On Church Growth Consulting we have joined up as part of a web ministry experiment to see how long it takes to get new sites established. This site is one of seven sites involved in the process. We think that if you follow along with the articles you can gain some significant real time insight into what it takes to get your web ministry started to help you with your church growth.
The site we have started and are reporting on is Church Marketing. Of all the sites in the experiment, this one is starting out the slowest. In its first month it hasn’t had any traffic and is not showing up on either Google or Yahoo. We have so far added 3 original articles to the site. Primarily we have been working on getting links to the site. For this site to eventually show up on page 1 of a Google search it will have to have 4000 to 5000 links just to start. We have been pointing some links to the site from here and we have also been building some online community with a few other sites. We are off to a good start with 752 in coming links in the first month. We use the link domain function on Yahoo to determine how many links a site has.
In February we will be working on adding more content to the site and we will be introducing another link building concept. We will start the process of article marketing. What that means is that we will write a unique article about church marketing and we will submit it to various websites and blogs to be published. Each time a site picks up the article it will give us two links back to the site. We will demonstrate the process and then report on the results in future articles on Church Growth Consulting. If you are interested in reading about what is happening to all the sites in the experiment vist the Web Ministry Online site.
Here on Church Growth Consulting we are always working on ways to help people and churches develop and expand their web ministry. There are three big factors in having your websites and blogs do well on the search engines; time, content, and links. We are always experimenting to see how much we can learn about the interactions between these three components and the different search engines. We have an ongoing experiment tight now which involves seven or eight different websites. Besides all that we are also tinkering with the impact of links from the sidebar of a site and directly from articles on the site. It seems that sites that are linked to from articles get a bigger boost than just being linked to from the sidebar. With that in mind we are going to track eightenn sites that we started on our sister site, Church Webmaster. Here is a list of the sites we will be looking at:
A Google search for each of the sites today produced the following results:
The Cape Coral Florida Churches is currently in position twenty-three. It has never been a page one return. The Clearwater Florida Churches site is at position seven. This site has spent most of its time on page two so this is an improvement. The Florida Keys Churches has been at position one for the last three months and enjoys a steady traffic flow. The Gainesville Florida Churches site has just recently moved to page one and is in position eight. The Lakeland Florida Churches is sitting at position twenty-two. The Ocala Florida Churches is in position three and has been there for several months. It also receives a steady traffic flow. The Fresno California Churches has moved in to position three in the last month. The Fremont California Churches site is in position twelve. The Oceanside California Churches site is in position seven. The Springfield Oregon Churches site is in position three. The Hillsboro Oregon Churches site is in position eight. The Salem Oregon Churches is in position eleven. It was a solid page one return but has started to drift backwards. The Federal Way Washington Churches is doing very well at position two. The Flagstaff Arizona Churches site is in position eight. The Glendale Arizona Churches site is in position fifteen. This is after being a page one return for a long time. The Scottsdale Arizona Churches site has really fallen back, moving from page one to page six in position fifty-four. The Tempe Arizona Churches site is holding on ot position eight. The Gilbert Arizona Churches site has moved back to position 14 from a solid page one return.
We will continue to track the progress of these sites on Church Growth COnsulting as we point some article links at each of them over the next couple of weeks and we will check back in on the progress of the sites then.
In this article we will continue to record the progress of the web ministry experiment we are participating in here on Church Growth Consulting. Our task in the web ministry experiment is to develop and record the progress of a site called Church Marketing. We have the site up and running and indexed by Google. We have added a tracking software so that we can track any traffic that might come to the site to see if there is any keyword search that works that we might not be aware of.
We did our first Google search for “Church Marketing” since the site was indexed and we found the new site. Check it out:
The site is showing up in position 195 on page 20. We have a lot to do to get the site to move up to page 1. This initial position doesn’t mean much. The site could easily disappear from the search engines at any time while it is this new. That particular phenomenon is called sand boxing and it often happens to new sites. We will have to watch and see what happens.
We will now start working on the things that we can do to help the site with the search engines. We will add content (informative articles about church marketing), and we will start developing links. To be competitive with this keyword we will have to develop 3000-4000 links for the site. This will take a considerable amount of work over a significant amount of time
In future articles we will begin to chronicle our link building efforts. For now, we are going to work on writing five good articles for the site over the next week or two. We will be using the Google search engine as our main barometer for how well the site is doing. While it would be a good thing to get the site showing up on Yahoo and MSN, they don’t produce nearly as much traffic as a page 1 return on Google.
