Background:  First United Methodist Church of Belvidere (FUMC) wishes to become better known in Belvidere and the surrounding Rockford area.  A new church facility was completed in mid-2004 that has allowed the congregation to grow moderately.  However, as is typical of many churches, it is difficult to reach young married couples and those who are unchurched.  The church has many activities during the week.  The vision and mission of the church is to "reach out" to the community and change lives.

While it is not important to be known on a national level, it would be very desirable to improve the church's visibility on a local level.  The church web site has recently been redesigned and has many resources.  While search optimization was considered in writing the content for the pages, a targeted SEO program was not undertaken at that time.  The church is open to online advertising using Google AdWords and Yahoo! Local Search.

Objective:  Improve the churches ranking in Google, Yahoo! Engine, and MSN when visitors to any of those engines type in words like:  church Belvidere, church Rockford, contemporary church Rockford, need Jesus, need help with  . . . , seeking . . . , and so on.  Obtain a top 20 or better ranking for Methodist Church Rockford, Methodist Church Belvidere, and Contemporary Church Rockford. 

A secondary objective is to discover popular phrases which could be used to optimize any of the remaining pages on the site.  Highly targeted keyword phrases could lead to elimination of some pages, and replacement of those pages with a gateway page to the site. 

Evaluation of Current Position:  We see that, although the web site has launched, there are no optimized titles, there are few heading on the pages, descriptions of the pages are incomplete, and keywords have not been placed in the html code.    To confirm the site has no ranking, we run a ranking report.  Click on the image to enlarge.

We determine it is necessary to go through the complete steps of:  1) Identifying Keywords; 2) Keyword Research; 3) Keyword Selection; 4) Updating Titles, Descriptions, Meta-Tags, Keyword Density, and Prominence; 5) Related Phrases; 6) Submission; 7) Rank Monitoring.  These steps are typical of an SEO project.

We Now Begin the Optimization (SEO) Process Step-by-Step

Step 1:  Identifying Keywords

We think carefully about what words people search on to find a church.  We come up with the obvious "church" words.  We also consider emotional keywords - those not necessarily related to church, but related to life's problems which might cause one to seek a church or pastor.

Step 2:  Researching Keywords

We believe that words or combinations of words might be what people actually use to find a church.  We use Wordtracker's database to find words or phrases that are appropriate.   The keywords in Step 1 are called "root words".  We may find that they are used very frequently, and that there are thousands and thousands of web sites that would be listed if we just used those words. 

Keyword selection for the pages being optimizing is dependent on several factors.  We want the KEI to fairly high number, we want the Count to be high number, and we want the competing web pages to be a low number.  These are ideal conditions seldom obtained.  We select our best keywords and keyword phrases remembering what the content of the pages is about.  The keywords and keyword phrases must be relevant to the content of the page.  We can adjust the content on each page.  However, it would be foolish for us to select a keyword such as "devotional" if there are no words or content related to "devotion" or "devotional" on that page.

Based on our research we find that root words like Rockford and Belvidere are frequently searched.  The KEI values for these words is low, and the number of competing sites is high.  We would have great difficulty obtaining a high page ranking based on  these individual words alone.  We do not ignore them, but we see that combinations of words are needed to obtain targeted traffic based on relevant content of the pages. 

In our keyword research of Step 2, we explored the possibility of finding phrases that people frequently search on that have a low number of competing sites. We used the Wordtracker database to find those terms.  We are not directly concerned with words like religion, christian, or methodist.  These types of words are " Root" words.  Instead we think about the reasons why people would search on those basic words. We wish to find words that are derivatives of those words.  We also are interested in the reasons people look for a church.  These reasons might have to do with life problems like divorce, counseling, need for support group, and so on. 

We know we will not be optimizing index.html and default.aspx for these keywords.  Our goal is to use related phrases in optimizing other pages in the site.  Our content for those pages will be specifically written for those niche phrases, and the phrases we select must be related to our web site.  Once we bring traffic to the site, our goal would be to keep them there and ultimately visit the Home page or the Guest page so that they would join us for worship on Sunday. 

To demonstrate this concept we use two root words:  "christian and spiritual".  We find that people are very interested in the Christian Meanings of Names.  We can guess that if they have a Christian name in mind for their child, they might be a candidate to view a Christian web site. Should First United Methodist Church choose to build a web page around this phrase, it would be entirely legitimate and not considered spamming. 

Likewise, the term "spiritual reunion" would be a good phrase if the church was planning a spiritual reunion.

In this manner we have used the power of our Wordtracker database to identify phrases which would drive traffic to www.fumcbelvidere.org.  This is a demonstration of lateral thinking in keyword research.  In the same way, we are able to find related words that will drive traffic to your business.

We choose not to list with Google because Google places a heavy emphasis on back links (links from others to your site).  We also believe Google awards higher ranks to sites when their "crawlers" discover a site on their own.  We decide to let this process happen on Google's schedule, even though we may go back later and add back links. 

We recognize the submissions to DMOZ and Yahoo! directories will take 6 months.  We may never get submitted to either directory, but our chance of being accepted are better than with Yahoo!.  We elect not to spend the $299 for Express listing with Yahoo!

We fill out the submission forms required for each search engine and wait for results.  We decide to set up a monitoring schedule and check search positions in 4 to 6 weeks.

7431 East State Street, #236

Rockford, IL 61108

815.332.8062

vwwanner@nilsem.com

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