Here are a few simple tips.
1. This is the MOST important tip of all! Make sure your site offers free relevant content of some sort.
On the internet as a whole people want information they can access for free immediately. Unless they know you personally or are all ready aware of your ministry, your website needs to provide something significant that shows others what you re all about. Provide a free in depth article or two if you are a writer. Consider placing either video, audio or written form of one of your sermons if you are an evangelist. Provide a free download of one of your earlier songs if you are a recording artist. If you are a mission agency, place detailed testimonies of changed lives, include photos.
90 percent of new visitors to this website find their way here by searching through google or yahoo. To be noticed on a search engine like google, your website needs to contain text (words) that accurately describes what your website is all about. Just a 'link' on a link index like ours is not going to drive a lot of people to your site. People type in phrases into a search engine, phrases that indicate that they are looking for specific information . If your site doesn't carry this information, then your website won't show up in their searches, even though your ministry may cover this area and be of help to them.
For example: Our prayer pages, which start at prayer.html draw in hundreds of visitors per week. They come through google and other search engines.They are looking for a place to submit prayer requests and a place to learn more about prayer. You will see when you visit those pages, that they get exactly what they are looking for. Some of the 'keywords' they type into google are: "Prayer Requests" "Intercessory Prayer" "Answered Prayer" "Prodigals". If you are an evangelist, very few people will type in the keyword 'evangelist' as most non-christians don't even know the word. Providing information about gaining freedom in Christ over addictions, broken marriages and diseases will draw more people to your site than merely calling yourself a prophetess or an evangelist, and give a contact email address.
Watch out for 'christianese' if you are trying to draw non-believers to your website in order to present the life changing power of Jesus Christ to them. They won't immediately understand words like 'sin' unless you explain what 'sin' is, for example. We live in an increasingly non-Christian world and the internet reflects this so provide clear definitions in words that someone who never grew up in a church would understand.
A nice flashy, well designed website may look wonderful but if there is no actual text and in depth content on that site, it won't draw a lot of visitors who are not already aware of your ministry.
2. Learn the importance of meta-tags! These are vital. Many flash-orientated websites forget how vitally important these little tags are. They are not visible on your website to a visitor but search engines use them to index your site. Your meta-tags must reflect the true nature of your website as search engines have methods to weed out websites that place fraudulent information in their meta-tags, lowering those websites way down on their search engines.
Going back to the prayer pages listed above. In between the < head > < /head > tags in the source code, you'll see the meta-tags. They look like something like this.
< TITLE > Christian Prayer Warriors, Instruction on Prayer, We Will Pray For Your Requests< /TITLE >
< META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="prayer, requests, rights, quiet, times, warriors, helps, pressing in, power, answered, quotes, bible, biblical, foundations, teaching, instruction, prodigal, pastors, intercession, praying, warriors, submit, God, Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, deliverance, God, Jesus Crhist, Holy Spirit,, submission," >
You'll note the keywords do not have duplicate wording and are separated by commas. Repeating the same word over and over will have many search engines red-flag your site as fraudulent and move you down their ranking systems.
The description needs to be about 20 words or less with no wasted words.
Don't duplicate the meta tags of already established websites as the search engines know the difference and again, will consider your site fraudulent and lower you in the rankings.
Warning: Make sure the meta-tags contain truthful information about what is in your website. Your meta-tags must clearly reflect the website's contents and must not falsely advertise information that is not on the site. Fraudalent metatags will result in your site being placed at the bottom of google rankings. You will also annoy visitors and your hits will go down.
3. Use 'alt tags' to your advantage. Under every graphic on your site, provide an alt within the code that describes why you are using that graphic. These also get picked up by the search engines. For example. If you place your mouse over the graphic of the mountain on this webpage, you'll see a alt saying: :": I Lift My Eyes Web Ministries - Edifying, encouraging and refreshing" Every graphic on your page should have a purpose in being there. Look up 'alt tags' in your search engine to learn more on how to incorporate them into your site. Not only do they draw more visitors they also help those who search the web with low or no vision. Remember that many who surf the net have limited vision and many websites are blocking them from getting information that could help them, simply because they use too many graphics. (To read more about keeping your webpage 'accessible' visit this page
4. After you've done these few tips, submit your site to google , it's the search engine most people use. Once one search engine picks you up, others will pick you up as well.
5. After you've properly prepared your site, ask other ministries to place a link to your site off of their site. Remember to include an 'alt tag' if you give them a banner to use as a link.
Please note: All graphics and articles within this site are copyrighted.
Contact Webmaster for copyright information and to report dead links.
Privacy Notice