Keyword selection is important

In creating your website, put some thought into the keywords that your prospective web visitors will be looking for. The articles in the sidebar at this page give good detailed and additional information, but here's an overview of what you should do.

• The "TITLE" tag in the header is the most important text on each page. For a church, your TITLE tag should have your church name, city name, and possibly your ZIP/postal code. If "church" is not part of your church name, be sure to include the word "church"! I've seen several church web pages with generic titles like "Page 2" or "Homepage." If you Googled and saw this on the search page, would you click on it?
  
• The H1 tag is almost as important as the TITLE. Your H1 tag should include important keywords. Avoid sappy dumbed down "market-speak." You should only have one H1 tag for each page.
  
• Make use of meta description content. Most search engines haven't use meta keywords since 1998, but meta descriptions are used by the major search engines when they display their results. This isn't strictly a keyword issue since the description is not indexed by the search engine. Nonetheless, this description is what is displayed on the search results page. The description displayed to the searcher should GRAB THE READER. I've seen copyright statements in this description space -- BAD mistake. Again, avoid stupid sappy marketing speak. Mission statements help define the purpose and drive of the congregation, but they are completely irrelevant to most prospective visitors and should not be used in your meta description content.