Harvest Media

Promoting Your Church Website

What good is an expensive website if no one ever visits it? You've invested your time and money to create a successful communication tool, and now it's time to use it and promote it in every way you can.

Stay on Top of Updates

Designate a webmaster for your ministry. Websites are a team effort, but every team needs a leader. If you have not done so already, designate one person who will be the contact for all things related to the website. The webmaster can delegate control over certain portions of the site to other members (the youth staff would have responsibility over the youth section for example), but ultimately the webmaster will be the one to whom everyone can come with web-related issues.

Use the features of your site as much as possible. Post your latest sermons, news, and photos of your special events! Assuming that your site has a calendar module, use it as the master calendar for your ministry. Users will be encouraged to return frequently if you regularly publish up-to-date content.

Plan a space into the layout of your home page that is used only to promote your next major event. Most likely your CMS will be built so that these special announcements will remove themselves automatically after the event date has passed.

Drive traffic to your site by publishing your web address everywhere you can. Include it on your church brochures, bulletins, business cards, and other printed material. Add a signature containing your church web address and telephone number to all of your e-mail messages if you haven't done so already. Include your web address on your recorded voice mail messages and encourage your secretary to promote it to those who call. And, of course, point your congregation to your site whenever possible.

In addition to frequent smaller updates, schedule 2 to 4 times a year when you evaluate your site as a whole. Ask yourself and your staff a few key questions at these meetings, for example: What feedback have you gotten since the last meeting? What areas of the site can be improved? What additional features can or should be added to make the site more user-friendly?

Search Engine Ranking & Submittal

One of the primary ways that online visitors will find your site is through the use of search engines. Don't underestimate their influence; during usability studies, 88% of web users went to a search engine first to accomplish a task.

The top contenders in this arena are Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Search engines use small automated computer programs (called "bots" or "spyders" for short) that crawl through the entire web and catalog information for each site they come across. High traffic sites can have bots crawling them and indexing results several times a day!

When a user searches the web for key words that pertain to your ministry (for example "church", "baptist" and "St. Louis"), ideally you want your church web site to appear as high as possible in the list of results. The process of improving your position in the list of search results is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and it has become an industry unto itself.

Some of the criteria that Search Engines use to determine how high your site should rank in the list are the following:

  • How long your domain has existed
  • How much content is available for their bots to read
  • How many websites link to your website and how popular they are
  • How clearly your navigation is organized
  • How well your pages are built
  • How relevant your content is to your users

With these criteria in mind, let's look at a few tips that will help search engines understand your site and increase its page ranking over time.

Submit your site manually to the major search engines. Each search engine will have a link somewhere where you can manually enter your URL (web address for your site) and request that your site be cataloged. They will catalog your site eventually without your submittal, but it is also advantageous to submit your site manually.

Build your site using web standards. The heart of web standards is to make your site accessible to as many users as possible by following certain best practices. Though this can be somewhat of a complex topic for the non-technical, one of those practices is to separate your content from your design by using CSS based layout. To learn more about what web standards are, we encourage you to watch the video at this link. If you are working with an outside vendor to produce your site, explain to them that web standards are important to you and that you would like to avoid using tables for your site's layout.

Paul Boag has produced an excellent presentation on the business benefits of web standards, you can view it here.

Make sure your site's content contains words that visitors would use when searching for your site. For example if you are a Baptist Church in St. Louis, try to include the words "Church", "Baptist", and "St. Louis" somewhere in your content. Limit the number of different keywords you include. If you try to include too many, you might as well include none at all. The ratio of how many keywords are in your content compared to the total amount of words is known as Keyword Density. An appropriate goal for your sites content is a keyword density of 5%. So for every 100 words of content, 5 of them would be keywords. This may seem obvious, but don't expect your site to show up in search results for key words that are nowhere to be found in your content.

To ensure that every page has something for the bots to read try to have at least 50 words of content per page.

Include unique, thorough titles and descriptions on every page of your site. The page title is the text displayed in the very top of your browser window. Instead of titling your home page "Welcome to Calvary Baptist Church" consider using "Calvary Baptist Church, Bringing the Gospel to Ourtown, USA." The more thorough each page's title is and the more keywords it contains, the better search engine bots can understand and catalog it. Page descriptions are similar to titles but are invisible to the site visitor without viewing the source code of the page; however, they are visible to bots and can be helpful in that regard. Make sure your CMS has the ability to enter descriptions for each page.

Keep the page content consistent with the URL (web address) and page title. Bots evaluate the text within your page to see how closely it matches the title, URL, headings and keywords you are focusing on. The more they recognize similar phrases and terms in all three, the higher they will prioritize your content. In other words, don't have a page with a title "hamburgers" and talk about "hot dogs." This may seem obvious, but occasionally a page's content will change and the title and URL is never updated.

Refrain from gratuitous use of flash, javascript or image-based text. Because of the limited amount of fonts available on the web, a designer will often create a graphic that displays text as an image in order to improve its visual appeal. Excessive use of this can be a dangerous practice, because bots cannot read images, and therefore have no data to store. If your designer must use text as an image ,be sure that they include a proper alt tag with it or use a CSS image replacement technique. Search engines cannot successfully read flash or javascript at this time so avoid serving up important content with these technologies.

Frequently link to other sites and other pages within your own site. Your outbound links help bots understand your content and to what it is related. Links also help your users learn more about your topic.

Request inbound links whenever possible. The most important factor that will affect your page rank is the number of other sites that link to yours. The more bots see your site URL appearing on the web, the more important they think you are. Seek out other sites that will be willing to put a link back to your site from theirs. Here are a few ideas: mission boards, church associations and fellowships, online church directories, community sites and church listings, and church members' personal sites.

In conclusion, be patient and search engine results naturally will come. Search engine optimization takes time, especially for a new domain, and anyone who promises to get your site to the top of Google's list overnight is likely practicing some underhanded techniques that will only hurt your page rank in the long run. After several months of best practices your site will eventually make its way up the list.

Paying for professional SEO is usually not necessary. Become familiar with the process yourself, put to practice what you have learned, and your site ranking will naturally come. If you would like to learn more, there is a great deal of information available online about how to improve your page ranking. Take some time to browse the resources listed at the end of this chapter.

Don't Give Up

The process of developing and maintaining a quality website can be tedious, but do not give up! As you take on the challenge of creating or improving the quality of your online presence, don't forget how very important this task is. Your website is the front-line representation of your ministry on the internet frontier. Your ministry will be well-served by a job well done.

And remember, the job of webmaster is never over. The burden and benefit of your website is that it will always be growing, changing, and improving. As your ministry expands, so will your site. Use it to God's glory!

Further Reading and SEO Resources