In this month’s SEO update, we’ll look at how the government program, Prism, is impacting search.  In addition, we’ll see what the past month has revealed about Google’s Penguin 2.0 update and review some other updates that have happened in the search engines, including an important update regarding mobile search.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBH2RvaA7nY

“Hi, I’m Kurt Steinbrueck, director of marketing services with OurChurch.Com, and I’m here with this month’s SEO update…” Click here for a full transcript.

Summary:

• Google Penguin Update not so impressive
• Google Maps flatten results
• Google mobile update may lower your rankings
• Yahoo updates their search results
• Bing adds features to Bing Maps
• The government program, Prism, impacts search

Share Your Thoughts:

• Were you impacted by Penguin 2.0?  If so, share your story.
• Are you concerned about the government spying program, Prism?
• Would you move to a new search engine because of government spying?

There was a time when blogs were considered the domain of the uber-geeky and ultra-tech-savvy.  But thanks to platforms like Hubpages and WordPress, blogging has become as intuitive as tying your shoes.  As a result, this amazing social medium is now available to everyone who wishes to put it to good use.

Churches should be using every possible method to reach people for Christ.  Unfortunately, it seems as though many churches are falling behind when it comes to their web-presence.  God has allowed some amazing technology to enter our world, it is our responsibility to be good stewards of these technological advances and use them for the glory of God.

If you, or your church, is new to the whole idea of putting yourselves out there for the entire online world to see, then perhaps starting off with a blog is good idea.  Blogs are not only easy to use and maintain, but they require almost zero technical knowledge.  You simply write, then post.

Why should we have a blog?  Isn’t our newsletter good enough?

There is nothing wrong with a newsletter.  In fact, I believe that a well-published newsletter is a must for all churches.  But we are not talking about reaching out to your existing congregation.  We need to be thinking bigger than that.

The invention of the internet allows us to reach people around the world with little more than a click of the mouse.  This is a HUGE opportunity for churches.  The Apostle Paul had to travel around the world just to reach a few cities and towns in his lifetime.  We can reach more people than Paul could have imagined from the comfort of our homes and offices.

A blog is a perfect way to accomplish this.  By simply posting on a regular basis, you can help people find the answer to difficult questions in their lives.  You can inspire and encourage believers from around the world.  You may even be able to lead someone to Christ.  What a blessing!

But I don’t know what to say.

You already say it!  You don’t have to be a wordsmith or an author to write a compelling blog.  The fact is, you already have something to say every week with your sermon.  Writing a blog post could be as simple as transcribing your sermon and posting in online.  If you do this on a weekly basis, then your congregation just went from hundreds to thousands, from thousands to millions.

Don’t rely on yourself to come up with something to write.  Put down what God has laid on your heart and trust that He will take care of the rest.  A friend and mentor once said, “There is no way to fail when spreading the Gospel.”  In truth, the only way to fail is to not spread it at all.

God promises that, “It is the same with my Word.  I send it out, and it always produces fruit.  It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.” (Isaiah 55:10 NLT)

It is our passion as believers, pastors, and churches to see the Word of God spread throughout the whole world.  This is a simple and effective way to see to it.  Blogging is not just for food critics and the overly-opinionated.  It’s not just for self-promotion and mindless dribble.  It can be used to glorify God by spreading His Word to all who need to hear.

Does your church have a blog?  If it does, tell us about it and share a link.  If not, what’s holding you back?

There’s no shortage of people bashing Facebook specifically and social media in general as contributors to narcissism, time-wasting, gossip, inappropriate relationships and more. So, it’s nice to see posts such as the one posted by Josh Riley on worship.com earlier this week that speak to the positive impact social media can have on ones spiritual life.

Josh highlights 5 specific benefits:

1. Accountability
2. Heart Analysis
3. Encouragement
4. Evangelism
5. Discernment

You can read more about each of these in Josh’s full post.

I would add at least 2 others to the list:

1. Learning/Ideas – Social media gives us the opportunity to learn new things about God and creative new ways to do ministry.
2. Collaboration – Social media enables us to connect with others who share a passion for a particular cause or project and work together to accomplish things we could never accomplish on our own.

What do you think about these 7 ways social media can have a positive impact on a person’s spiritual life?  Are there others you can think of?

The results from the Communications Strategy Survey are in. And while they indicate many organizations are struggling to develop a communications strategy, they also indicate many people within those organizations see the value of a communications strategy and are motivated to improve or develop theirs.

No Strategy

The most notable finding is that only 25% of respondents indicated their organization has a written communications strategy.

That means 75% of organizations are sailing their communications ship without a map. No wonder so many communicators are feeling confused and overwhelmed by all the communications options now available!

Breaking It Down

As we delve into the specific aspects of communications strategy, respondents feel best about their understanding of their target audience(s), with 43% rating their org a 4 or 5 compared with 29% rating their org a 1 or 2.

In all other aspects of communications strategy, more people rated their organization negatively than positively.

• On defining & understanding their communications goals, 31% were positive and 38% negative
• On defining & understanding their communications tactics, 31% were positive and 36% negative
• Respondents felt least confident in their tracking of metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of their communications goals with only 17% rating their organization positively and 62% negatively.

Motivated to Improve

Overall it’s clear that the people who responded to the survey are not satisfied with their communications strategy. When asked “Overall, how would you rate your organization’s communications strategy?” only 16% rated it positively while 47% rated it negatively.

On a positive note, though, when asked, “How motivated are you to help your organization develop a better communications strategy?” 70% indicated they are highly or extremely motivated.

I’m encouraged by this because it shows many people see the value of a communications strategy and the potential impact a good communications strategy has to improve communications and dramatically impact the effectiveness of the organization.

Biggest Barriers?

When asked, “What is the biggest barrier to your organization developing a better communications strategy?” respondents were fairly evenly divided between busyness (29%), lack of understanding (25%), and lack of leadership (21%). 17% of respondents indicated “other” on this question, but a closer look at those other reasons revealed nearly all could be categorized as time, understanding or leadership issues.

Where do we go from here?

Based on the survey results, I see at least 3 things we can do.

1) Develop Resources. It’s clear that organizations need and want help developing better communications strategies. That presents an opportunity for the development of better communications strategy resources and guidance – books, webinars, tools, conferences and coaching.

2) Provide Examples. An additional type of resource that would be helpful is examples of communications strategies. Some survey respondents indicated they would like to share their communications strategy online either as an example or for the purpose of receiving feedback. We hope to post and discuss as many of these as possible.

3) Parse Data Demographically.  More insight may be gained by parsing the results by demographic factors – type of organization, number of employees, role in the organization or years of experience. We’ll be looking into that ourselves. And if you’d like the raw data (excluding email address) to do your own parsing, just let us know.

For more on communications strategy, read What Is a Communications Strategy? and How to Develop a Communications Strategy – with 6 Words

Discussion

• What comments or questions do you have about the survey results?
• What could be done to help your organization or other organizations develop better communications strategies?

God is the God of all people.  Jesus died for all people, no matter their race, cultural background, language, economic situation, or any other distinction.  So, the church’s work is to reach out to all people, but this is not an easy task.  How do you connect to the people of an area when their cultural perspective and even their language may differ?  It’s not easy, but some church’s are taking on the challenge.

All People’s Church:
As their name suggests, All People’s Church in Brampton, Ontario, Canada is one of those churches who have taken on the challenge or reaching all people.  I first connected with Jonathan Gallo about a year ago.  Pastor Gallo explained the vision of All People’s Church and I was excited to be able to partner with a church that was taking on the multi ethnic challenge.

I’ll let Pastor Gallo tell you a bit about All People’s Church:

“All People’s Church is a multi ethnic charismatic evangelical church of 500. We have been around since 1968 and have served Brampton, a sister city to Toronto.  Our city is 1) very religious – a city of mosques, temple’s, and 100 churches; 2) the fastest growing city in Canada – currently 450,000 people representing over 110 different ethnicities.  As we surveyed the landscape, a variety of problems to us for evangelism presented themselves, however, an opportunity to grow also presented itself to us.  We realized that if our city is growing at a rate of 25,000 per year and 20% of people were from Christian backgrounds, many would be looking for a new church to become a part of.”

Common Ground – The Internet:
As I’ve mentioned it’s quite a challenge to try to reach such a wide variety of people.  However, one thing that most of the people have in common, no matter what their cultural background, is that they use the Internet to find things.  So, having an compelling website and being very visible in the search engines is a very effective way to reach people.

All People’s Church already had a very good website.  So, they needed to be more visible online so that compelling website would be truly effective.  So, they sought to partner with OurChurch.Com to help with their search engine visibility.  Here’s what their experience has been according to Pastor Gallo:

“Gone are the days of advertising in the newspaper (which we did at an annual cost of 4500 for 3 years with no return) or the yellow pages.  It’s why we turned to ourchurch.com to help us with search rankings.  Well, that was the best money we ever spent.  In the first year, I can count between 40-50 new people who joined our church because they visited our website and we were found first.  Thank you Ourchurch.com.”

Real-World Results:
Did you get that?  40-50 new members through the search engines in just the first year.  I’ve written before about churches getting high rankings and being listed all over the web, but what I love even more is seeing those real-world results.  Actual people, physically visiting the church, and making the church their home.  Those are real lives being ministered to for Christ.

If you are in the Brampton area, I encourage you to visit All People’s Church.  If you are a church interested in reaching a multi-ethnic community, it might be worth dropping a line to Pastor Gallo and finding out what their church is doing to reach their community.

This post is specifically for those people who participated in my breakout session at the Biola Digital Conference today titled, Grand Central: Making Your Website a Powerful Hub of Communication, Connection & Growth

Here are some links to more information on the topics covered in the session:

• What is a Communications Strategy?
• How to Create a Communications Strategy – with 6 Words
• How to Break the 80/20 Rule
• How to Design Your Website to be the Hub of Communications
• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about SEO
• How to Do Quick and Easy Usability Tests

2 Minute Feedback Survey

If you participated in the session, I’d appreciate your feedback in this quick, anonymous survey.

Connect

If you found the breakout session and these links helpful, we hope you’ll connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or RSS/email so you can receive and discuss more helpful content in the future.

OurChurch.Com’s mission is to help Christian organizations achieve their mission online. We do that through web design, web hosting, SEO and consulting. If your organization isn’t hitting on all cylinders, let’s schedule a time to talk at no cost to you. We’ll listen to the challenges you’re facing and

It took only a week to make Pastor Jeff dangerous. A team of church communication pros descended on his church to share their knowledge, a venture known as Creative Missions. The status quo is now endangered.

Is your church ready to be dangerous?

That’s the intro for the new booklet, Dangerous: A Go-to Guide for Church Communication

Dangerous is a collection of  19 essays on church communication, covering basic strategy and practical, real world tips for churches.  It was written some church communicators who went on a “creative missions trip” – a missions trip where they help churches in the community with their communications.

I bought and downloaded the Kindle version for only 3 bucks.  The articles are insightful and helpful.  If you’re a church communicator your sure to learn some things that save you far more than the time and money you invest in the book and help you become a more effective communicator.

There’s more info on Dangerous on the Church Marketing Sucks / Center for Church Communications website.

I’m looking forward to speaking and participating in the 2013 Biola Digital Conference next week.  One aspect of the conference I’m particularly looking forward to is connecting with the other speakers (and participants).  Here’s a list of all the speakers with a link to their Twitter profile, plus Biola Digital.

• Biola Digital
• Michael Hyatt
• Scott Hamm
• Jason Caston
• John Edmiston
• John Mark Reynolds
• Paul Steinbrueck
• Neil Perlin
• Carolyn Kim
• Ryan Bolger
• Rebecca Hong
• Ron Hannaford – unknown
• Georgia Joseph
• Dan Saugstad – unknown
• Beau Aguon
• Eric Brown
• David Rogers – unknown

If you’d like to follow the whole list with one click, I created a public Biola Digital 2013 Twitter list.

You can also join the conversation by watching and using the #bioladigital hashtag.

If you’re on Google+, comment on this G+ post so we can connect there.

Did you get hit by a penguin?  Google just released their Penguin 2.0 update and lots of websites are seeing their rankings drop.  So, what do you do if your rankings have dropped?

Don’t despair.  There is hope.  You can recover.

First, it would be good to understand what Penguin is.  Links are very important in Google’s ranking algorithm and they don’t like people manipulating link as this leads to search results that may not be very good.  Penguin is an algorithm that Google has released which seeks to find and devalue or penalize spammy links and paid links.    If you’re not sure what is meant by spammy links, I have a previous article that explains What Kind of Spammy Links Is Google Going After with Penguin 2.0 that I’d encourage you to read.

My Rankings Dropped!  What do I do?
If you’ve seen a significant drop in your rankings, you may have been hit by Google’s Penguin update.  The first thing you should do is investigate to make sure it’s Penguin that caused your rankings to drop and not something else.  After all, there are lots of things that can cause your site to drop.  Go to your Google Webmaster Tools account and look through your link profile to see if you have an unnatural link profile.  There are also several software tools that can help with this investigation. (if you’re not sure what an unnatural link profile is, see this article)

Recovering from Penguin 2.0:
Ok, let’s say you have an unnatural link profile or you just know that you’ve been doing a bunch of spammy link building.  How do you recover?  The first step is to try to get any spammy links removed.

• Get rid of any paid links that pass link juice, especially links on private blog networks. 
• Get rid of any spammy forum posts, especially forum profile links.  You can usually just login and delete your posts/profile.
• Try to have any spammy blog comments removed. Keep in mind, blog commenting itself isn’t spamming, but when you have a bunch of “Great post, I love what you do here [insert link with keyword here]” posts, those are spam.
• Look into site-wide links. First, consider whether the links themselves are valuable (are they sending real traffic). If so, just ask the webmaster to make the links no-follow. There’s no need to lose real traffic. If the links aren’t producing traffic and, perhaps they are on a suspiciously low quality site, then try to have them removed.

For any of the 4 above types of links, if you can’t get them removed, then you can use the disavow tool Google provides in their Google Webmaster Tools. Keep in mind, however, that you’re dealing with people who have more important things to do than remove your links. So, if you don’t receive an immediate response, give it a little time and send a few requests over a couple of weeks. If after a month or so you haven’t gotten a response, then you can use the disavow tool.

Submit a Request to Google:
Once you have removed as many spammy links as you could (documenting it as you go) and used the disavow tool for the links you couldn’t get removed, then contact Google to have them re-evaluate your site.  You can do this in your Google Webmaster Tools account.  Be sure to provide them with documentation showing that you’ve removed links and have been trying to get the other spammy links removed and that you used the disavow tool.  Google is going to want to see that you’ve taken real steps to correct the issue.  Then wait.  You should get a response, but it may take a while.

It Might Not be a Penalty:
The last thing I’ll add is that you do not need to submit a request for Google to review your site unless you’ve receive a notice of a manual penalty in your Google Webmaster Tools account. This is usually a message from Google telling you they’ve detected some unnatural links. If you haven’t received a message, then you probably don’t have a manual penalty and you’re just dealing with the algorithm. So, a request to Google won’t do you any good. They’ll just tell you manual action wasn’t taken against your site. In that case, you just need to do your best to guess how many links to remove and, more importantly, start building good, natural links. I’ve done an algorithm recovery for a client where we didn’t remove any links, we just built a bunch of good links until their profile looked natural again and they recovered quite well.

First United Methodist Church of Okeechobee, FL recently made the decision to improve their website presence.   Their previous website had run it’s course and they were looking for a new site with a better design and added functionality.

FUMC Okeechobee found OurChurch.Com through the partnership between OCC and TechShop (the technology ministry of the United Methodist Church).  Because OurChurch.Com is a preferred partner with TechShop, UMC referred organizations receive special discounts off of all OCC services.

FUMC Okeechobee wanted a professional looking website without spending more that their budget.  They did this through the Custom Express website package which includes website development, hosting, email, full service support, and monthly maintenance.  Below are a few highlights of how FUMC Okeechobee is using their website effectively:

• Professional design: Wanting a great look without needing a custom design made from scratch, they selected a pre-existing WordPress theme that was personalized for their congregation.
• Announcement scroller:  This feature located in the right column of their website, spotlights upcoming events that are especially noteworthy.
• Prayer requests: For those who want to submit prayer requests to the church, they can simply go to the website’s “prayer request” page, enter the prayer need, and can send their request to the church’s prayer team.  Visitors can even make a request to be notified when they have been prayed for.
• Stained Glass Windows: One of the unique aspects of FUMC Okeechobee and their church building is the use of stained glass.  Each window tells a story and the church has done a wonderful job of presenting those stories through the use of their website’s photo gallery.  Visitors can view all of the church’s windows along with a written description of the meaning of each.

All of these elements allow FUMC of Okeechobee to accomplish their mission online.

You can read more about OurChurch.Com’s custom web design services. If you are interested in discussing how OurChurch.Com can help you achieve your mission online, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We invite you to visit the website of FUMC of Okeechobee, FL. What do you think of their new site and the design choices made?