15 more articles and tools for improving search results

February 25, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

Last week I shared a list of beginners resources for improving search results, as well as 24 tools to assist your search engine optimisation. I’m in the process of playing around with each of these tools, to create a set of recommended tools for church and ministry websites. There are so many tools and resources available (for example check out this post with 136 SEO tools) but many of these aren’t targeted at (or even intelligible to) anyone who hasn’t been doing SEO for more than 10 years.

So, to the novice church website owner who wants to learn more about improving where your church website appears in search engine rankings, here’s 15 articles and tools to check out:

  1. 20 SEO tips for 2010 – this article touches on some more technical concepts but ones that are essential to know a little bit about. It also
  2. 10 questions to evaluate an SEO – a humorous and insightful post that will help you see what is and isn’t measurable.
  3. 9 SEO upgrades you can make right now – from the same author as above, great tips for church websites.
  4. Learn SEO in 30 minutes a day – this article is for the person who is inspired to get carried away with SEO (I don’t have 30 minutes a day to invest in SEO!) but again, lots of useful information and links.
  5. Have a new website? Try these quick and easy SEO tips – a post with very basic advice (but probably advice that many churches haven’t considered!)
  6. MazeCore Monitor – a tool to track website position, rank and uptime. The free account only gives you one website and 5 keywords, but for most churches this would be a good start.
  7. Google’s search-based keyword tool – another tool in Google’s suite of search tools, and integrated with AdWords.
  8. Advanced Web Ranking – this is software for multiple platforms that’s free for 30-days, and $99 to purchase. I’ve been playing around with this quite a bit and it’s looking very useful.
  9. Copyblogger – a series of posts on writing effective copy for search engines to find and rank your content. Just don’t forget that your primary audience is the people visiting your site!
  10. Interleado – another tool for managing SEO yourself.
  11. Web SEO Analytics – yet another online suite for analysing and tracking SE!
  12. 5 tips for better keyword research process [sic] – helpful tips for identifying the keywords you want to target.
  13. Keyword research tools showdown – once you’ve read the article above, you might want to check out these tools.
  14. Top 15 free SEO tools – in case you hadn’t seen enough tools already! (Now can you see the need for a summary post on the most useful tools?!)
  15. 5 harsh SEO truths that ministries need to know – a post with simple advice from a great church technology site, ChurchCrunch.

Update

  1. 10 SEO Tips for YouTube (ironically, they haven’t used a search-friendly URL!)

Stay tuned for a summary post of the best articles, advice and tools for search engine optimisation for church websites.

  • Cam

    I see a lot of Sydney churches that just need help to get more usable websites, with clean code (less errors) and a sitemap. A lot seemed bound to WordPress/Joomla sites and the plugins that are available. Fixing url structures, naming conventions, footer links, meta tags etc. will be a challenge, unless of course they find ‘another’ plugin.

  • Steven Kryger

    Good observation, Cam. I think you’re right – lots of churches are using big name content management systems, and most of these have great tools for search engine optimisations. Plugging these in and getting to know how to use them would be a good step forward.

  • Cam

    I actually meant that they are limited by their CMS and the plugins availalble/themes.

    It would good to see how you can raise a church website up in the search results of a specific keyword by using some of the tools you have listed.