Upon surveying some friends and family members that traveled frequently, I asked them how they selected the church they would be worshiping at when they were in a different location. The overwhelming answer was the church that has a website that best displays what kind of service they provided and that had pictures of real people.

After doing some research on some of the local church websites in my area, I came to the shocking conclusion that they apparently don’t care about how their website looks or don’t have the right creative direction to send out the right message.

1. You have an over excessive use of animated clipart.
This may have been acceptable in the 90’s for personal home pages, but it should never be used on a church’s website.

2. You play background music that cannot be turned off.
If you want to really annoy your visitors, keep this feature because it works.

3. Your site is in frames.
So you figured that you would make it easy for the navigation to be updated. Too bad you didn’t realize that search engines and some web browsers cannot properly view frames.

4. The last time you updated the site was two years ago.
It’s always good to know what events took place in the past, too bad we have no idea what’s going on in the present.

5. You utilize scrolling marquee text.
Sure it may look okay on CNN, but it looks horrible on a website.

6. You use numerous font types throughout the website.
A little Comic Sans here, a little Arial there and a few Wingdings here, it’s a masterpiece! Perhaps only to a child.

7. You built the site using Microsoft Word.
It was easy, just outline everything how you wanted it and then save as webpage. It doesn’t matter how different web browsers and different screen resolutions see the site, because it looks fabulous on your screen.

8. You used Java or Flash for your navigation. Look at the pretty cool effect. It’s a shame that search engines have a hard time trying to crawl a site with that type of navigation.

9. You didn’t properly resize images before you added them on the site.
Why is that picture of the Pastor so blurry?

10. You have used the same website design for the past five years.
Why change it now? That old outdated look really defines our church.

It doesn’t seem all that shocking when you think about how we are constantly evolving technologically. Many people nowadays no longer use a phone book, when it is just as easier to find names and numbers online. A good church website design can go along way.

Is there more that could be added to this list? Please comment below to add on…

Many SEOs will first do keyword research using tools such as Wordtracker and Overture. Unfortunately, a good majority of the time, the estimated search engine traffic reported for their keywords can be way off. Therefore it would make their work almost useless for their clients. Thankfully, Google is making keyword research a breeze by providing more accurate search volume information.

The reasons why many SEOs use tools like Wordtracker and Overture is because they list the estimated search volume for each keyword. Sadly, this number isn’t very accurate. Take for example the term “MichiganSEO Web Design”. Wordtracker had reported that the key phrase would yield a search volume of 933. We decided to test this out by creating a blog post targeted for that term. Within a few hours, that post took over the number one position in Google and has kept that position for over three months. But according to our website statistics, there has been absolutely no traffic from that search term and therefore making Wordtracker’s report questionable.

Google on the other hand with their Adwords Keyword Tool, reports different information regarding the search term. According to Google, there is little or no traffic reported for that term. Their report states that there is “No Data” for the search volume and “No Data” for any search volume trends within the last year!

So far Google’s keyword tool only showed graphs for search volume information. But some exciting news from overseas in India reported yesterday that the keyword tool is now showing actual numbers for search volume. This will greatly change the way that keyword research is done and will eliminate the inaccuracies with Wordtracker.

Click to Enlarge

Update: The Google Keyword Tool is now showing numbers in the U.S. as well.

Link building should be an essential part to your SEO strategy. Many search engine algorithms base their rankings on the number of links pointing to your site. So it’s no wonder why link development is an important aspect to consider with your online marketing strategy. Ever hear the expression “the best things in life are free”, well the same goes for link building with a strategy called linkbaiting.

What is Linkbait?

Linkbait in a nutshell, is basically something on your site that visitors would like to link to from their site. Linkbait can be a brilliantly written article on creating “Stumble Bait“, a funny picture, a neat Wordpress plugin or perhaps some useful website tool that everyone should know about. Remember that content is king, but great content will rule above all. If you supply your visitors with quality content, there’s a good chance that someone will want to link to it. Be sure to put linking instructions on your linkbait page. This will make it easier for visitors to add a link to your site.

Be Relevant

Search engines like Google place a lot of value on the relevance of links. So even though it is great to have many links for the funny picture of your cat, it won’t help you rank well for your page about vacuum cleaner reviews. If you can create linkbait that is relevant to your site, then and only then it will help with your rankings. If you provide linking instructions, be sure to vary the anchor text to make it look less spammy in Google’s eyes.

Linkbaiting should be an added bonus to your linking strategy and should not replace traditional link building. Creating quality content can be challenging at times, but if pulled off correctly, it can greatly help you in regards to your search engine marketing strategy.

Now you can easily display the current local weather in your area on your website. This plugin will pull the current weather forecast directly from Weather.com to give you the latest up to date weather conditions.

== Installation ==

1. Download the plugin, extract and upload it to your plugins folder on your server.

2. Activate the plugin.

3. Go to Settings (Options in other WP versions), and Local Weather.

4. Enter your area’s zip code and hit “Save”.

5. Add this code to your theme where you want the weather to be displayed:

<?php if (function_exists(my_local_weather)) { my_local_weather(); } ?>

Got a problem with this plugin? A suggestion? A compliment? Post a comment below!

A good church website needs to be informative, visually appealing and have a bit of interaction with the visitor. After all shouldn’t your church’s website inspire people to visit your church physically? It can be easy to forget that people not in your local community may be searching for a church to attend a worship service. What features do you look for when you are looking at a church website?

Driving Directions

How do you get there? Sure an address is great, but a map or written directions would be better. Make it as easy as possible for the website visitor to locate your church.

Service Times

When do you worship? Often more times than not the service times are not listed on most church websites. Be sure to place your worship times prominently on the homepage of the site.

Sunday School

Let’s say that your visitors have children. What do you suppose they would like to know about your church? Make it well known that you offer a Sunday school service to avoid any confusion with new guests to your church.

Events Calendar

What if a member of your congregation misses a Sunday, but would like to know about the youth soccer game in the park? By having an up-to-date events calendar you can let your church members know what is going on.

Pictures

Sure stock photography is great in some cases, but what about those great pictures from your church’s mission trip? Be sure to include real pictures of your church and congregation. This will give your site a more realistic and personal touch.

And there you have it five features that a church website shouldn’t be without. Do you have any suggestions regarding church website features? Post a comment below…

Ever wanted to see your FeedBurner stats on the Wordpress Dashboard? Well now you can with this simple plugin. The plugin uses FeedBurner’s Awareness API to get your feed subscriber stats directly from FeedBurner. So now you can easily check your subscriber stats from the Wordpress Administration section.

Installation Instructions

1. Download the plugin, extract and upload it to your plugins folder on your server.

2. Activate the plugin.

3. Go to your Wordpress Dashboard.

4. It will tell you that the URL is blank. Hit the “Edit” link and enter your FeedBurner information and hit “Update”.

Make sure that the Awareness API is activated on your FeedBurner Account. You can do this by logging in to your FeedBurner account, click on “Publicize”,. Then click “Awareness API” and Activate it.

UPDATE: PHP 4 support has now been added.

Do you use the plugin? Tell us what you think…

After turning down Microsoft’s bid to acquire Yahoo! for $47.5 billion, the internet pioneer has turned to Google for help. Yahoo! and Google have come to an agreement to show Google ads on Yahoo!. Currently Google has 75% of the search advertising market share.

This deal, which will go into effect in September, has projected to boost Yahoo!’s revenue by $800 million in the first 12 months. Although this has shareholders in a frenzy, this could be good news for pay per click advertisers that are using Google Adwords. Since this will expose ads on yet another popular search giant.

Wordpress is a well known and supported blogging platform and content management system. With the ability for developers to create new and useful additions or plugins, it’s no wonder why it has become so popular. When it comes to plugins to give you the advantage in SEO, Pagination and new blogging features these plugins come in first.

All in One SEO
This plugin allows you to set title and meta tags on posts and pages. It even has the ability to noindex categories and archives.

Spam Karma 2
Prevent spammers from spamming your blog with this handy plugin.

WP-PageNavi
Improve the usability of your blog by replacing the “Previous” and “Next” links with easy to use pagination.

Comment Relish
Improve your subscriber base by automatically sending an email to your commenters to ask them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

iflickr
Easily add Creative Commons photos from Flickr to your blog posts with this handy plugin.

Google Sitemaps
Automatically generate a Google compliant XML sitemap of your site.

Live
Want to watch visitors on your site? This plugin allows you to do just that. Monitor which pages your visitors are going to.

Redirection
Create seo-friendly 301 redirects from within Wordpress. Simply enter the source location and the target location and you are done.

We are pleased to announce that we have launched a new service to improve church marketing online. It seems that many churches need a professional website solution to better market what they have offer to the public. Since many churches do not have a website or a fully functional site, Collins Internet is ready to provide them with a comprehensive solution to improve their web presence.

Included in the church web design package, is our reliable website hosting, a fully functional content management system and a custom web design. We feel that many churches need a great solution such as this and we are proud to offer it.

With the packaged solution, church members can easily add new content, add sermons, an event calendar, upload audio and video, create picture galleries, accept donations online and setup prayer vigils on their website. The possibilities are almost endless.

How many times do you search for your name in Google? Do you do it out of boredom or as an ego boost? Believe it or not, ranking well for your own name can be an easy task. Here are a few tips to get a top 10 ranking for your name.

Competition

When you search for your name in Google, how many results are returned? If there are less than a million results, you may have a good shot of ranking well for the term. Try putting quotation marks around your name such as “John Smith”. This will search for exact matches on web pages. The lower the competition is; the better.

On-Page

If you have access to the page you wish to rank well for, make sure that your name is in the title tag. Also make sure that your name is used at least three times throughout the entire document. Have you registered a domain such as yourname.com? By having your name in the URL, it will greatly increase the chances of a high ranking.

Off-Page

Building links is an important step that will aid in top rankings. If you participate in forums, put a link in your signature with your name as the anchor text. Participate on blogs by posting comments with a link back to your web page. The more links you can build, the better your ranking will be. But beware that if you build too many links too fast, Google may flag you as a spammer and your ranking may be compromised.

Results

Results can vary depending on the number of links, the on-page optimization and the number of competing websites. You can sometimes see results in a matter of days or even a matter of months. SEO is a continuous process of adjustments in order to rank adequately in Google.