Website Promotion

Church branding

The first and simplest method of informing people about your church site is by adjusting the branding. This means that you should include your web address on all pertinent printed materials (church bulletins, flyers, newsletters, etc). It doesn't take much to do, and is a very important first step in making your website known. First time visitors often come away with various pieces of literature (or at least a bulletin), and so will be able to get more information about your church if your website address is plainly listed!

Second, by word of mouth - that is, TELL people about it! If your church makes announcements, mention the site and encourage people to visit it for detailed information during the week (note that this requires that you keep your site up-to-date with appropriate and relevant information). Mention it to people who ask, and ask people to share the address with their friends when appropriate.

And finally, having your site listed appropriately in the various search engines. This topic takes a little more detailed explanation, and so rates it's own section (below) - but note that while this is a good step, it is the least important of the three I mention. I am not saying it's not important, just that it's not AS important as the other two steps (which are more personal and direct). The longer your site exists, the more search engines will eventually find and list it - and if your site is built properly, then it will rise in the appropriate listings and become more easily found. However, unless your site is doing active ministry online separate from the local church ministry (which I do not go into on this site, as this is focused primarily on sites for the local church), then you should worry about this after you've dealt with all of the other, more important issues. That being said, let's move on:

Search engines

People often assume that a search engine will automatically find new websites and add them to their index instantaneously (or very fast), which is not strictly true. While great in theory, in reality if you want a search engine to index and list your site, you will want to submit your sites address to to be indexed/listed. It would take ages to do this manually for all the major search engines, but fortunately there are some automated services that will help you for free. A couple suggested ones are:

• Submit Corner
• Submit Express

Incidentally, note that even when you submit your site's address to a search engine it could still take up to a couple of months before your site is indexed and available for people to find. (See the page on seasonal events for a simple way to minimize this problem.)

If you submit your homepage to the search engines you will find that they will also index other pages from your site as well. While you are able to submit your site many times, you will not want to do this very often (at the most, once every few months), as those who submit too often are often listed poorly, or not listed at all.

Many search engines don't just look at the content of your site, but also check how many other sites link to you. The more sites that link to you the more popular your site is considered to be.

While different search engines work in different ways, there are a few rules that should help you improve your listings:

• Make sure that your site is properly built, preferably with the appropriate META tags. You will also want to be sure that your various pages are linked properly to each other, and that any dynamic or fancy menu systems you have are not causing search engines problems.
• If a site which links to you is itself popular (i.e. lots of other sites link to it) then so much the better. Having links to your website can therefore be very beneficial to you: firstly popular sites are given higher priority in the search results with some engines, making it easier for people to find your site; secondly it means that there are that many more places (websites) that will lead people to your site.
• Make sure that your content is changes periodically, but not drastically. This means that while any date-specific content (such as calendar and schedules) should be kept up-to-date, you should not change the whole design of your site every few months. That would confuse not only the search engines, but also the people who use and visit your website.