At Church Webmaster we are always interested in trying things to learn what we can about the search engines.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big deal when it comes to having an impact on the Internet.  We are going to include this site as part of a six site web ministry experiment.  Our part of the project will be developing and tracking the progress of two brand new blogs; Christian Blog, and Church Blog.  These blogs are being set up using very competitive keywords that have pretty significant search numbers (approx. 18,000/month).  Our goal is to get the sites positioned as page 1 Google returns to see how much of that traffic we can capture.  We will be writing articles over the course of 2009 detailing the steps we are taking to get the sites noticed by the search engines.

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.