Tag Archive - Google

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.

Brainstorming with Google Sets

January 8, 2010 in for Churches, Pastors

Google Sets creates sets (lists) of related items based on a just a couple of items. It’s a useful tool when you are brainstorming for coming up with related ideas. For example, I’ve been brainstorming ideas for promoting my church’s Easter services this year. I typed in a couple of words, in this case – death, disease and loneliness (this will make more sense in an upcoming post!):

And Google Sets came up with the following additional items:

Sure, some of the suggestions weren’t quite what I was looking for, but it was a helpful first step for the brainstorming process. Go on, give it a try!

Can you think of any other ministry applications for Google Sets?

Save time and can email responses

December 17, 2009 in Christian Living, for Churches, Pastors

Are there some email responses that you send quite regularly? Perhaps you are replying to the same questions over and over again, for example:

  • What are the service times for your church?
  • What are the bank details to give to the church?
  • Can you add me to the list to receive the weekly email newsletter?
  • I’d like to join the church – how do I do this?
  • I want to become a Christian – how do I do this? (wouldn’t it be great if that were a common question!)

If you have ever had the need to write the answer to the same question twice, you might benefit from using Google’s canned responses. Launched in 2008, I only just discovered this handy tool a couple of week’s ago when a friend put me onto it.

Canned responses allows you to save a response to easily re-use it on another occasion. They save you from re-typing the email from scratch. They save you from having to dig around to find the response you gave to the same question three months ago.

Of course, you can adjust any of the response to customise them as you need, and you can add text before, after or in the middle of the canned response, but  simply having the pre-written response on-hand can be a real time-saver. Other uses of this tool including adding signatures to the bottom of emails, or creating templates for weekly roster reminders, or weekly emails to your Bible study group.

If you use a Mac, but don’t use email, you might like to try out a tool called TextExpander (explained in more detail, along with some other email tips, in ‘8 tips for email liberation‘).

But if you don’t use Gmail, perhaps it’s time you switched – there’s lots of benefits to using this tool to manage your email!

It’s easy to import your email to Google from another web-based email account (e.g. Hotmail), and even if you don’t want to use a Gmail account, you can send and receive your email, using the Gmail interface, by importing your mail settings.

Web apps for ministry – what do you use?

November 11, 2009 in Christian Living, for Churches, Pastors

This Saturday I’ll be presenting two seminars at the Create conference and I’d like to ask for your help. One of the seminars I’m presenting is entitled “I’m not cheap, I’m entrepreneurial”. At it, I’ll be sharing free or cheap tools to assist with ministry. I’ve got lots of ideas for apps that fit into this category (and I’ll be sharing 2-3 per category, plus some surprises!), but I’d like to hear your ideas. Below are some categories and examples – what tools do you use and recommend?

What does Google know about you?

November 10, 2009 in Christian Living, Pastors

Google has released Google Dashboard – a one-stop shop to see most of the data that is associated with your Google account.

It’s just as well Google launched this – I’d forgotten how many Google services I use – 14 in total! Some I use regularly, like Gmail and Google Alerts. Others I haven’t used in years, like my Blogger account, but I haven’t got around to deleting. Now might be the time.

The Sydney Morning Herald and Mashable have also reported on this new service.

It makes me wonder – how many accounts do you and I have out there on the world wide web, for products and services that we haven’t used in a very long time? When you have some time spare, it could be worth your while trawling your email for all those confirmation emails that you receive when you sign-up for a new service, and if you no longer use the service, delete your account. There’s no point keeping an account active that you no longer use.

I’ve done this in bursts at various times – and discovered how difficult it can be to delete some accounts. For example, Mecanbe.com never answers my emails, and Plaxo continued to send emails after I’d deleted my account!

Will your church join LA city council?

November 5, 2009 in for Churches

Most churches and ministry organisations have two core technology tools – email and word processing (I’d add calendars to this list too, but most ministries and people in ministry probably aren’t using online calendars – yet!). Most churches and ministry organisations would use a desktop email client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail), and Microsoft Office for word processing. Not only can these tools be expensive, in need of regular upgrading and specific to particular operating systems, there are some real benefits to using online tools for these tasks.

Last week, technology blogs Mashable and Cnet that the Los Angeles’ city council is about to start using Google Apps. For those unfamiliar, Google Apps is a set of tools provided by Google to assist organisations with communication, collaboration and publishing.

How does it work?

Most churches and ministry organisations will already have their own domain (e.g. www.stanglican.com). You can keep this domain and use Google to manage these common tasks:

  • Email – use Google’s email tool (Gmail) to manage your email. Your email address will remain the same (e.g. steve@stanglican.com), but there are added benefits such as awesome spam filtering, access to email wherever you have internet access, and a dedicated team working behind the scenes, 24/7/365 to make sure your email is always available. Here’s some more tips and benefits to using Gmail.
  • Calendars – use Google’s calendar tool (Google Calendar) to manage your schedule and collaborate with the schedules of others in your team/ministry/church. There are many benefits to not using a paper diary, but one of the most compelling for ministry is collaboration. Google Calendar will allow you to create multiple calendars, see who has what on when, allocate resources, find common meeting times, and publish (where appropriate, of course) particular calendars online for anyone to access. That’s a very brief sell – check out a tour with more of the features.
  • Documents – use Google’s document creation/management tool (Google Docs) to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations. You can import (eg. from Word/Excel/PowerPoint) and export to the same formats (and others) – i.e. you can maintain most of the benefits to using Microsoft Office and open documents others send you. Again, one of the key features is collaboration – Google Docs is a great platform for sharing documents and allowing others to work with you on particular documents, without the issues associated with emailing these around and hoping you’re working on the most current version. And importantly, you don’t need to be connected to the internet to access your documents.

There are other tools and benefits provided by the Google Apps service – all available free for non-profits (i.e. churches and most ministry organisations!) Learn more of the features of Google Apps, or sign-up.

Will your church or ministry organisation join LA city council?

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