Google search results?

[kayre]

So, our church admin at long last has a functional web page up-- but it's about 4 pages deep on Google when one searches the obvious term (Community Lutheran Church VT). How do we get it to move up in the results, short of advertising?

The new page is: http://clcvt.org

The first result to come up is a nonfunctional shell that an unscrupulous web designer did "free"-- and then demanded really enormous amounts of money for making it functional, and refused to give up the domain or take the page down when we opted not to pay. Very frustrating.

Comments

[gingicat]

Nice site! Very good use of space. I defer to others to let you know how accessible it is for low-vision people.

Get the members of the congregation to relink it all over Facebook and Twitter. Keep putting up articles and resources relevant to the time of year, and relink those during the appropriate time of the year. This will pull up your search results in general. Using Google+ to relink may boost it even more. Relink any individual page that you'd like to get even more attention.

I absolutely love the description of you, especially "to share the gift of music to the glory of God." It's very you.

[kyrielle]

Also, the first search page links to a FB page. Is that in the church's control? If so, change the FB page to link to the real one....

[kayre]

Doh, I'm an admin on the FB page myself.. thanks!

[sara]

If you haven't put in for Google's Grants program, do it. http://www.google.com/grants/eligibility.html Churches are eligible. It both gets you free AdWords AND pulls your pages right up their search rankings.

[kayre]

Thanks, forwarded that to our admin!

[sara]

My nonprofit currently gets about $200/month in free ads from them, it's awesome. There are a few hoops to jump through but it's worth it.

[cellio]

The technical term for this (which I haven't searched on, but you might) is "search engine optimization". That might lead you to some helpful hints.

I do know two things that affect the ranking: frequency of change (sites with new content on a regular basis do better than static pages), and number of links to it from elsewhere. For the latter, while you certainly want to encourage the passing links like Facebook and Twitter, are there any more "permanent" links you can get? Like organizational directories (local, denominational), link-sharing with related sites, etc?