Can UK Churches Optimise my Site for Google?

First, it’s worth saying that UK Churches is not a Search Engine Optimisation company. This is a separate field all of its own and entire companies exist that specialise in doing this specifically.  However, we do build your site to the latest code standards using valid xhtml/css markup. This makes it easier for search engines to read and index your site. We make your site in such a way that it is ’search engine friendly’. Often, this will be enough for Google to simply index your site and include you in it’s results for relevant search terms – most often the name of your church.

I’m not appearing in Google when I type in my organisation’s name. What Can I do about it?

Although no-one except Google knows exactly how their indexing works, there are some fairly well established methods that result in better ranking in Google. Here are a few things you can do to help your site rise up the ranks in Google (since Google has the biggest share of the search engine market, we will concentrate exclusively on it)

• Ask any organisations you are affiliated with to link their websites to yours. Arguably the most important factor in determining your site’s ranking in Google is how other sites on the Internet link to yours. Essentially, the thinking goes that if similar organisations with well established websites are linking to you, then your site must have something of value to offer visitors.
• List your site in directory sites that offer useful links to organisations within a particular sector.
• Ensure that your site’s content is frequently updated with useful content. This is pretty much the only other thing you can do yourself to help your site’s ranking in Google. Your blog is an essential part of how this happens. Write new articles on a frequent basis and post relevant content. Google loves large sites with lots of content – content that contains lots of keywords relevant to your organisation’s sector. Content is useful to people, so Google will rank you higher for particular search terms if you have lots of useful content.
• If you have an existing domain name that’s been around for a while, keep it! Domains that have been around on the internet for a long time do better than new ones. Don’t change your domain name unless it’s absolutely necessary.

What about Keywords, Meta Descriptions and stuff?

Google actually ignores keywords in the head of your pages, so we don’t really bother with these. There are a few other search engines that still use them, but on the whole these are not considered important any more.

Meta descriptions are still used by Google sometimes to display a summary of your site on Google’s results pages. It’s worth sending us a description of your site to include in your site. This should be around 20-30 words in length and shouldn’t exceed 255 characters.