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.