SEO for churches

A Google blog

2005-08-10T20:37:00.000-07:00

Ooh, excellent. Matt Cutts is a software developer at Google. He now blogs. He's posting about a wide variety of topics, among which are specifics and insights on what Google does and does not like.

del.icio.us automatic links

2005-07-20T23:18:00.000-07:00

Update: Just call me Rube Goldberg. John points out that there's a much easier way to add links to del.icio.us than the over-engineered mess I describe below -- just use the blog macros to create the {del.icio.us link} + {permalink url} + {title} directly in your blog template. There's no need for Javascript code at all. Still, the Javascript can still be used to automatically generate links on non-blog web pages.

Yesterday, I linked to an article about using Greasemonkey, Firefox, and Blogger.com to help automate the process of adding Technorati Tags to your blog articles. Today, I explain how to easily create a link to post your article to del.icio.us, a relatively new "social bookmark" service. You don't need Greasemonkey or the Firefox browser or even blogger.com -- this code should work with any blogging software or service.

If you grok del.icio.us, skip to the code and examples.

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us provides a method for users to categorize their favorite websites into ad-hoc categories. These users assign "tags" or categories to the website and enter them into del.icio.us's database. Think back to the early days of the web when Yahoo first came out. Yahoo used human editors to categorize websites into categories. del.icio.us, on the other hand, is a social network that allows anybody to tag or categorize their favorite websites. Furthermore, there are no predefined tags; the tag keywords are chosen and created by the users themselves.

This practice of collaborative tagging is called "folksonomy," after "folk" (for normal, everyday people) and "taxonomy" (the practice of organizing things in to groups)

Why become del.icio.us?

Because of the voting/popularity aspect of del.icio.us, many users report search results that are more relevant than those from standard search engines. As tagging systems such as Technorati, Flickr, and del.icio.us become more popular, they will become increasingly important in driving traffic to your website.

How to be del.icio.us?

Delicious users typically add a bookmark to their browsers linking to Javascript at deli.cio.us. When the user visits a web page he likes, he clicks the delicious bookmark, he is redirected to a form at deli.cio.us, enters his tags and submits the website to deli.cio.us.

Web pages can also have a link on their pages to simplify the process for their visitors. I've written a small snippet of Javascript that creates this link for you on every page you include this Javascript. I also have a PHP version if you're concerned about users who disable the script.

Javascript del.icio.us

First of all, a disclaimer: This is the first time in my life I've written Javascript, so if I've made any horrible mistakes please let me know in the comments.

Here's the basic code that will create a link to deli.cio.us's site submittal form, using the current URL and page title.


<script type="text/javascript">
  var ref="http://del.icio.us/post?url=" + document.URL + "&title="
  var title = document.title
  newtitle = title.replace(/ /g,"+")
  fullref = encodeURI(ref + newtitle)
  document.write("<a href=\""+fullref+"\">")
  document.write("Make me deli.cio.us.")
  document.write("</a>")
</script>

This is a very basic Javascript program. It builds the hyperlink anchor to the del.cio.us form, with the current URL and document title added as the values for the url and title parameters. The string replace method replaces all spaces with the plus sign. encodeURI replaces illegal URL characters in the query string with valid characters.

You can add this Javascript code to any web page, whether it's a blog or not. If you want to do this on the server side, here's the PHP equivalent.


<?php
function delicious($pagetitle) {
        // This function will "Make Me Delicious"
        // by inserting URL-specific link to deli.cio.us's
        // tag post URL.
        // Input parameter $pagetitle is the title of the page.
        $url = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];
        $newurl = 'http://'.urlencode($url);
        $newtitle = urlencode($pagetitle); // make the title URL friendly
        echo "<br /><a href=http://del.icio.us/post?url=$newurl&title=$newtitle>
Make me delicious</a>.<br />";
}
?>

Like the Javascript example, this code will create a link to deli.cio.us's posting form. Unlike Javascript, the server-side PHP cannot determine the title of the page (unless you want to read the page and parse the title yourself), so the title is passed as an argument to the function delicious(). This function is called at the place on your web page you want the del.icio.us link.

Blogger.com example

Whatever blogging software you use, you want to put the code in your template so that links to del.icious are automatic. Below is how I added the Javascript to my bicycling blog. I put the code right after the blog article text (identified by <$BlogItemBody$>) and right before the "posted-by" footer. You'll notice the Javascript code is slightly different from the general example above -- I make use of Blogger.com macros. BlogItemTitle expands to the title of my article because the HTML page title may be something a little different. Also I use BlogItemPermalink because this Javascript may be running from the index page of the blog or from the "Permalink" page -- I want to be sure the right page gets tagged.


<script type="text/javascript">
  var ref="http://del.icio.us/post?url=" + "<$BlogItemPermalinkUrl$>" + "&title="
  <BlogItemTitle>
  var title = "<$BlogItemTitle$>"
  </BlogItemTitle>
  newtitle = title.replace(/ /g,"+")
  fullref = encodeURI(ref + newtitle)
  document.write("<a href=\""+fullref+"\">")
  document.write("Make this deli.cio.us.")
  document.write("</a>")
</script>

If you use the PHP version instead and your blog is hosted on a PHP-enabled host, calls to the delcious function are made like this to ensure you get the article title: delicious("<$BlogItemTitle$>). Note that the PHP version will only work on the Permalink page, so make sure the PHP code is wrapped within the tags <ItemPage> </ItemPage>

If you make use of this code, please drop me a line in the comments below.

Influence and blogging

2005-07-20T11:02:00.000-07:00

I'm running up against a deadline at work and don't have time to comment on this topic, but I sure wish I did.

Winning over your friends is about influence. Matt at The Basement writes about the 10% of Americans who are the Influentials -- the kind of people who stand out because they set trends and influence everybody else around them. Writers in the past have proven that these trendsetters are "quantifiable and identifiable." Matt and others also write of current attempts to identify bloggers who are influentials.

I suspect one way to identify these Influential bloggers: The influentials write original, cogent content that cause second and third-tier bloggers (like me) to go "Hmmm" and link to them with posts like this one.

What do you think? Who are Influential bloggers? Link to them in the comments below.

Update: Rex tells us we're missing the point . "If mass-marketers try to 'figure out' the blogosphere with some sort of 'measurement tool' rather than by joining in the conversation and belonging to the blogosphere, they're missing the point and will remain clueless outsiders."

Tags: influentials | influence | evangelism

Tags with blogspot

2005-07-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

If you use Blogger.com and you're tired of writing out the HTML code for Technorati tags, check this out -- an easy way to add tags to your blog posts. This Greasemonkey extension is reason alone to convert to Firefox as your web browser!

Google PR Update

2005-07-15T00:02:00.000-07:00

Google is updating their public PageRank and backlinks information today. My Longmont church website has bubbled up to PR3 from a PR2. More importantly, the church website ranks number one in search results for more keywords.

My old church in Urbana, Illinois has broken through the barrier from PR4 to PR5 today. It's a small website without much content, and amazingly almost every page has a PageRank of 5. What's especially interesting is that most of this site hasn't been updated in years. The photo on the homepage is one that I took four or five years ago. And unfortunately, this high PageRank does not translate into a good placement on the results page when searching for churches in Urbana or Champaign. I believe this easily rectified, however, and I hope to talk with the church webmistress to suggest some fixes. I'll let you know how that goes. The pages have good content and is easy for users to navigate.

I've also been following this church in Sacramento, California. Their church website lost PageRank today, dropping from 4 to 3. One of the people on their web team told me that this is "evidence that a static page that has not been updated will lose rank... and fast." This is contrary to the experience I cited about the Urbana church website. This team is aggressive on their web optimization, using numerous Technorati and Flickr tags, several gateway sites, and extensive crosslinking across sites in an attempt to boost the number of inbound links to their church website. Done clumsily, these techniques will result in Google detecting this as an attempt to spam or game their algorithms, and if it's bad enough Google will ban your site from their results completely.

What are the lessons to learn? Don't try to game the system -- make your site user-friendly and easily navigable, and include good content. For high placement, though, this might not be quite enough. For that, keywords in your pages and in anchor text linking to your site are the key. Read the other articles on this blog for more information.

Where does your church website place in Google? Search for "church city, state or province." Let me know how you're doing in the comment section.

Technorati tag: seo | google

More on spam blogs

2005-07-05T14:31:00.000-07:00

My last post discussed spam blogs -- blogs with automatically generated content and links that are set up solely for the purpose of generating links to another site.

Duncan Riley at the Blog Herald weighs in with his opinion that it's time for Google to act on Blogger.com. He writes: "As more and more spam blogs are created, search engine results become more and more polluted." In response, search engines "will start to offer blog free search, or at least blogspot.com free search. The first to suffer will be anyone legitimately using blogger for their blogs."

I think Technorati and similar blog search services can fix the problem without banning blog-hosting services wholesale. It's a hard problem to solve, no doubt: John August on his screenwriting blog wonders "if the spam-blog problem is readily fixable." But I think it's in the best interests of Technorati, Flickr, and the rest to detect, filter, and ban spam blogs and tag spam.

Technorati tags: technorati | blog | spam | seo | google

Scraper blogs

2005-06-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows that Google loves blogs, and church websites with high-quality blogs associated with them bear this out with their generally higher search engine rankings.

This love of blogs has resulted in an explosion of spam blogs ("splogs"?) -- blogs that are created specifically to draw traffic for PPC or affiliate programs. The content is automatically generated by scraping content from newsfeeds, selecting articles with keywords important to the site, snipping content from the feed with those keywords and posting these snippets as a blog article. RSS feed aggregators such as Technorati then pick up these articles as original content and give it immediate distribution.

When I search Technorati for recent blog entries about my city, eight of the top fourteen blogs returned are these RSS scraper sites. This is amazingly annoying.

Because this greatly reduces the utility of Technorati, I hope Technorati implements some intelligence in their software to detect and ban these scraper blogs.

What do you think? Is scraped or random content a legitimate way to create links to your website? Leave your comments here.

Technorati tags: technorati | blog | spam | seo

Legalities of blogging

2005-06-14T08:26:00.000-07:00

The "unprofessional journalism" of blogging is a big thing and it's having an impact on the traditional news media. Bloggers have broken stories that the traditional news outlets have picked up. Some bloggers have press credentials while many others complain in online forums that their credentials were denied.

A Christian group will (hopefully) excercise some restraint in publishing private and personal information. Whatever the case, when you blog, you are a publisher. What you publish can open yourself up to some liability. It's a good idea to study your rights and look at the legalities of blogging.

Technorati tags: Free Speech Blog

Two way street

2005-06-09T08:34:00.000-07:00

Blogs are a powerful tool for spontaneous communication and can be used to help provide the two-way relationship building that I've talked about on this blog. The primary ways feedback comes is through commenting and trackbacks. Some bloggers are better than others at watching the comments. I urge bloggers to provide feedback to the commenters to make the communication two-way. Doing this will naturally result in more reader loyalty.

Some people are talking about ways to change blogging to produce real conversations. My opinion on opening up blogs to all comers: you'll end up with Yet Another Discussion Forum.

Popularity contest

2005-06-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Who's on first?

When you enter a search for "church in new york city" Google claims to find about 14 million results. How do the search engines decide which church to list first?

PageRank

One of the criteria that Google has historically used is PageRank. PageRank is a value from 0 to 10 that Google assigns to your page to give an indication of how important it thinks your page is. PageRank is computed based on several different factors, but one of them is the number of inbound links to your website. Your website's popularity is an indication to Google of how "good" your website is.

Content is king

The Number One method of growing these inbound links is to have excellent content on your website. This is an area where 'zine types of websites such as 90&9 and Endtime Magazine really shine. Blogs are another way to generate content. Google puts a lot of importance on blogs, and I encourage you to consider a blog on or linking to your church website. Blog software provides an easy way to upload sermon notes and syndicate your content for wider distribution. When you have good content (and when people can find it), others will automatically start linking to the content.

Get the free links

Make sure that community directories all have links to your church website. Do a search for "YourCity directory" or "YourCity church" and find all of the websites that provide links to churches and community resources in your city. Ask the webmasters for a link to your church. Real Estate websites often have church directories.

Advertising

The final and fastest way to get links is advertising. Participation in free advertising networks work extremely well for certains kinds of websites, but you must agree to placing outbound links on your website, and you don't always have much control on where those links go. Websites with high PageRank will often sell outbound links. This is paid advertising, but it doesn't "look" like advertising to search engine software. These arrangements work best when the links are from websites with content somehow related to your website.

Apostolic web ministries

2005-05-31T10:28:00.000-07:00

My quest to improve my church's web presence began after a discussion with Wendy Scoggins (who is just a little bit odd). She challenged 'net using Christians with the question: Why are we so ineffective on the web? Changes (still in process) and this blog are partially a response to that challenge.

The 90&9 Webzine's answer to this challenge is the e-panel discussion "Where are the Apostolics? On the Dearth of Apostolic Web Ministries". The panelists have good websites from a design standpoint, and most of them are good from an usability and accessibility standpoint. I've enjoyed Bro Moehlenpah's material for several years. Endtime has a first class website from any perspective. Endtime is probably doing more for outreach than any other group (and I write as one who's not a big fan of endtime discussion). 90&9 is wonderful. And I've always admired Paul Polvoni's design work.

I think some of the panelists "get it" -- the interactivity of the web, the communication and relationship building that can occur. 90&9 is the best example of this. The technology they use is simple, but the communication goes both directions. When you write to the editors or writers, chances are fair that you'll actually hear back from them. Endtime is another good example. They're not quite as good at responding to your inquiries, but they present a lot of good, up-to-date information and analysis that is frequently updated. They make good use of presentation technology to enhance the Endtime website, but extra plugins are not absolutely required to view the information on the site.

The panelists who create online church brochures, on the other hand, probably need to read and think a little more. Nobody is interested in an online brochure, no matter how attractive the brochure looks. Kent d Curry hit the nail on the head in his commentary about church websites as a placeholder. Kent writes, "I’ve hit my own church site about thrice in five years and it’s well done, but why would I visit it — I’m a member who can get that information at church. (And why would an outsider visit if they’re not a member?)"

I browsed the portfolios of the professional designers on the panels. They all have very attractive designs but most were difficult to find via search engines. Whether you are focused on inreach or outreach, what's the point of the website if nobody can find you?

Read the articles in the sidebar. There are several things you can control to improve your website and increase traffic. Make the changes that you can. Participate in conversations online. If you are interested in outreach, don't cloister yourself off and stay in Apostolic circles. If inreach is what you're doing, participate in the Apostolic forums. Make yourself known. Answer the questions -- even the hard ones. If you don't have time to answer, be honest and say so.

To be effective in person or online, you must connect, communicate, and participate. Building an attractive online brochure for the world to see is exactly as effective as printing a glossy four-color handout and sticking it on the windshields at the shopping mall. If you develop relationship -- whether face-to-face or online -- that's when you win the right to minister to people .

We're Number One!

2005-05-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

Google's latest update, dubbed "bourbon", occurred last weekend. Some of the changes I've made to my church website over the past couple of weeks have really paid off. For variations of my selected keywords, my church is listed number one or two (out of a field of over 88,000 hits) in searches on Google or Yahoo. This is a huge improvement over the tenth page listing we used to receive. Watch this space for specifics on what I did to improve my church website's search engine results placement.

Google 302 hijacked

2005-05-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

All of the SEO message boards are abuzz with the news that the mighty Google is a victim of 302 redirect hijacking. As of Tuesday night (May 24), searching for "adsense" still gives the hijacker -- all-in-one-business.com -- the top search result.

Seoconsultants.com has a detailed article explaining 302 redirects and pagejacking.

Update: As of 4 p.m. California time, the "all-in-one-business.com" site is gone from the adsense listings, and google.com/adsense is back on top. It appears Google probably hand-tweaked the results here!

Local search and advertising

2005-05-23T07:08:00.000-07:00

Discussion here deals mostly with techniques to drive traffic to your website organically or naturally. Besides raw SEO optimization, however, you also have the option of plain old-fashioned advertising -- paying for those links from websites and search engines to your website.

I've focused for several years now on local content. International news sites such as CNN rank very highly to search engines. If you want the local news, however, you have to read your local newspaper. Many high profile web design professionals have been downplayed the importance of local search for several years, but now that the major search engines have jumped on the bandwagon in providing Local Search results, they're starting to change their minds.

Similarly, Joe Soul looking for a church wants to know where the local churches are. If he searches online, one way you can get his attention is through the use of paid advertising. Google and Yahoo both offer local search options in their online ad programs. These are the "Sponsored Listings" that appear before the normal results whenever you do a search at the various search engines.

These advertising programs are cheaper than you might think, especially if you carefully select the right keywords for your program. People with effective advertising report a much higher return on their investment with online advertising targeted to local searches versus buying a Yellow Pages ad.

Some people report great success in just setting up the program, forgetting about it, then watching the phone calls come in. It's a little more involved than that, but buying ads is an easy and inexpensive way to get people to visit your website.

Advertising & Marketing?

2005-05-14T20:05:00.000-07:00

My own denomination strongly discourages the use of television as a source of entertainment, yet endorses the use of the Internet. Several people believe this view is completely inconsisent. I've never really understood those who claim the Internet is the same as television until I re-read The Cluetrain Manifesto. You see, television is a completely passive medium, whereas the Internet has always been a method of communications for me since I started using it in the late 80s. Cluetrain decries the hijacking of the World Wide Web by the "clueless newbies" who see the web as merely a slow version of television. This is very evident in use of the Web in the corporate and the church world as a method of advertising.

This is relevant in the context of using the web to advertise the church because the church is all about interpersonal relationship and communicaton. "This the church, this is the steeple, open the door and see the way-cool animated graphics and multimedia sound presentations!" Too often we forget about the people. If church websites can be used as an adjunct or a helper for this interpersonal communication, then perhaps THAT is the way of of increasing my church's web presence.

Keyword selection is important

2005-05-12T15:01:00.000-07:00

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.

The purpose of your church website

2005-05-10T14:57:00.000-07:00

I'm on a mission to make my local congregation known to the world through the use of the Web and the Internet. Church websites are generally electronic advertising -- an attractive sign put out in the hopes that somebody cruising by on the Information Superhighway will see the ad and maybe drop in for a visit. Some of the signs are professionally designed billboards. Several are the equivalent of a humble, hand-lettered signboard. Too many are tacky, gaudy flashy signs that are reminiscent of something you'd find on the Strip in Vegas. And almost all of them are completely ineffective.

I've been talking with some people about effective use of the Web and Internet to promote their church. They create (or pay somebody to create) a very attractive website. And, hey, if you search for "[Denomination] [Yourtown]" and come up in the first page of search results, it's all good! Frankly, I'm not that interested in the people who are searching for "Pentecostal Church in Longmont Colorado" -- they already know where to find us. I want to reach the newcomer who just bought a house out in the suburbs who's looking for a good church for his family. I want to reach the single mother who is unraveling from life's stresses who's looking for some help. I want to reach the engineer who is up to his neck in debt and needs to find satisfaction in life from something other than new toys and activities. These people are not going to be looking for a particular denomination or "brand," especially in Colorado where denominal loyalty is very weak.