Hello churchwebmaster and welcome to the forums! I am sure that you will find a lot of help here regarding the marketing of your website on the search engines. SEO is basically the tweaking of your web pages for optimal results in Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.Hi, I'm a mebmaster for my local church. I designed and published my website but dont know how to go about advertising it. Please Help.
I am assuming your site is new and noticed a sub domain for the url. This may cause you problems with indexing in some engines. At this time the site is not indexed in Google. You can submit to Google here http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl manually or you can submit to many engines at once here http://www.submitexpress.com/submit.html
Keyword Content on Page and off
A good place to start with any new website is the keyword content and density on each page. You want to use keyword tools to gauge which industry keywords you would like to target on the engines. Here is a list of some tools http://www.submitexpress.com/bbs/about1114.html. Target 3 to 4 terms for each page and then make the text on that page match up with your Meta description and keywords and title tag.
Title tag and meta tags
Every website has a <head> section in the meta source code to view and display information for search engine meta crawler. Here is where you want to target specific industry keywords and phrases. Make each page <title> unique using your selected keywords, write a unique description for each page using the same words or phrases. Make sure the words are not repeated over and over again. (you will want to research meta data regulations and suggestions more before you attempt this)
Here is your <head>
It could say something like this...<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
<title>St. John The Baptist Church, Glyncorrwg Home Page</title>
</head>
<head>
<title>St. John Baptist Church - Glyncorrwg Baptist Church - Port Talbot UK Church</title>
<meta name="description" content="Glyncorrwg St. John Baptist Church Port Talbot, UK offers church functions, baptist church prayer, st. john baptist and more.">
<meta name="keywords" content="St. john baptist church, glyncorrwg baptist church, uk church, port talbot baptist church."
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb">
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
Build links and wait
Once you get things just how you want them in your <head> section and on your pages you can begin to build relevant inbound links to your site. Quality is much more important than quantity when it comes to links and there are several factors used to judge importance of a link. Start with relevant directory submissions to major directories like DMOZ and Yahoo. Start a link swap campaign. Post on your favorite forum or blog and leave a signature etc. are good ways to build links to a site.
Once a little time passes and the engines have a chance to SEE your content regularly and from many referrers you will get more hits, more visitors and hopefully more members and dontations to your church (if thats what your after).
Hope this helps and gives you some place to start. Keep coming back for information and to share your own SEO experiences and findings!
