If your goal is to be the first site listed whenever someone types in “church + your city” then chances are you should hire a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm to go through your site and build strategies for on-page SEO (keywords and content) and off-page SEO (links and social media). However, there are some simple strategies for beginners that can improve your ranking in the search engines simply by understanding what influences your positioning.
The most important concept is that search engines read text in HTML. (Which means if you have a beautiful flash site, it may be invisible in search if there is no text to read. ) The more words you have relevant to the search term, the higher you come up in search. For example, if your church's name is “Bob's Worship Center” then the more times you say the term “Bob's Worship Center” in your content the more relevant you become to the search term “Bob's Worship Center”.
With that in mind, search engines prioritize beyond simply how many times a search term is used on your site. They prioritize titles of pages with the home page being the most important. So, if your home page is simply titled “Bob's Worship Center – Home” you are missing the opportunity to reach people moving into your neighborhood who may be searching for “church + your city.” A simple fix is to change the title of the home page to “Bob's Worship Center – a church in your city.” (My guess is that you can be more creative than that.) Search engines also care that you have unique titles for the different pages on your website.
Another opportunity is to add keywords in your footer. If your church's address is in the footer of each page, then your city suddenly shows up on your website…a lot. You may choose to add a sentence on other things people may search for where you would like to show up in the rankings.
Page descriptions are another under-utilized item. You have the opportunity in the meta-tag to write the content that comes up in the preview of your page. In HTML, it looks something like this:
When you first make changes, it isn't unusual to get a bump in how high you show up in natural search, and while you may mistakenly attribute that to the brilliance of the changes you've made; more likely, it is because the page was “fresh.” It isn't unusual to check back on that search term in a few months to find you've fallen in the rankings. Search engines are much more interested in recent content than older content, so the “freshness” of your pages actually matters. Structuring your website in a way where new content is added frequently makes a big difference.
Google has some fantastic tools which can read your site and provide feedback on things as detailed as the most used keywords on your site and duplicate titles of pages. Check out http://www.google.com/webmasters/ and begin to explore.
Note: Many thanks to Mark MacDonald at PinPoint Creative Group who inspired me to do my homework on such things! If you do decide to begin improving your web presence his firm is a great place to start.
