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.
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.
We have been writing a series of articles on Church Growth Consulting about the benefits of starting a web ministry. As we continue to make changes to the Church Growth site we are spreading some of the topics to our sister sites, Web Ministry Online and Church Web Master. All of the articles that we have written about web ministry will be staying on this site. You will be able to go and read them at any time by visiting the archives. We will be taking the Web Ministry Category down from the home page in the near future however.
On Web Ministry Online we will continue to write articles about how to start your own web ministries. We are also developing some complete web ministries for sale, which you can view on the Web Ministry Online site.
