I can’t claim credit for this, but I should share this with you.
A timely chat with a friendly Christian worker (and former employee of a leading Search engine company) yielded these suggestions for ways that Christian Organisations can use their real world networks, to yield on-line results.
The two big pillars of SEO ranking it seems to me are relevancy and authority.
To improve your ranking should mean understanding you audience and some hard legwork and cajoling.
Relevancy
You, the site manager can make sure the site has relevancy (by making sure you title, head and link you pages in a way that people will find helpful), but what can you do about authority?
Authority
Authority is about credibility and popularity, and links from other relevant sites.
Using your networks
- Churches have a fair number of hits
- 30 links from good sized churches/organisations is valuable traffic
- Churches and other Christian orgs are relevant to your work (Mission Bible, Christain etc).
- They will be happy to link to you.
- The more relevant links to you, the better your credibility, and the better you will rank.
So…
- Work out who you would like to link to you
- Identify the key pages and keywords you want to boost on your site (for us that’s “long term mission opportunities” and our “short-term serve Asia programme“)
- Get churches and other Christian groups to link to the specific pages in your site (not just your homepage, for you it might be courses?)
- Make sure they include the keywords in the link (see my suggestion below)
- If possible, get them to link from their home page (high popularity), or a page that is applicable to you ministry (good relevancy -the surrounding words on that page are taken into account).
What does it look like:
Asking people to replace links like this:
with:
If that helps, please let me know.