Advertising your address
(From the Hartford Institute)
Now that your web site is designed and ready to go, what will you do with it? Hide it under a bushel? NO! Once your web site is posted, you have to find ways to let its light shine. Just because you built it does not mean folks will flock to your pages. There is nothing more depressing than a site with a counter registering 14 visits in the past 2 years. But there are ways to avoid this. First, don’t put a hit counter on your page! Second, advertise your site.
Purchase a domain name (your web address – like www.firstchurchlittleton.org) that is descriptive of your congregation and easy to remember. Post, print and plaster this web address everywhere. Every piece of the church’s printed material should have the address. Newspaper and yellow page ads should feature it prominently.
It goes without saying but is seldom a guarantee, make sure your clergy and your laity know the site is there. I have asked countless members of congregations if they had a web site only to get a blank stare.
Ask your denomination or network to post a link from their web site. Inquire at the town hall, chamber of commerce, tourist bureau, etc. if they will link to the church’s site. Submit the site to other religious sites, especially those with similar mission foci.
The most important component of advertising your web site is to have an accurate and descriptive title, description, and keywords embedded in the HTML of the web page – its meta text. Search engines are not "intelligent" but rather are mechanical in their analysis of a page or site. The programs "spiders" or "robots" (how they are usually referred to) are sent out to catalog your site - basically count word frequency, read the title, description, metatags or keywords, and examine a few other things, like the title, heading text, hyperlinks, text, and how high up on a page certain words are or how often certain words occur.
These phrases are embedded in the HTML code on each page of the site. To look at the HTML that creates the web pages you see in your browser, Click on the "View" menu on the browser bar, choose "source" and it should open a page that has gibberish all over it and starts with <html> <head>
You should see the meta text – if you have any - looking something like this:
Meta title – Title of the site (and subsequent pages) <TITLE>Hartford Institute for Religion Research</TITLE>
Meta name – Description
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="The Institute's work is guided by a disciplined understanding of the interrelationship between the inner life and resources of American religious institutions and the possibilities and limits placed on those institutions by the social and cultural context into which God has called them.">Meta tags – Keywords
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="religion, sociology of religion, organizations, research, congregational resources, bookshelf, learning communities, press resources, denominations, judicatories, congregations, megachurches, megachurch, new religious movements, parachurch groups, women and religion, church growth, church decline, religion and the family, religion and the web, theological education, pentecostalism, homosexuality and religion, church inventory, statistics, designing church sites, hartford seminary">
A "spider" or "web crawler" visits the URL and captures/saves portions of your page and may follow hyperlinks deeper into your site or follow a link to another site. You can’t guarantee a spider that visits your site will go beyond the home page. In any case it is wisest to have quite a few links to your inner pages from your home page. Plus spiders read and record both text and hyperlink text. Be aware that if your home page has only images -- image links have little text for spiders to record – unless you use ALT tags to identify your images and you should!
Load down your home page with metatags and hyperlinks if possible. For instance, examine the Hartford Institute home page. We have all the navigation links on the left, additional links at the top, text links at the bottom, several ALT tags on our images, and descriptive links in the body of the page totaling roughly 70 links into the site from this one page.
What good are meta and ALT tags?
The more accurate these tags are, the better job a search engine does of categorizing your site. It is equally important that the metatags be descriptive and yet commonly used search terms. Here are a few sites that provide helpful information:
www.Promotion101.com/metatags.shtml
www.wordtracker.com/trial/ 
- This site provides a free trial of a database that stores commonly used search terms. This will allow you to better understand what visitors are searching for when you select your metatags.
Search Engine Guide Wordtracker - Top 500 search terms minus sexual terms
You should try to have your home or index page tags reflect the entire site in the metatags. Then tailor each set of tags in subsequent pages to reflect exactly what is on each internal page. Sometimes this is just a matter of re-sorting the tags from the front page. Consider making the first 5-6 tags on our inner pages reflect the page accurately and then the other 15-20 are identical to the front page. It is especially important if you have pages within the site that are quite unique from the rest. Our section on "charitable choice" is unlike the rest of our site in some ways but is heavily traveled because it is a hot topic at present, so we were careful to make the metatags fit the content of that page.
There are a number of web sites (especially the submission service sites) that will help you generate the HTML code that defines these titles, names and tags. All you have to do is go to the site and answer questions and the site will generate the correct HTML tags. These sites can help:
www.Promotion101.com/metatags.shtml
It is also important to title all your pages and file names accurately and with descriptive phrases. This helps:
- with search engines,
- with returning to bookmarks or favorites, and
- by giving the visitor clues where he or she is in your site.
Once you have the pages containing the title, description and keywords, you are ready to submit your page to the search engines. There are many ways to do this – and most of them are free. There is no consensus on how many engines to submit your site to – some say only the top ones and other say as many as possible.
- You could travel to the top search engines like Alta Vista, Lycos, or Google or metasearch engines or a directory such as Yahoo and About and submit your URL manually – they all have "add a site" or "recommend a site" features. Usually it takes a month or two for the spider to get to visit your site. Of course this will not guarantee that you will be ranked first in the search engine, or that you will stay in the top twenty (the choice locations), especially if the search term is a very popular word, like religion or youth or faith.
- You can also use one of the free services such as www.submit-it.com or www.ineedhits.com/add-it/free/ to submit to numerous sites at once.
- Another way is to pay those and other submission companies to give your submission some priority such as near the top of a list, or ensure the spiders travel throughout your whole site – cost ranges from $50-$500 or more. www.webposition.com
As mentioned above, using good meta text in the title, image and links tags, thinking about your key words, and having these metatags reflect the content of the page all help in your ranking. Also helpful in a high ranking is the number of links into and out of your page. Some engines favor sites with many links pointing at them. They want to have the main pages of a site, like the home page, in their search file rather than minor pages deep in a site. There are other tricks that folks use to get ranked in the top 20 but many are not legitimate and should be discouraged.
- Name of your site- Nearly all of our sites have clear, easy to guess names hartfordinstitute.org louisville-institute.org, alban.org, practicingourfaith.org - research shows that many people try these name links often before going to the search engines.
- Directories- Submit your site to directories of links that fit your content.
- Reciprocal links- Trade links with other sites that are similar to yours. Most sites are happy to do this even if they are competing for hits and traffic with you. Hint: have a short, accurate description of your site written for other sites to use as an annotation to your link – or offer them a graphic, your logo, etc. if that is more appropriate.
- Using your address on everything- Make sure you print your web address on every piece of literature, letter, business card, ad, that you produce.
- ETC – Print ads, post cards, spam email, newsgroup postings, Banner ads, pay for clicks programs, and affiliate programs.
