Heal Your Church Web Site: The 10 Commandments of Church Website Search Engine Optimization

This is good: Heal Your Church Web Site: The 10 Commandments of Church Website Search Engine Optimization but I would add one more

11. Get a proper domain name and have it hosted properly. It is not very expensive to register a domain name and if you do it is not very expensive to have it hosted so that it works properly.

There are a variety of schemes (oops nearly typed scams) that use frames so that your domain appears in the browser url but the site is hosted at http://LookAtMyFreeHosting.com/Long/Random/Domain/Name/And/Path

There are so many problems with this, but here are a couple.

• When people come in via the search engine they come to the real domain name rather than the one you have paid for. That may also mean the site does not work properly (typical problem with frames and search engines). It will drop your search rankings (url does not match content or search words). It will break the 9th commandment as typically these sites don't stay around the same host for long.
• As people move around the site they can't bookmark individual pages as the url won't change.

Comments

[Mean Dean]

Y'know its so funny you mention domain names. The original cut of commandment 6 "You shall not create crufty URIs" I had included some language about "that goes for your domain name as well" or "don't use hyphenation and/or acronyms ..."

I couldn't work it out verb-wise, so thanks for adding to the list!

[DaveW]

Ah well I did not enter into the spirit of the language so it was cheating somewhat. Call it the GEV text (Geeky English Version) ;-)