Lesson #1. Magnetic Titles - When your objective is to get found by people looking for your kind of site – church, ministry, store, you have to consider the title of your site. I know there are a lot of ministries out there that use the name of the ministry and the motto or vision statement as their title. This is nice, but it doesn’t help people find you when they’re doing a Google search. Let’s say your site’s name is First Congregational Church, and your motto is a place to find a friend. I just made that up, so don’t go looking for such a place.
This page title is fine if you only want the members of the church to find your site. Most churches, however, I would imagine want to attract new people to their site, and eventually their church.
If I’m new to the area, and I’m looking for a church, I’m going to go to Google and put the following phrase in the search box: Christian church in (insert the name of your city here). One of the main things that Google looks for is titles of web pages. In our example, the only word that is associated with the search term is “church.” First Congregational Church may be in the list of search results, but most likely on page 17.
Your goal is to be among the websites listed on the first page, number one if possible. To do this, there are many strategies you can implement, and I will discuss some of the in later posts, but if you want to get into the Google game, you have to play by the Google rules. So this is what you need to do:
1. Determine what you offer to people looking for a church or ministry or store. Let’s say that in our example, the First Congregational Church offers a Seniors, Young Adult and Youth and children’s ministries in the Inland Empire of California.
2. Change the title of your primary web page to reflect this. It should read like this:
A Family Ministry in the Inland Empire. It’s a bit long, but as long as it’s under 63 characters, you’re OK.
Well what about the motto, Sam?
I’m glad you asked. Put the motto somewhere in the page, but keep it out of the title. It will only confuse the search engine.
Again, there are other strategies to implement to really make your web page optimized for the search engines, but if you do this one minor change, you’re going to rank higher when people go searching for a site like yours.
What do you think ?
Thanks,
Sam