1. Search engines
People often assume that a search engine will automatically find new websites and add them to their index. That is great in theory, but in reality if you want a search engine to index your site then you must submit your site's address to it. It would take ages to do this manually for all the major search engines, but fortunately there are some automated services that will help you for free. We suggest you try one of these:

Submit Corner

Submit Express

If you submit your homepage to the search engines you will find that they will also index other pages from your site as well. In theory they should index the whole of your site, but in practice most search engines have size restraints which prevent them doing this. You can get more of your site listed if you periodically submit different pages of your website to the search engines. But never submit more than one page to a search engine each month, or they may think your site is 'spam' and remove it from the index altogether.

Many search engines don't just look at the content of your site, but also check how many other sites link to you. The more sites that link to you the more popular your site is considered to be. If a site which links to you is itself popular (i.e. lots of other sites link to it) then so much the better. Having links to your website is therefore very beneficial to you: firstly popular sites are given higher priority in the search results, making it easier for people to find your site; secondly the search engines will index a higher proportion of your web pages.

Incidentally, note that even when you submit your site's address to a search engine it could still take up to a couple of months before your site is indexed and available for people to find.

2. Church directories
Being listed in an online church directory doesn't just enable people using the directory to find your church. It also creates a link from their website to yours, which in turn means that your website is rated more highly by search engines. Therefore it is worth getting listed in all the church directories you come across. We recommend the following:

Our sister site: UK Christian Links (which also operates a reciprical links program)

ChurchNet UK

ChurchUK

Kingdom Seek

Also the website of your diocese, network, or denomination.

If your church website is good, then try and get listed in the relevant section of the Open Directory Project as well. A listing there will be picked up by lots of the search engines, and so is very worthwhile.

3. Community sites
If you can get other local community websites to link to you then you have provided an excellent way for local people to find your church website even if they weren't intending to! Doing this is therefore highly worthwhile, though it takes time.

First of all you need to find the websites for organisations in your area. Using a couple of search engines (e.g. Google and Altavista) try to think of searches (e.g. placename or postcode) which will identify local sites. Your could also try using a couple of directories (e.g. Yahoo! and Open Directory Project) and find a catagory which contains local sites.

The local sites you find will probably include schools, charities, churches, residents associations, etc. For each site check whether they have a 'links' page to link to other local sites. If they do then send the webmaster an e-mail and ask them if they would consider linking to your site as well. They will probably agree if you offer to link from your site to theirs in return (a 'reciprocal link').