Last week I offered free SEO advice for Publiside. I’m going to continue my SEO Advice series today by helping out another YoungEntrepreneur.com blog reader, Brian from the Stratford Heights Church of God.
Stratford Heights Church of God – http://www.shcog.com
SEO Advice – I have designed a site for my church www.shcog.com and I would love some SEO advice on it. It was created using PHP, CSS and JavaScript
Brian
My Recommendations
1) Get some links!
Right now you have a Page Rank of 1. This means that Google has recognized your website and has given it the lowest score you can receive (unless you have been penalized in which case you get a 0). If you don’t have some kind of authority in Google’s eyes then you won’t get traffic. Get Page Rank by building your links. How about asking your parishioners to link to your website or getting your Oasis Youth group on a link building campaign as a start?
2) Create more content
You want to have pages with at least 300 words of content if you want to get ranked in Google. Most of your pages do not fit this criteria. You should also consider adding new content that you can drive traffic to. A good place to start would be converting some of your sermon audios into text files. Google doesn’t pick up audio but there is a lot of information here that if you turned into articles would help drive traffic to your website.
3) Optimize around important keywords
Right now you rank on the first page for Stratford Heights Church but unless someone is specifically searching you out, they won’t find your website. You should consider which keywords will help drive more traffic. Perhaps optimizing for Middletown Church (Middletown is the city where the church is located) would get more people finding you. Once you’ve picked your keywords, put them in your title tags and make sure to use them throughout your pages.
Good luck Brian! I hope the advice helps!
Readers, what do you think about the Stratford Heights Church of God website?
To learn more about how to get SEO tips for your website please read my post: Need SEO Advice? Submit Your Site!
From a design standpoint, the website is on the threshold between being an ‘acceptable’ website and being a ‘great’ website.
Maybe you could make the navigation a little more attractive? Use some color, rather than two shades of gray with black text? Gradient backgrounds, :hover border-left, or icons would also be a great way to add some flair and really make the navigation pop out.
The overall typography/font selection might be improved to increase readability and attractiveness. Have you considered increasing the line-height a little? It looks like you’re using a serif font everywhere except for the navigation links — it’s getting more and more popular to move away from Times New Roman and toward a sans-serif font (Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, etc.) If I were you, I would consider keeping my heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) with the current serif font, but switching out the content text to a sans-serif font.
I would definitely add some CSS magic dust to the calendar — a little color and tweaking would make it pop out a lot more.
I can tell you’ve got a lot of potential, and as it is, the site is looking good, but you just need to add a little jazz to make it look _great_.
The leftnav is something out of the nineties – it doesn’t even cut 2000. Why not try something a bit shinier; izea have the extreme of shiny on their site, where it works.
I want to submit my site for review, but the link doesn’t seem to be working.