how search engines work : workshop session at ministry 2.0 technology conference

• search engines go out and crawl the visibly accessible web. things that are not intentionally blocked by passwords or 'don not crawl' commands
• search engines read text, imagine a blind person reading. can't view images.
• they hold cache's or copies of the text.
• clicking 'cached' on search results gives clue why a particular page showed up so high.
• results circulate around relevant and popularity
  • relevance is about the amount of content
  • popularity is about the traffic & linked too the most
• if you put out a brand new site it might take 3 months to make it to the top of search engine because of popularity. need to get found.
• identify the landing pages of your site that you want people to find
  • optimize a 'new to…' page for new visitors
  • don't have to drive people just to your homepage
  • drive traffic for singles ministry. think search for 'franklin singles'
  • what are the most seeker oriented activities? what are the draws? the entry point
  • cor, uses a lot of paid search around Christmas & Easter
  • optimizing your code, get up on w3 standards. the better your code is or standards impliant the better you will show up.
• brainstorm search terms
  • the obvious are the 'church' hits the folks who are church shopping
  • wordtracker paid service, will give you some info on word searches to help optimize
  • how many key words do you want to manage for
  • using analytics can give you an idea of what people are searching for
• title tags
  • the things that show up at the top of the browser is the first thing crawlers see, optimize that to the key words you need
  • for every page you have you want to optimize that tag
• meta tags
  • used to be the way, but is moving away from that depending the search engine. google doesn't put much stock in it
  • the description tag puts in the blurb in the search engine results. its text the search engine will see but it is not something you see on the site. say something interesting to get people to click on it
• body text
  • the number of times a particular word shows up 'density' gives more optimization
  • want to do that without sounding non-sensical
  • tricks to use white text or microscopic text that is not visible will get you banned
• link building
  • popularity comes with traffic and inbound links
  • google webmasters tool
  • blogs are great for inbound links
  • press releases and stories in online newspapers
  • link:"site name" will give list of
  • the language of the incoming link matters
• advanced lp's (landing page)
  • using special landing pages with large use of keywords, then point people off to things they want to see.
  • use this for the long tail
• paid search
  • google adwords, pay for the click. mailings we have no clue the results of return, they say about 1%. on adwords you have very targeted audience
  • facebook, has so much data based on the people profiles, demographics, activity and can be targeted to those folks
  • roi, return on investment can exponentially pay for itself if someone shows up and stays
• local search
  • claim your business, free
  • plug in with that
  • can put in videos that are on youtube
• any time you have the opportunity to put out text that you can control you need to do that.
• directories / tools
  • submit your site if it is happens to not be there
  • google web master tool is important to have in use
  • analytics, google analytics is free, you can really get in and understand what is going on on your site

chuck russell is leadership development director at church of the resurrection in leawood kansas outside kansas city (that was for you chuck)

view photos of the ministry 2.0 conference