I wrote in the first Studies in SEO article about search results and I used my Christian Book Club blog as an example. To develop the idea a little further I want to talk about what I did with some recent information I got from reviewing the statistics on Christian Book Club. As you develop your own site you will interested to see how many people come to your site and how they get there. I use a program called StatCounter to do this. Recently, I have been getting traffic to the site for a keyword search of “how to start a christian book club”.
I did a search and my site is being returned in the third position on page 1. Google is actually returning an article on my site called “Welcome to the Christian Book Club”.
In order to return a better result for that keyword search (3 isn’t bad, but 1 will be better) I wrote an article called “How to Start a Christian Book Club“. In the article I encourage people seeking to start a Christian Book Club to join up with my site and use it as an interactive component. It is a good fit for where I want that site to go. As with most new articles and sites Google won’t return the article in a search result right away. But it already shows up if you do the Google search with quotes around it. (If you want Google to give you exact matches you put quotes around your keyword search. If you look below you can see I entered “how to start a christian book club”.
Google knows the article exists and should begin to return it on a regular search soon. This is an example of how to make use of keyword searches to bring traffic to your site. For a short time, it is possible that Google will also return this article on Church Growth Consulting as one of the results because we just wrote about the keyword here. Learning how to work with Search Engine Optimization is key in getting your sites noticed.
I wanted to give you an update on the article we wrote on Church Growth Consulting called Ideas for Church Growth. The article showed up on search results for a couple of days and then disappeared. That is not unusual. Google often holds new article and new sites out of the search results for a while. It sort of showed up on a MSN search. Check out what I mean:
MSN returned a result of 14 on page 2, but the result is an article about the article, not the actual article. As with everything on the Internet, this will take a little time. I pointed 2 links from another site at the article today. Now we will wait and watch.
As I am waiting for the Florida Keys Churches site to find it’s way back into the search results I thought I would take on another little experiment in SEO. Part of the process of having people find your site when they search is to find some keywords that people search for and then position your site so that Google returns your site for the search. I am working on having this site get to to the top of the search results for the keyword search “Church Growth Consulting“. As I write this article the site had just started to show up on Page 1, usually in position 10.
Sometimes it goes back to Page 2 but in time it should get on Page 1 and stay there and then climb up to the top spot. This process takes time and work but it can happen. Some keywords will move up quicker than others.
An Example of a Keyword Search
I wrote an article on this site a few hours ago to illustrate the process. The article is called “Ideas for Church Growth“. It is a simple article that lists a few of the church growth ideas we are currently using. I decided on the title of the article because I thought the keyword would complement this site. The idea is that if someone searches on Google for “ideas for church growth”, that article will pop up and they will end up checking out this site. I checked on Google 2 hours after I wrote the article, and it was already on Page 3 at position 23.
I will point a few more links at the article and see how quickly I can get the article on Page 1. What does this mean for your church web site or web ministry? It means that you should spend some time thinking about keywords that will compliment your site so that it will increase traffic to your site. If you are interested in keyword research I encourage you to read “Keywords, Keywords, Keywords” on My Newbie Blog. I will update you in the future on the progress of the “Ideas for Church Growth” article.
