In an earlier article we had written that we were no longer going to be writing articles about search engine optimization on Church Growth Consulting.  However, we have decided to change that decision to be involved in what promises to be an interesting experiment on search engine optimization.  We are going to be involved in a six site web ministry experiment to help explore some SEO techniques.

Our part in the experiment is to develop a site and record its progress on this site in a series of updates over the course of 2009.  The site we are starting is Church Marketing.  The Church Marketing site will be competing with well established sites in a very competitive keyword.  This keywords receives about 7000 searches a month.  We are going to try and get our new site to show up as a page 1 Google return for Church Marketing and then measure how much of that traffic we are able to capture.

We have started the site with some articles that we duplicated from some of our other sites (We would never duplicate someone else’ content, but we have no problem with using our own.  Duplicate content is not counted by Google and so does not help the site with the search engines.  It doesn’t count against us either, so it is helpful in putting some content on a brand new site).  We have also added some RSS feeds from some of our other sites so that anyone who stumbles accross the site in its early stages will have something useful to read.

The site has already been indexed by Google.  We are going to be doing three things in the near future; we will start adding a series of original articles to the site, we will begin commenting on similar sites and leaving the URL of the new site, we are going to get some links pointed at the site.

We will then bring you regular updates on this site about the progress of our new site.  If you are interested in the scope of the entire experiment you can read aout the scope of the experiment on Web Ministry.