On Church Webmaster we have joined with seven other sites to conduct a web ministry experiment to help demonstrate the process of getting your web ministry started, established, and responding to the search engines. We have been tasked with starting and reporting on two new sites; Christian Blog and Church Blog.

If you follow the overall experiment on Web Ministry Online you will see that new sites all start differently.  We have sort of mixed results for the two sites we are working on here.  Here are the statistics for the two sites for the month of January.

Christian Blog is being completely sand boxed on Google.  That means that it is no longer showing up for a keyword search of Christian Blog.  It has shown up on different pages at different times during January, and for a while was showing up on page 2 for ‘christian blogs’.  It is showing up right now on Yahoo on page 3 in position 25:

This has generated a little traffic for the site which received 121 page views during the month:

The majority of that traffic came from searches for christian blogs as we can see by analyzing our keyword results:

We added  5 original articles to the site in January.  We also began developing links for the site.  For this site to be successful we need to develop 3000 - 4000 links initially.  We had a pretty good first month as we were able to establish 805 incoming links.  We use a function on Yahoo to show us how many links we have.  If you go to yahoo and in the search engine bar type in linkdomain: followed by the URL you are interested in, you can see how many links are pointing to the site.  It looks like this:

Type it in and click on Web Search and the result looks like this:

We were able to establish 805 links in January, which is a pretty good start.

Church Blog had less traffic than Christian Blog.  It is also currently sand boxed.  It received only 59 page views during January:

It did, however, capture the most incoming links for the month of January:

869 links is a good start.  We added four original articles to the site in January as well.

In February at Church Webmaster we will continue working on establishing links and adding content.  We will be introducing a link building technique called article marketing as well.