Church Growth Consulting » sandbox

Church Growth Consulting – 2009 SEO Experiment – Part 2

stephenlawes — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:18:20 +0000

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.

Working the Directories – Part 1

stephenlawes — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:37:52 +0000

On Church Growth Consulting we are going to start a new series of articles documenting our SEO strategies for developing some more of our Church Directory Sites. We documented the SEO strategies of our first Church Directory Site in a series of articles called “If They Can’t Find You”. In this series we are going to follow the progress of three sites:

The Cape Coral and Orlando sites have been aging since the end of April. The Cape Coral site has had one article written on it. The Orlando Florida site has two articles written. I have been pointing links at the sites for over a month. The Key West site is only a week old, and has two articles written on it. Let’s look at where the sites are on Google searches right now.

The Cape Coral Florida Churches site is currently on page 9 in position 90:

The Orlando Florida Churches is currently on page 27 in position 267

The Key West Florida Churches site is still new and so it is getting a pretty good result, which if you have been reading the articles on this site about SEO you know that it wont last. The site will move backward before it moves forward. Right now it is on page 3 at position 24

I am going to write articles for each site so that they all have at least five articles on them. I will also write periodic updates on this site to point some extra links at the sites. I think it will be interesting to see how the sites move. The goal is to get each site to return on page 1 of a Google search.

Strategies for SEO

stephenlawes — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:09:26 +0000

At Church Growth Consulting we have often discussed the importance of getting your sites noticed as a result of search engine searches. This will allow us to have an impact around the world with our web ministries. One of our test sites was a church directory we started and discussed in a series of articles called “If They Can’t Find You”. That site is now getting page 1 returns in position 2 and 3. Our SEO was effective and worked. In developing that site, we would also like some of the individual pages to show up on the results as well. Of the four pages we would like to see return high, 3 of them return page 1 results. The fourth page, “Key West Florida Churches”, has a lot of competition and doesn’t seem to want to move off of page 6.

So we employed another strategy for that one page. We started a site called “Key West Florida Churches“. We purchased the domain name for $9.69 for a year. We are taking advantage of free web hosting from Good News Domains. We will apply the same SEO techniques to this site as we did to our first test site. We are currently getting a page 3 position 25 result.

The site initially showed up on page 2 at position 14, but it started to slide pretty quickly. If you remember from our initial series of articles, new sites usually disappear from the results for a while. We will begin applying our SEO techniques and see how quickly we can get the site on page 1. If it doesn’t get sandboxed it should be a couple of month process. If it gets sandboxed, it could take six months. We are starting the process and we will report on what happens.