As I was looking through some of the AWStats for MyChurch.org, I couldn't help but notice that several search engine queries for "Living Stones Christian Church Milpitas" resulted in some click-thrus to MyChurch. Living Stones was the church plant that Carol and I had supported for half a year...

But what is really interesting is that their MyChurch page showed up before their own home page in the search results. See for yourself. There are 2 reasons why this is suprising:

1. There is not much activity on Living Stones' MyChurch profile. They have 7 members and barely any content...
2. There is NO search engine optimization done on MyChurch.org. Meta-tags, clean URL's, church names/locations as webpage titles, subdomains - we do absolutely NONE of that...for now.
   

SEO is something we're studying. And we plan to do it right. (we've just been caught up in a really nasty cookie issue that causes fickle logouts when using Internet Explorer). But imagine how powerful SEO will be for MyChurch when done correctly...

Imagine googling "San Jose churches" and the first page of results are all MyChurch.org church profiles.

I have the audacity to claim that, in a year from now, a church's profile on MyChurch may be more important than its regular webpage (so much for being humble). Why? How? Because churches in the future will focus their efforts on Google visibility instead of yellow pages visibility. And because Google loves links. Its page ranking for a website is based on how many other sites are linking to said website. How will a regular church's webpage get backward links? Unless it has a blog or otherwise dynamic and rich content, the obvious answer is that it won't.

MyChurch.org on the other hand is getting lots of relevant links. These are just (what I call) static links - individual church websites are linking to their own MyChurch profiles. Once we start aggregating and highlighting content like blogs, sermons, events (what I call dynamic links), the oneway links to MyChurch should increase significantly. MyChurch's page rank will be higher than any single church's website. This is the power of the long tail.

Its already happening for Living Stones Church - a church that recently had a complete webpage makeover by a professional church web design company.  Their bare MyChurch profile's google page rank trumps their professional one.  And we weren't even trying...

Sidenote: Hiten Shah and Neil Patel of ACS Consulting are 2 guys I'd like to work with. I've met Hiten in person and I read Neil's blog, which has lots of SEO/SMO tips (today's for example)