ChurchHacks.com

My wife, kids, and I moved to my home state to live near and reconnect with family. Even before the move, we started looking for a church that was similar in beliefs and ministry philosophy to the church we had been involved in for the last several years. Being an Internet-savvy guy (ok, I’m a geek!), I decided to church shop in the comfort of my own home using the vast resources of the World Wide Web. Having spent many years as a full-time web site developer and using the Internet for most of my waking hours, I have an excellent understanding of how it all works and how to quickly and effectively search for what I’m looking for. In fact, I pride myself in being able to locate useless bits of trivia and legitimately useful information at a pace that would put my name in the Guinness Book of World Records.

However, this had me stumped. I spent 4-5 hours over a period of two days trying to find a church for us to attend. My various searches revealed several churches but none of them met our criteria. What was more perplexing than being unable to find a church that would fit us was that the search in itself was so difficult. A simple search for churches in our area didn’t provide us with any useful results. Finally, after throwing my hands in the air in frustration and shaking my fists at the heavens, I discovered a church listed in a small advertisement in our free, weekly newspaper… the most unlikely place to search for a church.

I concluded that either the Internet isn’t set up well for churches to be listed, the web is so populated with junk that it is crowding out legitimate sites relevant to your search, or churches aren’t using the Internet and its capabilities to their advantage. Since there is very little I can do to restructure the entire Internet, I decided to help churches by instructing them on how to use the web and their church web site to help church shoppers to find their church with minimal effort.

If you don’t have a church web site, much of this isn’t going to help you. The first step for you is to make haste and purchase a domain name and get a web site for your church. For those of you who do have a site, get with your resident web geek and consider making some of the following suggestions happen.

Find out about your site

The first thing you need to do is determine how your church and church’s web site is listed on the Internet. Do many searches using every word combination you can think of to find out if it’s possible to find your church using language common people would use. Try to find where your church is listed on directories, search engines, and other sites. For example, using Google, search for link:yoursitename.org. The result will give sites that link to your church web site.

Also, check http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ to see if and how Google and Yahoo are listing your site.

List your church on Google Maps

Google, the veritable backbone of the Internet, allows you to add your local business to their maps service. If your church is not already listed, stick your virtual thumb tack on the Google Map and add your church’s information so people can find you while they’re looking for local businesses in their area. Go to google.com, click on “Business Solutions”, then click “Get Listed on Google Maps.”

Make your site search engine friendly

The search engine rankings game is like deriving a system to win the lottery or beating slot machines. It’s a difficult game to play and you’re rarely successful at it when you’re going up against big businesses and other sites vying for traffic. Fret not, young padawan learner. Here are some methods and practices you can implement that will help people find your site. Before your eyes gloss over, realize that this information will be most useful for your web site team or the aforementioned resident geek.

Use appropriate meta tags
Your meta keywords should be chocked full of juicy, relevant goodness. Keywords are going to help the middle man, the search engine, match up the person behind the keyboard searching for a church and your site. Help the process by using keywords that church shoppers would use during their search. For example, besides using the name of your church, use every combination of names your church is referred to, including acronyms. Include your town, the towns around you, and the nearest big city. When searching for a church, people will not type in the names of every small town in a given area but will look in the bigger cities. Related to that, include your region in the keywords, such as, Northwest Ohio or Southwest Arkansas. Your keywords should also include your denomination, any denominational affiliations, churchy related words such as church and Christian, and any other words that describe your church (contemporary worship, biblical preaching, etc).

The meta description should be a concise description of your church in 250 characters or less. Make it exceptional because many search engines will list this description in the results listing of the search. In many cases, this will be the first chance you have to make an impression so make it good.

Use descriptive content on your home page
Your main page, or home page, of your web site should offer a lengthier description of your church than what the meta description provides. The content mixed with your meta keywords and description will help boost your rank in the search engine listings. If there is continuity among those three items, you’ll have a better chance of getting listed higher when those keywords are used in the search. Also, some search engines use home page content in the results listing instead of or in absence of a meta description.

Ask administrators of other sites to link to your site

Links are the bread and butter of the Internet. Links are what make the Internet operate like a web because you can get from here to anywhere, theoretically, because every site is connected indirectly to each other site through links. Kevin Bacon, anyone? By getting other sites to link to yours, you’re connecting your site to the web’s vast highway of traffic. In fact, search engines use bots to crawl the web to find new and updated pages and web sites and report the results back to the search engine. They go from link to link and site to site and if your web site is connected through a link on someone else’s page, you’ll be automagically added to Google’s and others’ databases. Here are some ideas for appropriate sites that could link to your church web site.

• Personal sites and blogs of people in your church
• Local community web sites
• Your town’s chamber of commerce site
• Localized link directories
• Your area’s newspaper web site
• Christian radio station’s site
• Denominational/affiliation directories

Some of you, myself included, probably ran out to every search engine you could think of the minute you created your first web site to get your site listed. Years ago, that worked. Don’t waste your time. If you’ve done the suggestions listed above, your site will be crawled and cataloged with the popular, most-used search engines and, more importantly, those searching for a church to attend in your area will find your site and have the opportunity to visit your church.

Do you have other suggestions or tricks up your sleeve for publicizing your church via the web? Share them in the comments below.

Tags: Technology, Internet