Dean Peters, of Heal Your Church Website, has some great things to say about how churches should optimize their websites to be easily found in search engines.
The only thing I might take issue with in his list is his advice to include the church’s name, denomination, city and state in the title tag. In addition to appearing at the top of your browser window, the information you include in the title tag will be the text which shows up as the title of the search engine listing.
Here’s my reasoning for not including the church’s name, etc. in the title tag:
1. If your site is targeted toward believers, then most believers in your local area will probably know how to find your church without using a search engine. Even if they do use a search engine, they will probably already be searching on something like “baptist church topeka kansas,” and would assume that the listings which were returned by the search engine would be for Baptist churches in Topeka, Kansas. A title tag with the church’s name, etc. would therefore be a bit redundant (at least for that particular searcher).
2. If your site is targeted toward unbelievers (and it’s my conviction that church websites should be aimed primarily at those who do not yet know Christ), then I don’t think unbelievers will find the name, denomination, and location of your church to be relevant at all. That’s because most unbelievers today don’t think that Christian churches have anything relevant to say to them.
I would much prefer to see churches develop pages which speak to the felt needs of unbelievers (through relating the stories of real people in the congregation) and then set the title tag to pertain to those felt needs.
For example, if a church were to include the story of one of their members who had suffered from cancer, the title tag for that page might read something like “John Smith Survived Cancer.” That title would tend to draw the attention of an unbeliever suffering from cancer much more than a title which read, “First Baptist Church - Topeka, Kansas.” Hopefully, the unbeliever would then click through to the church’s website, become engrossed in John Smith’s story, and eventually want to meet John Smith because his story is so compelling.
When our churches market their websites, I believe we should start with the presumption that unbelievers are not interested in what we have to offer. Our websites, though, if promoted appropriately, can be used to intrigue the lost enough to lead them to consider the claims of Christ (through witnessing His power in the midst of authentic Christian communtiy - once they are drawn to meet some of our number because of our real stories).
All of that being said, I do believe that Dean’s list, for the most part, has some very important advice for church webmasters to consider. If you haven’t visited Dean’s site in the past, I would strongly encourage you to bookmark it (or subscribe to his RSS feed) and visit often.
I believe that the internet provides today's church with a historic opportunity .... to tell the old, old story of Jesus and His love in ways which could only have been imagined in times past. The objective of this website is to explore the various ways in which today's technology can be used to spread the gospel around the world.
