SEO Tips for Church Websites

What is SEO?

SEO simply means – Search Engine Optimization.  It’s a bit of science that deals with how search engines view your websites, and more importantly how they rank you in the search results.  Before we begin, let me just say that you create your website for people, not for search engines.  You might have the most optimized site, but is it user-friendly and pleasant to visit?  I’m not a self-proclaimed expert on the subject.  There are quite a few sites devoted to teaching about SEO.  If you want to really get your hands dirty, sign up for a Lynda.com account and watch their four hour training session.

SEO Tips

Meta Tags

I’ve seen many people create a ton of tags in the header of their website thinking this will generate better search results.  Sadly, they are dead wrong.  Google does not even look at meta tags when ranking search results.  You can read the article here.

Keywords

Keywords are entity words within your titles and content.  The base unit of data for search engines is a keyword.  This is a word when coupled with other keywords creates a rich definition of the target content.  It’s important that you define a set of keywords for your target market.  There are a lot of keyword generators available on the web, however, my personal approach is that you sit down and do some hard work to find keywords that fit your mission and vision.  If you have a marketing professional in your church, have them give you keyword suggestions that reflect your marketing strategy.

Page/Post Titles

I have found from research and speaking to SEO geniuses that your page title is the most important part of your page ranking.   Secondary is your content.  It is vitally important that each page of your website has a unique relevant title that identifies that pages content.   The position of keywords within your title also affect your page ranking.  If you want your church to be ranked in a search for “Naperville Pentecostal church”, your homepage title should reflect this.

Meta Descriptions

Your meta descriptions should be worded with rich keywords that describe the content of the page.  Be careful not to repeat keywords over and over within the content as this flags a potential violation in the searchbot.

Content

Your content is very important as well.  A search engine looks at the length and the quality of your content.  Your pages/post content should not be too short or too long.  Within your content, it’s important to identify sections using heading tags.  Do not increase the font size and place a bold tag to emphasize heading titles.  The searchbot is trained to see h1, h2, h3, etc. tags as section titles.   Also when presenting content (paragraphs, headings, etc.), NEVER use tables unless you are displaying a TABLE of data (spreadsheet, graph data, etc.).  Tables split data into numerous cells and cannot be read in a linear fashion.  Do your best to keep all content in paragraph tags as search engines identify these tags as content containers.

Legitimate Backlinks

Backlinks are basically other websites that have a link to your websites.  I don’t really care for backlinking ranking because people hire spammers to add links to hundreds of sites in the comment sections of other sites.  Basically, this is fraudulent ranking.  However, since search engines still consider backlinking a relevant ranking metric, do your best to get your members or friends to add a link to your site on their website.  These are legitimate links that help others find you and give you some credibility with search engines.

DO NOT PAY FOR SEO CONSULTANTS!!!!! (Caps used to denote screaming my head off at you)

Don’t spend resources that God has given to your church on SEO experts.  This is being an unwise manager of God’s money.  You know the most about your operation, they don’t. So, get dirty and learn some proper SEO techniques for free and then do some hard work to make your website optimal.  Read this article.

Create Clean Code

A search engine is trained to look at clean code.  If you have messy code, chances are you are not getting optimal search results.  Check the quality of your code at at the W3C  Validation site.  It’s free.  Clean code is a non-negotiable practice.  I use the transitional document typel.  The strict document type will give you a headache trying to validate your code.  It’s not necessary according to me.

Free SEO Tools

If you’re a Wordpress freak like me, here are a few plugins that can help you with your SEO strategies.

• All-In-One SEO Pack – This awesome plugin places a form below all page/post content in the WP editor to create custom, unique titles and descriptions for all of your content.
• Google XML Sitemaps – One of the most important steps to getting noticed is submitting an XML sitemap file to Google and other search engines.  This is a techie and scary process for those not techie.  This plugin automates the entire process by submitting a dynamically created XML to Google and other search engines.

Other Tools

• Google Webmaster Tools – This is a set of user-friendly and self-explained tools to help webmasters get the most out of search engines.
• Google Analytics – Find out who is visiting your site and what keywords they have used to find you.  This is a great way to get a demographic sampling of who is visiting your site.  This also can give you valuable information to shape your marketing strategy.
• SEO Moz - There are dozens of tools out there like SEO Moz that help you determine proper SEO strategies.  There are eight free tools you can use to optimize your site.

Other Articles

• Church Crunch – 5 Harsh SEO Truths that Ministries Need to Know

In Conclusion

SEO should not be taken lightly, and should not be taken too seriously for church websites.  The main purpose of a church website is to give a snapshot of our church so websites visitors will be converted to physical guests.  Use proper SEO to make site visible to potential guests, but make sure you are spending the majority of your time creating relevant content that will enrich those who visit.  If you just focus on page ranking, chances are, your website will be stale.  I love this quote from the above referenced article:  “they get seduced by the SEO dark side into thinking they need to create content for Google instead of for their readers”.  Go be productive and make your website awesome!