| Tips for church sites - Top - Evangalism Tool |
Page 7 of 8 Being found – online and physically65. The title tag – these are the words contained within <title> and </title> tags – invisible on the text of the page, but visible to search engines. It is essential to use this opportunity fully. You can use up to 90 characters – in the head of your homepage, which should contain the full name of the church, plus town, state and country.It is also essential to include in your page head some invisible coding called a ‘meta description’ (and also ‘meta keyword list’). This ‘meta description’ is often used on a search engine results page as additional site information displayed below the words taken from the ‘title’ tag – so make them enticing and informative. 66. Your church name, street, town, area/state, country and phone number should also appear in unabbreviated form in a small font in the footer of your homepage (or preferably every page). This assists ‘local search’ listing in search engines. Write this information in full, rather than abbreviated. 67. Submit your church site to main search engines and secular directories. Look for the ‘submit URL’ link, and add your homepage to the ‘spidering’ search engines: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AllTheWeb. Also submit to directories – at a minimum to Yahoo.com (the directory, as well as its spidering search engine), zeal.com and dmoz.org, plus all regional/local listings in your country or area, and Christian directories including church listing sites. 68. Make every page of your site a logical entry point to your site. This way, if people find an internal site page via a search engine, they can easily move through the rest of the site from that starting point. Each page should have its own unique title-tag wording, relating to the particular content of that page. (It is a frequent error to use an identical title tag right across a site.) 69. Framed pages– a page design with code which enables one or more blocks of content to be scrolled independently – present problems to being listed in search engines. For this and many other reasons, do not use a framed structure for your site. 70. Ensure the church URL is easy to remember. Take every opportunity to give it a high profile. Print the URL on all business/contact cards, road-side church sign-board, leaflets, church letterheads, press advertising, news releases. 71. Make full use of press releases to local newspapers and radio stations. These should always include your URL. Larger churches can consider publishing regular news using an ‘RSS’ feed. Many news editors monitor RSS feeds. Other websites (for instance, local Christian portals) can also draw down your RSS news into their own pages. 72. Include clear directions for finding the church. Give details of parking, public transport links, and a map. There are free online map services you can link to, which will automatically display your location centrally within a street map, or even show a route from the user’s home to the church. Or have a map professionally drawn. Maybe include a church office phone number on this page that people can call if they get lost. |
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