5 Ways to Boost Your Church Website Grade

A great free tool to gauge the effectiveness of your church or ministry is Website Grader, from the online marketing geniuses at Hubspot. Website Grader scans your website for ways in which you attract visitors and search engines.

Hubspot's focus is all about getting people to visit your website, and to do so regularly. It does not evaluate the quality of your website's content, just its ability to attract Web traffic (both organically and through search engines).

Here are five ways you can improve your website grade, and attract more visitors to your ministry website.

1. Create a Blog and Post Regularly

The easiest way to make your website more interactive is to start a blog and update it regularly.

Blogs help your website two big ways:

• Your posts give users a reason to visit repeatedly and makes you more accessible.
  It lets you communicate to your site visitors by creating a two-way dialogue.
  
  
• Blogs feed search engines constant updates, which aids your search engine rankings

2. Improve Your Metadata

Metadata works behind the scenes to tell search engines and those using them about your website content.

Metadata is usually broken down into three segments:

• Search descriptions summarize the content on each of your website pages. Just like a synopsis on the back of a book, your search description sells your pages to searchers.
  
  
• Keywords the are words or phrases used most by the people looking for your site on search engines. Choose these keywords carefully to make sure your website comes up at the top of searches.
  
  
• Browser titles explain who your website represents and what each page contains. Browser titles carry a lot of weight with search engines, so strategically placing keywords in them is a great way to boost your search rankings.

iMinistries makes it easy to set metadata site-wide and page-by-page with integrated SEO tabs on each content item.

3. Add Pages

People love information. Search engines love information. The more pages you have on your website, the more information you have. Pretty easy, right?

The easiest ways to fill your website with useful pages is to consistently update your blog and by adding news and events. When search engines scan your website, they still find archived content, so just because news or events may expire, don't delete them.

4. Incorporate Your Social Media

Since website visitors and search engines love new, shiny things (who doesn't), give them constant updates by displaying your Twitter feed, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and any other social media your ministry or church regularly engages.

By promoting your social media outlets on your websites, you'll get more followers, increase your website visitors, and raise your website grade.

5. Get Other Sites to Link To You

As you start pumping out quality blog posts, interesting news and events, and promoting your social media, people across the Web should start linking to you. Getting other websites to link to you tells search engines that you are a place worth checking out, so they'll push you up their search rankings.

Having a more visited website link to your content is like receiving a positive review--a thumbs up. The more thumbs up you get, and the more important those giving them, the more search engines will like you.

LEARN MORE ABOUT IMPROVING YOUR WEBSITE GRADE

Improving Search Results Case Study - iMinistries Blog
Keyword Phrase Strategy's Importance to SEO - iMinistries Blog
Is Your Website Visitor-Focused? - iMinistries Blog