We know that churches need to be good stewards of their budgets and we are currently offering some of the best church advertising deals on the Internet. We have four different levels of involvement and one of these plans will surely fit in your budget.

1.) Highlighted Church ($99 to $199 /year)

We have three spaces available on our directory site for “Highlighted Churches”. Our highlighted churches receive advertising coverage on one of our corner peel away ads. These ads are the most visited places on our websites. People are drawn to the ads because they want to see what is there.

The ads are located in the top right corner ($199/year as this is the most visited area on the site), top left corner ($149/year as the second most visited area on the site) and the bottom left corner ($99/year as the third most visited area of the site). As a highlighted church you will see the most Internet traffic produced by the website. We will link directly to your existing website (if you do not have a church website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) as well as develop a tailored page for your church on the directory. You will also receive all of the benefits of the Featured and Suggested Church categories as well.

2.) Featured Church ($39/year)

As a “Featured Church” your church will be one of twelve churches that are placed on the scroller at the top of our church directory sites.

We will link directly to your existing website (if you do not have a church website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) as well as develop a tailored page for your church on the directory. You will also receive all of the benefits of the Suggested Church category as well.

3.) Suggested Church ($19/year)

As a “Suggested Church” your church will be listed with a hot link in the middle column of our directory site just below the Featured Churches.

We will also give you a hot link to your existing church website (if you do not have a church website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) on your free church listing on the site. People are more likely to visit your site with a hot link then if they have to type in your url (website address).

4.) Free Church Listing

With your free “Church listing” on our directory you can send us articles about your church which we will publish on the site. These articles can promote the activities and ministries of your church and will help to attract visitors to your existing website (if you do not have a church website, we can develop and maintain one for you for as little as $199/year) and church.

We know that these directories will bring visitors to your church! How do we know? We get a lot of visitors to our church who tell us that they found us on the Internet. Our church is in the Florida Keys and when you search for churches in the Florida Keys our directory shows up. Our church has one of the corner ads and it connects with people who are looking for a church. Check it out by clicking here “Florida Keys Churches” and then rolling your mouse over the ad in the top right corner.

If you are ready to take advantage of one of these great offers for your church, or if you have any questions, fill out the form below or call us at 305-304-6321.

Here are the updates for the Christian Blog for February.  The site is showing up in position 56 of a Google search:

The site had 79 unique visitors:

You can also take a look at the keywords that people used to find the site:

Church Blog is not currently showing up on a Google search. It did get a little bit of traffic in February:

You can see the keywords that brought people to the site in February:

This month on Church Webmaster we are going to spend some time in March working on the links again for the two sites. We will also add a couple of more posts to each site. It looks like both of the sites are going to go through some sand boxing in the weeks or months ahead. It is usually part of the process, and we continue to work on developing the sites so that they can continue their move forward on the search engines in the future.

• Cape Coral Florida Churches
• Clearwater Florida Churches
• Florida Keys Churches
• Gainesville Florida Churches
• Lakeland Florida Churches
• Ocala Florida Churches
• Fresno California Churches
• Fremont California Churches
• Oceanside California Churches
• Springfield Oregon Churches
• Hillsboro Oregon Churches
• Salem Oregon Churches
• Federal Way Washington Churches
• Flagstaff Arizona Churches
• Glendale Arizona Churches
• Scottsdale Arizona Churches
• Tempe Arizona Churches
• Gilbert Arizona Churches

Let’s take a quick look at each of the sites and see where they are today and then we will check on their movement again in the near future. The Cape Coral Florida Churches is currently in position twenty-three. It has never been a page one return. The Clearwater Florida Churches site is at position seven. This site has spent most of its time on page two so this is an improvement. The Florida Keys Churches has been at position one for the last three months and enjoys a steady traffic flow. Th Gainesville Florida Churches site has just recently moved to page one and is in position eight. The Lakeland Florida Churches is sitting at position twenty-two. The Ocala Florida Churches is in position three and has been there for several months. It also receives a steady traffic flow. The Fresno California Churches has moved in to position three in the last month. The Fremont California Churches site is in position twelve. The Oceanside California Churches site is in position seven. The Springfield Oregon Churches site is in position three. The Hillsboro Oregon Churches site is in position eight. The Salem Oregon Churches is in position eleven. It was a solid page one return but has started to drift backwards. The Federal Way Washington Churches is doing very well at position two. The Flagstaff Arizona Churches site is in position eight. The Glendale Arizona Churches site is in position fifteen. This is after being a page one return for a long time. The Scottsdale Arizona Churches site has really fallen back, moving from page one to page six in position fifty-four. The Tempe Arizona Churches site is holding on ot position eight. The Gilbert Arizona Churches site has moved back to position 14 from a solid page one return.

Our goal is to have all of these sites in the top three for their keywords. We will see what happens as we continue to track their progress.

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.

This is a pretty big move from page 15 where it was two days ago.  There is a strong possibility that it will move back or disappear.  Another interesting thing is that the site has already recieved a little traffic.  Here is a picture of the statcounter results:

How did these people find the site?  One of them came as a result of a comment I made on another blog.  The other two came because they did a Google search for “christian blogs” and this site showed up on Page 2 in position 11:

How is this information useful?  To build some intitial traffic to the site I will continue to leave comments on other blogs that are on topic with our new blog.  I will also add the keyword “Christian Blogs” in several spots on the home page of the site.  Anytime we see a keyword phrase that people are using that pulls up the site, we will try and capitalize on that by increasing our use of the leyword phrase where we can.

Church Blog has made a quick showing at the bottom of page 4 in position 39:

This initial result will probably change dramatically for the worse over the next season of time.  It would not be unusual for the new site to actually quit showing up at all on Google for a few months or more.  Once the site is a little older it will generally become more steady as a result and we can focus on moving the site up to page 1.

Christian Blog is quite a bit farther back.  We found it on page15 in position 144:

The question for some might be, “How do you get the site to page 1?”.  Good question.  There are three major factors when it comes to search engine optimization; time, links, and content.  Time will take care of itself.  Content comes in the form of imformative articles written on the site.  Links have to be developed from other sites.  The links are the most difficult part of the equation and we will discuss the process of developing links in the weeks ahead.  We will be working on the content part over the next couple of weeks.  Our task will be to write five original articles for each site.  After that we will take another look and see how the sites are doing.

We have set up the blogs in very similar ways and we have pointed a couple of links at the blogs so that we could get them indexed by Google.  They are now indexed and we have added five articles on each site.  These articles are about some of our other blogs and have been placed on the sites just to offer something for people who find the sites early to read.  These articles are duplicates (Duplicate content is generally a no-no on blogs, and we would never copy other people’s content, but this is our own original content and is being used as a place holder more than anything.  While duplicate content doesn’t count with Google, it is not counting against us and so it is a way to put something on a new site), and we have also added some RSS feeds for the same reason.

The next phase of this project will be writing 5 original articles on each of the sites.  These articles will be on topic and will be about 300 words each.  We will also be commenting on sites that are similar to the ones we are starting.  This is a good way to try and develop some initial traffic.  It is our hope that by following this series of articles, you will be able to learn a lot about getting your own sites noticed.

Our Key West Vineyard Community Church site is now very close to being complete.  We have added some of the finishing touches that make a site functional.  All of the important information about the church is available on the front page.  This includes the times of the services, phone number, address, and a map to the church.    We have added some pictures do that people who visit the church after visiting the website will have an immediate connection.  We have started a church blog.  We have also linked to some other websites by RSS which provide constant fresh content to the site.  Here are a couple of screen shots of the site today:

The site has also been indexed by Google and is showing up on the search engines.  It is currently in position 2 of page 1:

In our next phase of development of the site we will begin to utilize the blog to get the site to show up on more general Google searches.  We will try to get the site to show up as a result for “Key West Churches” and “Churches in Key West”.  This process is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and it is an important part of being a church webmaster.