At a meeting with new church members I attended, our Pastor asked participants how they first learned of our church. "Google," said a gentleman in the group. He has recently moved to our city and began searching for churches to visit online. His first stop was a search engine. How important is it to find your church easily on a search engine? Consider recent statistics by mediapost.com and survey.com:

• 70% of American adults under age 40 say their primary source for information for products and services is the Internet.
• 90% of Internet users looking for information begin with a search engine.
• 78% of web users will abandon their search if they do not find an answer within the first three pages of search results.

If you think having your church phone number in the phone book is important, then know that having your church represented in major search engines is far more important. Other than ordering pizzas and finding a chiropractor, the phone book is, for all intensive purposes, dead. People must be able to easily find your church online. Here are some helpful suggestions to maximize your search engine exposure:

Quick test. Have you gone to Google and typed in the name of your church recently? How difficult was it to find your church in the results? How specific did you need to get in order to find your site? Most web searchers type 3-4 words in the search window--what words do you think they are typing? Will they find your church? Take a few minutes to click through the major engines and find where your church ranks.

www.google.com
www.yahoo.com
search.msn.com

Submitting your site to search engines. There are many services that submit your site to search engines for a fee. They are all a waste of money. The reality is that the big three engines listed here account for about 95% of all searches online--the top one, Google, for 78% of that 95%--and your site is automatically submitted or "crawled" about once a month (more often for larger and more popular sites).

Crawling is the search engine scanning and indexing the content of your site. Depending on the search engine, your site could be indexed by name, keyword, links, or any number of other criteria. Be sure to include keyword and description meta tags on all of your pages which list as many relevant descriptors of your site as possible. Most site management tools will allow you to enter this information for each page--it is very important to the accessibility of your site through search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is the Holy Grail of web-based marketing, and many companies offer services to improve SEO. Basically, the premise behind SEO is that the content, labeling, keywording and tagging of each web page is optimized to make it attractive to search engines, thereby increasing the amount of traffic to the site from visitors looking for specific information through Google or other engines online.

While a church may not see SEO as a big issue for their website, these techniques can significantly improve the ability of an individual--church member or guest--to find important information on your site. So, some attention to SEO is warranted, even if the volume of traffic to your site is not a concern.

An old trick used to be to stuff the keyword meta tag with thousands of words--the search engines would then assume your site was relevant based on volume of words--if your page had the word "church" listed 5,000 times on your page, for instance, then it followed that it had to be the most important. This simple logic no longer works--search engines have grown much smarter. A maximum of 6 to 8 keywords and a one- or two-sentence description are adequate for each page. These keywords and descriptions should be unique for reach page--don't copy them verbatim from page to page. Too many keywords, and too many repetitions of the same word now, hurt rather than help.

What are people looking for? For the websites I manage, I use Google Analytics to track site visitors and how they arrived at my sites. I put a code tag at the top of each page, which sends information to Google every time it is loaded. These tags give me very detailed information about each visitor--and the service is completely free.

One feature of Google Analytics is a listing of search terms people typed into search engines that led them to my site. I'm always amazed browsing this list at how people find us. You would think that most people type in "First Christian Church" or something similar, and that's true. But they also find us by typing in "Worship Ministry" or "Student Ministry in Binghamton, Wisconsin" or "Dr. John Doe Sermons". Detailed reports like these are helpful in making your site's content more accessible to those in your community and on the web.

Keyword and description meta tags. These two tags can be added to each web page to give the search engines a more precise idea of what is on the page itself as they crawl the site. For keywords, be sure they are unique to not only your site, but the specific page of the site. Use no more than 6-8 keywords per page. A description should be one short sentence describing the content of that particular web page.

Site map file. A site map file is a special XML file located in the root directory of your website, which lists all pages in your site, their overall level of importance within your site, and how often they are updated. Google and other engines can use this file to help them crawl the site more completely. This is especially useful to keep updated if you have added major new sections to your site which have not been crawled yet.

Seasonal Events. Even more important with respect to search engines may be seasonal events. You'll obviously want people to be able to search for "Easter services" or "church Christmas program" and have your site appear in the listing. But if you only add pages for these special events a few weeks prior to the program, the pages will never be indexed by the engines and will not appear in search results.

An easy way to keep these seasonal and special events in the search listings is to create permanent "generic" pages for major holiday and seasonal events. On these pages you may only include generic information like a description or dates, but you can always add details later. The important thing is to have a page live all the time so search engines can index keywords and descriptions for your major annual emphases. That way, when someone goes to Google for "Christmas program in Atlanta," your church's Christmas events web page will pop up in their results window, no matter what season of the year.

Browsers check in, but they don't check out. If a web search engine is so important to your site, you may be tempted to add a "web search" feature to your site--all the major engines encourage this. Of course they would--it brings more traffic to their sites. I recommend against it. Your desire is to bring people to your site and provide compelling content and features while they are there. Instead, consider a Google Custom Search feature for your site instead--another free service, it allows you to set up a way for visitors to search within your website for words and phrases of their choosing.

Forget the Yellow Pages. Here's another tip about web search engines. More and more, people are turning to the internet first for information. The likelihood that someone would look in the Yellow Pages for your church's ad or information is becoming more minute with each passing year. Yet the cost of Yellow Pages advertising is astronomical. I quit advertising in the Yellow Pages altogether in 2004. For one church I ceased Yellow Pages advertising for, the monthly cost had been over $700. Guess what? Not one person even commented that it was gone. It's a much better investment to put that money into the website.

The web and search engines are quickly becoming the defacto information resource for the current generation. Take time to optimize your site to be search engine savvy.

About the Author. Eugene Mason has more than two decades of experience in ministry communications and technologies. More...