How To Spy On Your Website
It may sound funny, but you probably want to spy on your church's website, especially if you're in charge of it.
“So, I should essentially spy on myself?”, you may be asking.
Not quite, but pretty close. It's not really you or the content of your website that you want to spy on, but what your site is doing on the internet:
- Are people linking to your website?
- If they are, what are they linking to?
- And, what are they saying about it?
- Is your church being referenced in news or blogs, but not linking to your website?
For a church, this is all important information to have, but how can we go about acquiring it?
Google Alerts allows you to have the latest new search results for a particular search term sent directly to your e-mail. For this site, I monitor both “if jesus had a website” and “ifjesushadawebsite.net” as search terms so that I can be notified of new links to the site and any references to the site in any other manner. For your church website, I'd recommend both the basic unit of your website URL (i.e. “abcd.com”) and the name of your church as search terms. In addition, if your church goes by any distinctive nicknames, I'd create alerts for them as well.
Google Webmaster Tools can not only help your church website's presence in search engines through the use of sitemaps, but over time it will also give you a multitude of stats and information to learn how your site is referenced. This information includes search terms used that find your site, page access errors or problems, and the types of links on your site and where they go.
While you won't have to monitor these tools a closely as the alerts above, they're good for a periodic check of where you are with your site.
For those of you who use Bloglines as a RSS reader, you can also take advantage of the Bloglines Search feature. It is similar to Google Alerts, but it focuses simply on the content of blogs, and seems to provide more up-to-date results.
A combination of these and other similar tools can really help you understand where your church website situates itself in the great expanse of the world wide web. With that knowledge, you can determine if you're where you want to be, and if not, a course of action to get there.