You’ve heard the saying from the baseball movie a few years ago – “Build it and they will come.” Well, it doesn’t work that way with the internet.
You can put up a beautiful website of your religious community but then see only five to ten visitors per day. If you want more visitors, you have to go to bat and promote your site.
Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to attract new visitors. This means making your website attractive to search engines such as Google.com, Msn.com, and Yahoo.com, which are the three most popular search engines. Thus, when a person searching for a vocation types in the term sisters, Franciscan brothers, priests, religious sisters, and so on, your website will come up high up on the first page of the search results.
“Your post [entries] tops in both search engines – why? Because all search engines love fresh content,” says the popular website Elechub.com. Thus, updating your web pages with news of professions, a newsletter article, or a blog helps.
We at TreeFrogClick have been tracking the visits of a pro-life pregnancy center in the Chicago area since November 2007, when we began optimizing their eight-page website. Optimizing means making it search-engine friendly. We added a new page of client testimonies, as well as a new link menu along the bottom of the page. I won’t get into the technical reasons, but the link menu was a big improvement since it made the non-home pages visible to search engines.
A big step in the project was the addition of an abortion news service to the website on June 26. The news service, provided by our company, provides a news story each week with information about the dangers of abortion and birth control devices, and related information. The news story is designed to contain keywords such as abortion, termination of pregnancy, ultrasound, etc., used by pregnant women seeking abortion services through search engines.
From Nov. 1 to July 31, the number of website visits for this center has increased from 9 to 16 per day – an increase of more than 70%. The rise has been a steady increase.
You don’t have to have a news service. Just update your content every week or so.
While there are a number of important ways to raise your website’s ranking in a search engine, the best way is to provide fresh, relevant content on a regular basis. It takes many months for search engine optimization methods to work, so it’s best to get started soon.
