One thing you’ll notice in many of my critiques is advice on how to improve a church website’s search engine visibility. While the following list is by no means a magic enumeration that if followed will guarantee you a great Google rank – not doing them is sure to put your website on the bottom of the heap.

When possible, I’ve provided hyperlinks to posts and article on this and/or other sites that will help you figure out how to keep from backsliding into the abyss of search engine invisibility.

1. You shall have no text other than your church’s name, denomination, city and state correctly spelled in between the <title> tags of your church’s home page.
2. You shall not make for your self webpage description and keywords meta tags that contain key words that are not related to your church’s ministries, purpose and personality.
3. You shall have no text other than your church’s name, denomination, city and state correctly spelled in between the <h1> tag in the header of your church’s home page – even if you are using some form of CSS text/image replacement.
4. Remember to keep your page content compelling, relevant and up-to-date.
5. Honor your reciprocal links, even if you do it on a page other than your home page.
6. You shall not create crufty URIs.
7. You shall not word-stuff.
8. You shall not forget to include content in the title arguments of your hyperlinks and the alt arguments of your image tags.
9. You shall not kill well indexed pages.
10. You shall not covet your neighbors search engine placement; you shall not covet their meta tags; you shall not covet their title tags; you shall not covet their heading tags nor their content.

I promise to bring down from the mountain a much heftier article in the near future (most of it is already written), but its late and I’ve got some other mad-scientist fun to finish before the evening it out.

As with all lists, none of the above is written in stone … that said, if you’ve got an item or a related link to add … leave a comment.