Beginners resources for improving search results

February 17, 2010 in for Churches, Outreach

35% of visitors to my church’s website come from users searching on Google, Yahoo and other search engines. The rest of visitors arrive at the site after typing ‘www.cbtb.org.au’ into their browser, or via links from emails or social media sites. (On a related note, interestingly, 46% of traffic to Communicate Jesus comes from search engines).

How many of your website’s visitors arrive via a web search? My guess is that this figure will be at least 35%.

And 35% is not an insignificant proportion. And these are just the people who were successful in their search!

The good news is, there are some simple things that you can do to make the content of your church website easier to find via search engines. This process is called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Here are some resources to get you started:

I hope these links are helpful in your endeavours to improve search results. There’s not much point having a church website if people can’t find it!

Know of other useful resources? Share them with us via the comments section below.

  • http://www.stefanhaensch.de Stefan Haensch

    Thank’s a lot for your inspiring stuff. To me as a german pastor it’s a privielege to learn from you and to apply great ideas to share the gospel.

  • http://www.switchedonmedia.com.au Andy Jamieson

    Steve,

    Great post. Insightful and useful. I am surprised that it is only 35% of people via natural search. Either this means you have an opportunity to improve your SEO or you have a strong brand and URL awareness. I propose that it might be a mixture of both.

    PS Hope Feb has been a fun time during your new adjustments!

  • Steven Kryger

    Thanks Andy. For some reason your comment got lost in Akismet’s spam filter, but you’re out now! Married life has been great so far – and enjoying being back on the blog too!

    Good reflections on the 35% too. You could be right – 35% via search could have other implications worth reflecting on.

  • http://macintoshhowto.com Wayne

    This post of mine http://macintoshhowto.com/leopard/how-to-merge-pdf-files-with-preview-in-leopard.html tops google if you search for ‘merge pdf macintosh’

    I have doen a limited bit of SEO on the site.
    1. I used the SEO plugin for wordpress with all it’s default settings.
    2. I have heaps of incoming links from a wordpress theme that I wrote that got the sites pagerank up to 5 or 6.
    3. I don’t normally worry about article wording, but when this particular article was getting lots of hits, I re-worded it using the google keyword finder so now you’ll see I use varying language. It originally said ‘here’s how to merge two documents in OSX using preview.’
    I types ‘merge pdf OSX’ into google adwords keyword generator and it gave me heaps of options. I didn’t go for the biggest number of hits’ but words that related to what I was saying.
    ‘document’ became ‘files’, ‘pages’ and ‘documents’
    ‘merge’ became ‘edit, move, merge, combine, combining, together, join, two or more, one’
    I added the word ‘program’

    It now reads:

    Leopard and Snow Leopard have the ability to edit pdf files, move pages around, and even merge pdf documents together. In OS X combining pdf documents is now easy and you don’t need a third party program to do it! Here is how to join two or more pdf files together into one.

    Notice it still reads naturally, it’s probably more informative than my original version too. It’s now number one of a few different combination of searches. So the lesson is when you are writing to use words that other people might use when they are searching for your article, but do it in a natural way.

  • http://www.im3.co.uk/ SEO Sheffield

    oogle estimated this change effects some 32% of searches or so of searches, while Panda may effect 1/2 that number. The biggest question may be what criteria is used to determine what is a timely search subject effected by the new algo and which maintain their ranking for a longer period, some undeserving sites will be effected.  The new local results display for Places pages has been in effect for 6 days, worth checking out if you have no noticed it.