for exact matches to keywords, so include different forms of each word: ministry, ministries, ministers.
  
  
• Go to other sites similar to yours and look for some of the words on those sites
  
  
• It's very difficult to get a good search ranking for a single word, so target two and three-word phrases.
  
  
• General terms like Jesus, God, love, and Heaven are among the keywords for millions of Christian sites. It's fine to include them, but give priority to keywords that are uniquely related to your website.

When prioritizing the keyword phrases for your website it's important to consider both their relevance to your website as well as their popularity or the number of times people search for each phrase. Overture's keyword selection tool is extremely valuable for determining which phrases are used most often in web searches.

Once you've generated a prioritized list of 50-100 words, you want to make a conscious effort to use those words in various places in your website. In reality, though, you can only effectively target 3-5 keyword phrases on each page because you need to include targeted phrases in your page title and other headings for best results. For that reason it's a good idea to target different keyword phrases with each page rather than trying to target all phrases on all pages.

Meta Tags

Meta tags are the HTML elements that Webmasters can include within a web page to provide information about the document (author, title, description, etc.). Meta tags aren't visible to users viewing a page unless they click the "View" menu, then click "Source," which opens a window displaying the raw HTML of the web page.

Even though Meta tags are invisible to site visitors, they are visible to search engines that index websites. That makes them very important in the marketing of your website.

• Many search engines will use the title tag and description tag as the title and description displayed in the search results.
  
  
• If a Web page lacks a Title Tag, some search engine results will display the phrase "No Title" in the first line of the listing. That can limit search engine traffic.
  
  
• If a Web page lacks a Meta Description Tag, some search engines will display the first few words on the page as the listing description. That might not be the most compelling copy for driving visitors to the site.
  
  
• Many search engines factor in Meta tags in ranking websites. If a certain word or phrase is not in the Meta tags, then chances are your website will be further down in the search results.

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