Here are a few key tips to analyze and optimize your website...
Measure and Compare How many visitors does your website receive each day? Which pages do they visit? How long do they stay? Web analytics answers these questions. It is like having someone tell you how close your ball is on the green after you have hit it from the fairway. With information from web analytics, you can make adjustments on your site and improve the user's experience. Web analytics can be obtained for free by using software such as Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics).
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Once you have your website up and running, there are two ways users can find you: knowledge and search. Knowledge happens several ways. The user may come to your church and receive literature with your website on it. Later, they access the site and begin exploring. As I hopefully hammered home above, social media is a big way users find your church. When their friend shares something and links your church, the user now knows about it. Knowledge of your church is great but the best way to reach folks who don’t know you exist or have friends who don’t know you exist is through search. When I type “Nondenominational Church in Dallas” in the Google search bar, The Potters House church pulls up twice. If I was looking for a church, I have a 20% chance of checking out their website. Another example is “divorce recovery in Dallas.” Both Watermark Community Church and Fellowship Church show up in the front page. So how did these churches land there? SEO.
SEO is a strategy that you can implement to bring your site up to the first page of key searches. It uses a combination of key words on your site and in your content and linking of your site to other sites. No one knows the exact mathematical formula for how Google, Bing and Yahoo! rank each site but programmers who specialize in SEO know how to increase the visibility of your website and get it up in rankings. And the higher it goes, the more traffic your website gets.
For more information on this and other topics, get your copy of "The iChurch Method Volume 1: How to Advance Your Ministry Online." or The iChurch Method Volume 2: Changing the World When You Login or even sign up for the iChurch Method Online School.