Seasonal Events vs. Search Engines

Search engine time-lag

At particular times of the year, lots of churches make a special effort to invite local people to come to church services. For example, there may be an outsider-friendly Christmas carol service, an evangelistic presentation of the Easter story, or even an 'alternative' Halloween. Naturally, it is desirable to advertise these events on the church website so that they will be found by someone searching for, say, "Christmas services in Bristol".

So far, so good. But search engine time-lag creates a problem for the unsuspecting church webmaster. By the time your church minister tells you what the Christmas services are going to be, it will probably already be November. Suppose you manage to get the details onto the website by the 1st of December, and submit the relevant page to the major search engines. You could find that it takes around two months before the page is indexed by the search engines. So someone searching for Christmas services may not find them until February!

Solving the problem

Careful website design can reduce this problem significantly. The solution is work out which special events happen every year (e.g. Christmas, Easter, children's summer holiday club, etc.) and then create a page for each of those events. Upload those pages to your website now, so that they can be indexed by the search engines in good time.

Of course, you probably don't yet have most of the information you need for these pages. But it is still easy to write something based on what happened last year, and you can always go back and fill in the details nearer to the time. For example on a Christmas page you could write:

Each Christmas we have a number of special services to celebrate the birth of Jesus. You would be very welcome to come to our traditional Carol service, or if you have children they may enjoy our fun Nativity service. For further details please visit this page again nearer to the time, or contact us.

If you can include comments from people about how much they enjoyed the event last year, or photos, then so much the better.

Remember that you need to create a link from the rest of your website to each of the pages you have written, otherwise they won't be indexed by the search engines. The easiest way to do this is to have a "diary" or "what's on" page, and then list them as "forthcoming events".

This article came from hosea.co.uk (closed January 2004)