All Posts Tagged With: "SEO"
Starting a Blog for Evangelism
One of the things we hope to accomplish on Church Growth Consulting is to encourage people to use the Internet to help people with not only their own church growth, but to help encourage church growth all over the world. One of the ways to accomplish this is by starting blogs and websites that will appeal to to not only Christians, but also to pre-Christians. A well chosen topic can provide opportunities to develop online relationships with people from all over the world and then develop opportunities to share the Good News of Jesus Christ. By applying some simple SEO (search engine optimization) strategies and a little bit of time, we can create sites that will be found on the search engines and provide us with a steady stream of new people to reach for the Gospel. As a demonstration of this principle we are starting a site called Political Events. We will be working on this site to get a strong placement on the search engine results and a steady flow of traffic.
To get the site started we purchased a domain name from Good News Domains, (www.politicalevents.org), we took advantage of the free hosting plan (we will deal with the advertising banner across the header as this will allow us to operate the site for the cost of the domain name, which is $10/year), and we installed WordPress.
To give the site some foundation, we added RSS feeds from Political sites and some news sites as well. We also included video feeds about politics and current events. Here is what the site looks like today:
We will be working on the site by adding content and building links. Once the site is established on the search engines we will start developing ways to utilize the site for the Kingdom of God and world wide church growth.
SEO and Web Ministry
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:
- Cape Coral Florida Churches
- Clearwater Florida Churches
- Florida Keys Churches
- Gainesville Florida Churches
- Lakeland Florida Churches
- Ocala Florida Churches
- Fresno California Churches
- Fremont California Churches
- Oceanside California Churches
- Springfield Oregon Churches
- Hillsboro Oregon Churches
- Salem Oregon Churches
- Federal Way Washington Churches
- Flagstaff Arizona Churches
- Glendale Arizona Churches
- Scottsdale Arizona Churches
- Tempe Arizona Churches
- Gilbert Arizona Churches
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.
Church Growth Consulting - 2009 SEO Experiment - Part 2
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.
Church Growth Consulting - 2009 SEO Experiment - Part 1
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.
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