Whether your developing a new website or upgrading an existing one, there are some SEO tips that not everybody  incorporates into their plan. However, they happen to be surprisingly effective in getting your website to the coveted top spot!

Research Your Competitions Winning Keyword Phrases

After identifying the best keywords to focus on for your website, make sure you look at your competitors websites. Look at the on-site and offsite aspects of what you believe is their to help their SEO initiatives. You will start to see links and text on their site that stand out because most likely it’s intentionally there to boost their search ranking. Research what you can do to beat them in organic search for those same phrases.

What Else Is Your Competition Doing?

If the goal is to get the competitors traffic coming to your site, then it is imperative that you understand why Google ranks them where they do. After coming up with a list of keywords that your direct competitors are using, you can also check if they have higher domain recognition than you, and if their web pages have more page authorities or back links than you do. There are free online tools that make it easy to gather this information, such as installing a free Moz toolbar or SEM Rush’s free addition.

Determine How Your Website is Different From Competitors

After checking what your competitors have to offer, the next thing you need to do is to determine how you can improve the calls to action of your own website. How can you make it better than your competitor’s site?

Take note of things that you can do to make your site better and more appealing to your customers. If your competition doesn’t have a useful blog, than that would be a good place to start. Blogs are a source of more pages and rich high quality information that Google recognizes and awards ranking for.

There are several free tools that will help organize all of the important aspects of the competition that are earning them their rank. One that is often used is SeoBook. also, Microsoft has a new free download tool named Web SEO Toolkit

What are you doing to learn from your competitors and improve your website and SEO?

Jonathan Keener

www.ourchurch.com/

The post New SEO Strategies That Will Get More Traffic coming to You! appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

It is true that part of the overall marketing strategy via social channels is brand awareness, but you should still be able to come up with a way to track your overall ROI when it comes to any of your marketing efforts.

Focus on one Post

Connecting all of your accounts together so that you don’t have to go to each one and put the same post in is basically just filling up the social sphere with content. Start with 1 post on Facebook and create an offer that will get people to respond. That could be a free trial, product or service for your followers. This does two things. First, it gets people interested in the offer and their followers may see it. Second, you can see exactly how many people engaged and divide that into the time spend putting up the post.

Different Posts for Different Outlets

People that spend the majority of the day on Twitter don’t have the same interests necessarily as people that are on Facebook. Before you post on Twitter, understand will make people want to re-tweet the post to the rest of the world. This usually differs between audiences.

Show Passion

When you educated and passionate about a topic, is much easier to write about it and the content is becomes much more genuine.

Ultimately with the mobile tools available these days, it doesn’t take much to get a post out.

How are you managing and tracking the impact of your social media?

Jonathan Keener

www.ourchurch.com/

The post Managing Your Social Media Initiatives appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Make it Personal

When  thinking of your target audience, we need to understand why they are on Facebook in the first place. Typically, it has nothing to do with business and everything to do with personal communication on a personal level. So although you are there to talk about certain aspects of your business, people that follow you want to know more about you and what kind of things you experience that they can relate to in their own lives. If you ever run into “social media writers block”, always remember, everyone loves fun posts that include dogs, cats or babies!

Try and Get Shares

If your posts are good enough, people will want to share your content, that means, free marketing! Even the biggest companies spend countless hours trying to figure out how to get you to share their posts, the reason being is, they know that people are more likely to show interest in a product or service when it is suggested by someone they know or trust.

Make it Eye Catching

In today’s fast paced digital landscape, our human minds have a very short attention span. When scrolling through multiple messages while searching for something engaging, the average person decides whether or not to click on your link in less than 2 seconds before moving on. This however will change over time after you build up an audience that trusts your posting skills and will soon click on everything you post because they know they’re sure to read something useful or entertaining.

Shorter is Better

Studies have indicated that engagement increased as posts got shorter. The highest activity came from posts that were from 0 to 70 characters in length. This is a good opportunity to use nothing more than a picture or a YouTube video where people have to click through to your webpage to view the actual post.

Be Consistent

According to to data from AgoraPulse who track social trends, the highest engaging posts all had these four characteristics in common:

• They target an audience with a strong passion
• They publish good content focused on their target audience
• They publish consistently (at least once a day)
• They get a lot of shares

Don’t Try Too Hard

With all these things in mind, remember, just be yourself and the followers will come. Start out by making sure your friends and family become fans of your page to give you a small foundation build off of. Don’t be afraid to learn from your mistakes. If five of your posts receive no interaction and one does, that one post should give you an idea as to how to format your posts going forward.

Don’t forget to invite us at OurChurch to follow your page, we will be sure to help you along…

Happy Posting!

Jonathan Keener

www.ourchurch.com/

The post Quality Marketing With Facebook appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Video is now within the reach of anyone who has a website. We live in a culture where video is the most passive form of consumption. We like to press a button and then absorb what we’re getting. This all should tell you that maybe it’s high time to make a video. Another reason to make videos is the opportunity to step out of a webpage and gain trust with your target audience. Its obvious people feel comfortable toward social media. The only difference from mainstream advertising, promotions and social media are the personal attributes social media delivers. It builds trust and lets people get to know you on a more personal level.

Content

When making a video, don’t get too hung up on the content. It can be as simple as introducing yourself, your position and maybe some other people who might want to say hi! Or you could go as far as doing a virtual tour of your location.

The ability to be “you” is crucial. Trying to act a part will not come off as natural and could run the risk of looking completely fake and wont accomplish what video can do for your business.

“Videos are complicated to make, and that makes me nervous”

This is both a valid concern and a common misconception, so let’s go through the steps. Usually there are three main people involved, the person doing the filming, the person in the film, and the person that does the editing. So to find someone to film, simply start asking around to people you may think would have an interest in filming the video. Typically this is someone younger with technical skills, or you could go as far as looking for someone local in craigslist that would be willing to do the recording for a decent price. The editing is the most important part of the completed video. If you don’t know someone who does video editing, there is a great online resource called Fiver (click here). This is a great resource for people who need small technical jobs done with quick turn – around.

Why does Google love video?

Because Google knows that when a person searches a key phrase, a consumer is more likely to click on the video thumbnail result amongst a sea of webpages. If you are able to get your videos indexed in the search results you will reap the benefits of 85% those keyword searches. But throwing a video onto YouTube will not bring traffic to your website, or convert costumers.

Here’s what you need to do: Set up an RSS feed or a Video sitemap. This is a good time to get a hold of your website development team. There is going to be some programming and design work involved, so always it’s best at this point to hand it over to them. The main goal of all of this is to have the video on your webpage so that when someone clicks on it from a search result; they land on your webpage instead of a video platform such as YouTube. Here is Benjamin Wayne who is the pioneer of “Video SEO” and does a great job of explaining its benefits.

WARNING He says the word “fundamental” numerous times, not sure why.

Jonathan Keener

www.ourchurch.com/

The post Creating a Video for Search Results appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

We keep hearing about blogging, social media, content marketing and SEO. Buzz words, smoke in mirrors… yes, especially when you are on the phone with the tenth telemarketer this month telling you that their firm “specializes in placing companies like yours on the 1st page of Google”. We also hear it at the end of the news cast, “follow us”, “like me” “then go to our blog” and “tweet” something. The general population is uneducated as to the benefits of social media and how, or if it works, but never the less, people are talking about it constantly!

Content

Several tactics accepted by Google that used to work, now do not. Google’s goal is to provide the best “search experience”. So, anything that doesn’t show true and genuine content and transparency of the website that is found in their search results, it is either pushed to the back of the line, or removed from the search index all together. How they gauge this is by the quality and relevance of your websites content. A good rule of thumb is to never publish any content over the web that you wouldn’t want your English professor grading you on.

Social Media

The content that you publish can, and should be shared through social media. The more followers you have, the more likes you will get! The goal here is to put your competitive nature aside and try and learn from those who are already the best in your niche. There are already large followings and tight niched groups who share the same interest as you. With that being said, you should start adding these people to your “follow” list. After creating your first blog, start introducing it to the new group that you have begun to create. Slowly, you will start gaining a captive audience.

SEO

How does this help SEO? Great question! Part of Google’s algorithm gauges of popularity of webpages. And since a blog or news item is a webpage, the sharing aspect becomes very important. So when someone with 100k followers shares a blog post and it is then shared and liked by several other users, that post shows up on many different social profiles and the search engines see that.

Closing notes:

The main social profiles to begin focusing on are Google-plus and Facebook. Good blogs that are free are either WordPress or Blogger.

Also, don’t fall victim as so many businesses do trying to build their brand by buying automation software to do the social work. Automation is your enemy and it can make your posts look “non-friendly”.

Remember, people want you to share their content as much as you want them to share yours. So if you are a newbie, be prepared to do a lot of sharing and positive engagements right out of the gate! This will only build visibility and credibility which is critical in the beginning stages.

Jonathan Keener

www.ourchurch.com/

The post Calling All Newbies… Lets get Blogging! appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.

Lets look at some examples. My mother in law has asked us to bring a taco salad to these weekends’ birthday party. I am only responsible for buying the necessary ingredients (she can toss it) and I need those now since this will be my only trip to the store. I go straight to Google and type the term “taco salad” into the search field. The search results populate and display thumbnail images of the taco salads, the rating count with stars, total number of reviews, cooking time and some even show calories. So based on the best and most relevant result, I am quickly able to discern the website I want to click on. What I noticed is that I am only clicking on the listings that have images and only the ones that have images that look appetizing. I also notice that some of them start catchy titles such as “quick”, “easy” or “healthy”, even “quick + easy”

Google accepts these types of snippets from website page content:

• Reviews
• People
• Products
• Businesses and organizations
• Recipes
• Events
• Music

So if we wanted to give detailed data about events on our church schedule, it would look something like this:

It should be noted, Google claims that the additional snippets do not help with rank. However, because we know that sharing, rating and engaging with websites does help ranking, adding this functionality can definitely be beneficial.

So how do I add rich snippets to my website?

Google has very useful tools when it comes to providing a “better search experience” . First we need to determine what markup data Google sees on your site if any. Use the Structured Data Testing Tool. Simply enter your URL and click preview.

The next step is to use the Google Structured Data Markup Helper . This is a great tool to help you identify what content on your website can be used as “rich snippets”. So if a section of your website is dedicated to events, you would choose “events” and enter your events page URL and click “start tagging”. From here you can begin to choose data on the page that you would like Google to consider important markup data. Google will then give the correct html for use on that page. If you have a website with OurChurch.Com using the Ne1 web builder, you can access the HTML code using the Edit HTML icon in the text editor or you can add short bits of HTML code using the Paste HTML Code icon (see screenshot to the right).  Keep in mind; this gets somewhat technical, so it’s always good practice to have a conversation with your websites administrator whenever there is code involved.

If you have any questions fell free to give us a ring!

Jonathan Keener

www.ourchurch.com/

The post Let’s Tell Google About Your Rich Snippets appeared first on Christian Web Trends Blog: Church Websites, Design, SEO.