[bt-devel] web site home page text

[Eeli Kaikkonen]

On Mon, 16 Nov 2009, Raoul Snyman wrote:
> An upside to using a CMS is that we can have more folks helping out with
> the site, including folks who are not XML and Subversion savvy. Also, if we
> were to go the Drupal route, we could simply enhance the blog, and then
> move it to the main domain. Much less hassle than running both the blog and
> the site as separate systems.

Other things to consider are page translations and a forum. Can the
pages be translated with Drupal? Does it have an integrated forum or is
it easy to add one? We have the subforum under www.crosswire.org/forums
but it's not very active and people don't find it because we don't link
to it. We should do something about it. We had a forum once but we had
less folks doing things then and didn't want to take the burden of
operating it.

> Eeli, you are 100% on the mark. With my OpenLP project, one of the other
> guys and I worked on some SEO to get OpenLP higher in search results. By
> just adding some appropriate text to the home page's title, and then
> rewording the "mission" block in the middle of the home page, we were able
> to skip to the front page of Google in less than a week.
>

> Also, getting a number of people to add links from their sites/blogs/etc to
> the BibleTime site, using the words "free Bible study program" will get
> more traffic to the BT site, and will raise the ranking on search engines
> like Google for the phrase "free Bible study program."

Yes, and it's better to have links from mutually independent domains. I
hate facebooks and twitters but they are worth keeping for this reason
alone :) And I don't even have a link from my own home page! It has to
be done immediately.

Are we going to be "evil" with our search optimization? I don't mean
spamming or such, but for example adding the word "life" could get
searches like "life application bible study". It wouldn't feel very
wrong because "application" (and "program") may have a different
connotation attached with "Bible study" but it's still a standard word
for "software", and people interested in bible study might be interested
in BibleTime, too.

But the most important thing is to find the relevant searches which
people might use and add all the words in critical places. We could all
spend ten minutes thinking about and testing some searches, and the
results can be dramatic for BibleTime's success. After all, we don't
have much means to attract people, except www searches and links.

  Yours,
	Eeli Kaikkonen (Mr.), Oulu, Finland
	e-mail: eekaikko at mailx.studentx.oulux.fix (with no x)