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

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

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.

Bloglines Search

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.

We've probably all done this before. Ya know, make a link that nobody knows what its for until they click it, like if you write "you should really read this" or "try this". I know I have on many occasions.

And one of the first rules of optimizing web sites for search engines is that if it isn't clear to people, then it won't be clear to a program.

The problem with the kind of links used above is that they don't benefit the linker or the linkee. The person making the link doesn't make it clear to their readers or search engines how the link relates to the rest of their content. The person being linked to may get some traffic, but the search engines actually get less of a feel for the content of their site because there is no key text within the link. It would be better to write something like "hey, I found this great sports site" instead.

However, you can go too far with adding keywords to a link. For example, if I told you that I found this great article about the Yankees being beaten by a rookie pitcher last night over at ESPN, the worldwide leader in sports which is a great site in my opinion, if perhaps a little busy...well, actually the site is better for it's updates and videos than most of it's content, but it's useful nonetheless, that might be a little much. At that point, there are many words thrown in there that do not even relate to the link in particular, leaving your readers wondering if you know what you're doing, and watering down the accuracy of the search engines understanding of the linked page.

In the end, it's best for everyone involved to keep your links clear and concise. Not only is it more clear and useful for your visitors, but it helps for good search engine optimization as well.

When it comes to site design, oftentimes one of the most overlooked aspects of the site is the pieces of which it is made. While there are usually numerous ways to get a certain look for a site, they often have different reflections when it comes to how they are perceived by search engines. One great example of this is the set of header tags.

Header tags (h1, h2 and so forth) are designed to highlight titles and sections in your page, much like different headings are used in a written report, essay or book. You've probably seen them used in this way before, and they help the human eye and brain determine key points and the flow of the writing. They're designed to serve the same purpose in your web pages.

However, the problem often comes when people use header tags for display purposes instead of content organization. For example, someone may want to have all of a certain type of text, like an e-mail address, displayed in a certain style. However, instead of using a proper CSS class for a link tag, they use a header tag because it's easier to write and follow for them. They don't think anything of it because the page displays the way they want.

The problem with this approach is that search engines give these header tags more weight than other text. Therefore, they could have a whole page about their VBS programs, but a search engine may see that page as being more about e-mail addresses than VBS. Therefore, their page isn't identified as relevant to VBS searches, meaning the page is less likely to be visited through a search.

The general lesson here is to use HTML tags for what they are designed for, and this lesson may not be more applicable than when it comes to header tags. Use them to highlight page and section titles, and you'll likely see the benefits when it comes to the search engines.