There’s this new thing called Google. People use it to find things like llama collars, deluxe felt squeegies, and churches. Can lost people find your church online? It used to be said, in the business world, that if you weren’t in the yellow pages, you didn’t exist. Now, if you don’t show up in a Google search, you don’t exist.
Believe it or not, the design and structure of your church website has a lot to do with whether or not Google will rank you in a high position in search results. If you want to show up in the top ten (which is as far as most people will search) when someone searches for “churches in anytown, usa” then you need to be optimized for search engines.
If you’re using WordPress for your church’s online presence, you’re already off to a good start. Many premium WordPress themes already have some great SEO tools built in, and then there are SEO plugins available to do the trick.
Whether you are designing your own theme or utilizing a plugin, here’s a quick checklist of SEO essentials:
On Page SEO Factors
- Make sure your title tag is optimized. The title tag is in the head of the document (in WordPress, it’s always in the header.php file). This is one of the most important factors for higher Google rankings. Google considers whatever words are in that tag to be the essential subject matter of the individual web page. There are three important things to remember about the title tag: 1.) It needs to make sense, but be keyword-rich and less than 60 characters, 2.) Every page should have its own unique title tag, and 3.) the weight given to each word is divided by the total words, so use only essential words and put the most important ones first. A best practice for church websites is to put “[Church Name] in [Town Name, State]” in your title tag to catch all the people searching for “churches in [your town].”
- Make sure your heading tags are properly ordered. I need to clarify. By heading tags, I mean the html tags h1, h2, h3, and so on. Many designers make the mistake of thinking heading tags exist solely for styling purposes, but actually, heading tags are intended to show search engines (and humans too) a clear heirarchy of information. So the most important item on the page, the page title, should get the h1 tag, and there should never be more than one h1 tag on any page. The first-level subheadings should use h2 tags, and so on. The only exception to this rule is that on the home page, the logo or actual website title probably needs to have the h1 tag while the rest of the page uses h2′s and so on.
- Check your meta tags. In the head section of every page should be a “meta” tag collection including 8 to 10 meta keywords and a one- or two-sentence meta description. It’s debated whether or not Google uses these, but other smaller search engines do, which can affect page popularity, which in turn affects Google rankings. So it’s a best practice to use these tags just in case, but be very careful not to be guilty of “keyword stuffing,” in which you bombard the search engine with every conceivable keyword. Google doesn’t like this.
- Use good keywords in your content, especially near the beginning. And it’s also a good idea to have some of those keywords and key phrases referencing other links, especially related content within your site. Why? Because this signifies that your content is an authoritative source of information about the subject matter.
- Optimize your images with the alt= and title= tags. The title= tag is used by browsers as kind of a generic tooltip or mouseover description when someone mouses over an image. The alt= tag is officially used as text that shows up if the image can’t load for some reason, but Google and other search engines also use it to identify the content of the image. This further adds to the authoritative value of your page, but it also has a tendency to draw visitors from web image searches as well.
- Use descriptive titles of your generic site links. Having an “About Us” page is pretty standard, but when you make it a link, give it a title= that is a bit more descriptive. So in the actual link in your code, add title=”About [Church Name]” and in a link called “Location” add something like title=”Find [Church Name] in [Anytown]“.
- Be stingy with your link juice. People will debate this point a bit. On my blog I’m more liberal with links, but on a church website, a best practice is to add rel=”nofollow” to any off-site link so that Google doesn’t give too much weight to non-essential links. Also add rel=”nofollow” to secondary links to a single resource, such as if you have a “Contact” link at the top, add rel=”nofollow” to any other “Contact” links on the same page.
- Use smart, pretty url’s. Again, this one is debatable. I know some very high-ranking pages that use things like /?p=2102 or something even more complex, but having actual, human words in your url certainly can’t hurt, and it gives people an instant and more memorable way to identify your page.
- Think local and make it obvious where you are. Multi-campus churches will have to be a bit more creative, but the average church needs to be ultra-clear about its location, and I recommend placing your physical address and phone number on every single page, even if it’s in small print in the footer. There’s a practical reason for this. I’ve visited plenty of church sites with a slight frustration that I couldn’t tell which one of thousands of “Grace” or “First” Churches I was visiting.
Checklists are useful, and keywords can be powerful, but don’t forget that it’s always more important to be human and natural. Optimizing your church website for search engines can get you found, but once you’re found, you want to communicate in a genuinely connecting way.
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In part 2, I’ll talk about off-page SEO factors for church websites (so you might want to subscribe).
