Page Properties
Your Domain (URL)
The most difficult part of your web site to change is your URL. If you already have a site, you already have a URL and if your church owns that domain, make the best of it. If you are still in preparation for getting your ministry online, spend some time thinking about your domain name and make it as close to the name of your ministry or church as possible. Most searchers that know about a church, or business, will simply type the name of the business, or church, in the address bar and see if they get lucky. For example - www.ourchurch.org could be the URL of Our Church in Hometown, MN. Domain names must be unique - worldwide - so getting exactly the one you want is getting more difficult every day. You also have the option of picking a .org, .com, .net, or many other top-level domains (TLDs) - try to get a .org TLD, if possible. They were originally designed to help differentiate between commercial sites (.com), non-profit organizations' sites (.org), network sites (.net) and others (educational, governmental, informational, military are some other TLDs).
Your Page <Title>
The page title displayed at the top of the browser is probably the most single important thing you can do to tell people and search engines about what your page contains. It is not actually displayed on your page, but is a property of your page and many people overlook this, even today. The text that displays is contained as part of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that defines the layout and content of your page. Just know, for now, you want each of your pages to have a unique title that relates to the content of that page. Also know the first 70 characters are the most important - make the most of them. Get an idea of how others are using their page titles by looking at the pages of search results you had earlier. People will read the title first and then the excerpt, so having effective titles is very important.
Your Description Meta Tag
Now for the excerpt. This is usually not something that is taken from what is displayed on your page, but, rather from a META tag, which is much like your page title - a property of your page, not part of the displayed content. Having a description that is unique to each page and relevant is also very important. Looking at the search results page will help you understand this - the title may have caught your eye and the description is going to bring you closer to clicking on that link to visit the page. If you are manually editing each page, you should be able to provide the description for each page, just like you provide the title for each page. If you are using a content management system (CMS) or a blogging application, you may have the opportunity to provide those properties when you create entries. Be sure to understand how your site generates both titles and descriptions for each of your pages. And do not just repeat your keywords over and over in your description - you can actually be penalized for keyword cramming and possibly even be blacklisted by the search engines. Your description should be a short executive summary of your page, no more than 200 characters in length.
These 3 things - URL, title and description - are important in being listed as part of search results for the terms you selected. But they are not the only things - each of them only reinforces what is actually displayed on the page. So, if you want one of your pages to be high on the list of results for the terms we identified at the beginning of this article - your church or ministry name, your location, your denomination and the word 'church' or 'churches' - those words need to appear on your page, preferably near the beginning of the page and with some kind of emphasis (bold, italic, larger size).
The most difficult part of your web site to change is your URL. If you already have a site, you already have a URL and if your church owns that domain, make the best of it. If you are still in preparation for getting your ministry online, spend some time thinking about your domain name and make it as close to the name of your ministry or church as possible. Most searchers that know about a church, or business, will simply type the name of the business, or church, in the address bar and see if they get lucky. For example - www.ourchurch.org could be the URL of Our Church in Hometown, MN. Domain names must be unique - worldwide - so getting exactly the one you want is getting more difficult every day. You also have the option of picking a .org, .com, .net, or many other top-level domains (TLDs) - try to get a .org TLD, if possible. They were originally designed to help differentiate between commercial sites (.com), non-profit organizations' sites (.org), network sites (.net) and others (educational, governmental, informational, military are some other TLDs).
Your Page <Title>
The page title displayed at the top of the browser is probably the most single important thing you can do to tell people and search engines about what your page contains. It is not actually displayed on your page, but is a property of your page and many people overlook this, even today. The text that displays is contained as part of the Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) that defines the layout and content of your page. Just know, for now, you want each of your pages to have a unique title that relates to the content of that page. Also know the first 70 characters are the most important - make the most of them. Get an idea of how others are using their page titles by looking at the pages of search results you had earlier. People will read the title first and then the excerpt, so having effective titles is very important.
Your Description Meta Tag
Now for the excerpt. This is usually not something that is taken from what is displayed on your page, but, rather from a META tag, which is much like your page title - a property of your page, not part of the displayed content. Having a description that is unique to each page and relevant is also very important. Looking at the search results page will help you understand this - the title may have caught your eye and the description is going to bring you closer to clicking on that link to visit the page. If you are manually editing each page, you should be able to provide the description for each page, just like you provide the title for each page. If you are using a content management system (CMS) or a blogging application, you may have the opportunity to provide those properties when you create entries. Be sure to understand how your site generates both titles and descriptions for each of your pages. And do not just repeat your keywords over and over in your description - you can actually be penalized for keyword cramming and possibly even be blacklisted by the search engines. Your description should be a short executive summary of your page, no more than 200 characters in length.
These 3 things - URL, title and description - are important in being listed as part of search results for the terms you selected. But they are not the only things - each of them only reinforces what is actually displayed on the page. So, if you want one of your pages to be high on the list of results for the terms we identified at the beginning of this article - your church or ministry name, your location, your denomination and the word 'church' or 'churches' - those words need to appear on your page, preferably near the beginning of the page and with some kind of emphasis (bold, italic, larger size).
Subtitles
