Improving Your Organic Search Results

Not surprisingly, the team at SiteOrganic knows a lot about organic search rankings.  Here are some obscure tips that might just give you the boost you need to achieve page-one status on Google.

Improving your Organic Search Results

If your church or ministry wants to attract increased traffic from search engines, you have many tools at your disposal.  Old wisdom on checking META tags is largely irrelevant nowadays, since it has been replaced by a dizzying array of active and passive methods for boosting your rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).  While many techniques can be tuned for specific search engines, let’s be honest: Google and Bing are the big players.  Focus on these two (especially since Bing now shares results with Yahoo!) and you’ll be in great shape.

Depending on your budget, search engine marketing (e.g. Google AdWords) is normally a very effective--and immediate--way to see your name at the top of the SERP. 

For those with no budget or limited budget, however, here are five things you may be overlooking on your Website:

1. Submit your site to dmoz.org.  It’s a human-powered directory, focused on quality results.  Not only will your listing give you one additional source of inbound links, but inclusion in dmoz is seen quite favorably by Google.  A double-win.

2. Take out your wallet and stay a while! Renew your domain name for a long period of time.  Google prefers to see domains that have been registered for more than a year, since it suggests longevity and legitimacy.

3. Go back to school. Do you know any school webmasters?  What about someone at a governmental agency? If so, have them link to your site.  An inbound link from a domain ending in *.edu or *.gov carries more weight than other domains.

4. Beware of the worst kind of copycat: yourself. Avoid duplicate content.  If you have multiple Websites with identical content, seek to consolidate.  Google sees duplication as a possible attempt to sandbag search results, and it doesn’t respond favorably.  Before you go and point 2 or more domain names at the same Website, consider your strategy carefully.  For example, if you are concerned about securing the .com, .net., and .org versions of your domain, it might be better for you to buy them but park them instead of having them all point to your home page.

5. Robots are your friends. Check your robots.txt file.  This is a file that should be on your site, to instruct the search crawlers on which parts of your site to check, and which parts to avoid.  For more information on how to set up a simple robots.txt file, see http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html.

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These tips are brought to you by the team at SiteOrganic. SiteOrganic is the only church Website solution that delivers The Organic Blend of smart design, easy tools, helpful service, and effortless integration with the latest technologies. Contact our experts today to find out how we can help you make your Website the most strategic part of your ministry communications portfolio.

The CMA is an Media Association of Churches, Ministries, and TV Networks/Producers, proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ thru Media.

Our Mission is to provide Christian Churches, Ministries, Media Networks with Training, Media Content, Equipment
and Networking, to utilize "Media" to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ and Edify the Saints.
Established 1993

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"Proclaim among the nations what He has done" Psalm 9:11