Know who you are trying to reach

Each group has different interests, vocabularies and cultural perspectives. If you were to speak to them in person, you would choose different words and possibly even different sentence structures. As a church, you already have an idea of what your demographics are - just look at the faces in the pews. Build a profile of your typical member - age, gender, education level, economic status, geographic location and family status. If you are hoping to appeal to a specific segment of your members, build a profile for that group, too.

Choose 3 - 5 keywords that are the essence of what you have to say

You can't be all things to all people and be successful. You need to be focused on what you can do well. If you master that, expand into another area, but don't sacrifice your core competency. Most searches consist of 2 - 4 words. You can have as many as 20 keywords for the content on your site, but I would not recommend trying to include all of them for 1 page and I wouldn't start trying to fit them all in at first. Build on the top 3 - 5 and when you are getting the results you like, move to another 3 - 5 words in your list

Focus your writing using your keywords

This is really the key - if you can't use your keywords in normal conversations with people, you will have a difficult time trying to write using them. Simply stating "This article is about keyword 1, keyword 2 and keyword 3" and then never using the words again just won't work.

Your writing should be narrative - tell a story. Write a sentence using your keywords, then read it out loud. Does it sound natural? Write 3 sentences, each with a different keyword - does it sound better? Think of the search page again - people type 2 - 4 words to describe what they are really trying to find. It is the simplest sentence for their topic of interest.

Get out a thesaurus and find other words that have the same or similar meaning as your keywords and use them, too. Don't add your synonyms to your keyword list, though, just use them in your text or article. Again, people have different vocabularies and use words differently. Having some similar words in your page will help appeal to them.

Find the search terms that are bringing visitors to your site

Here's where the technology starts to come in - you will need to gather information about where people were before they came to your site. Most web host companies provide a statistics package for your site - number of visits by hour, by day, by month, pages visited, originating address of the visit, and most importantly for this discussion - visits that were the result of a search and what terms they used.

Look at that list and compare it to your keyword list - you'll get a few things from this. First, you'll know if your writing is making the most of your keywords. If your keywords aren't high on the list, go back and look at your articles again. Read them and highlight your keywords. Now look at the search terms that brought people to your site and highlight them in your articles. Are those search terms other forms of your keywords? Then that's OK. If they are something completely different, then you need to do some more analysis, but we'll work on that later (probably in another article).

The second thing your search term list will tell you is more about your audience than your site - what are the people really trying to find? Perhaps you have some other opportunities to examine and other needs you can fill with your church or ministry site.

Find the search terms used once people are at your site

Once people get to your site, are they finding what they expect, or do they have to look for it? If you have a large site with lots of content, having a search feature is a nice thing to have. Be careful about this, though. Search capabilities should not take the place of a well-organized site with good navigation structure.

If you do have an internal search function, be sure to capture what terms are being used there, too. Now that people are visiting, a search indicates they expect that information to be there and they just need help locating it. Use this information to identify gaps in content and to examine your site structure and organization. If your main information is at the top of the most searched (internally) content on your site, your site is not organized well.