What do you call the crowds jockeying for too few seats at church on Easter Sunday? This year you can call it March Madness. It’s a safe bet that the pews will be packed so here’s your March Madness grid for churches. Keep track of who’s taking up all the room from the Round of XXXII to the Saintly 16, and from the Ecclesiastic 8 to the Faithful Four.

Which worshipers will make
it the the Faithful Four?

Update on March 18, 2008, Part I - This post is part of Catholic Carnival #164 so check it out.
Update on March 18, 2008, Part II - The “real” grid is available as an iGoogle gadget.

In-house SEOs can learn from The Wall St. Journal’s advice for IT by Amit Basu and Chip Jarnagin.

“Too often, there’s a wall between a company’s information-technology department and everything else. That wall has to go.”

Replace “IT” with “SEO” and you’ll find valuable lessons for in-house SEO. Here are the blueprints from that article adapted for SEO.

1. Begin with SEO literacy — and commitment — at the top
   In-house SEOs need to make the case and tie SEO directly to performance metrics, particularly in dashboards and management reports. If you don’t, no one else will make the connections.
2. Hire an SEO leader who sees the big picture
   Sure, it’s important to know what’s hot on Sphinn, but you also need to understand marketing and technology-and to have strong relationships with the staff in those areas. And if aspects of SEO are outsourced, it’s important for you to closely manage those vendor relationships. As the article says, “Outsourcing simply shifts the emphasis of [SEO] management away from everyday operations and toward broader business considerations such as contract, relationship and performance management.”
3. Create demand for SEO solutions
   Help business areas understand that SEO improvements make their units perform better. Use workshops, brown bag sessions or team meetings to get your SEO points across.
4. Make sure nothing gets lost in translation
   “A company must have people at all levels who can translate [SEO] for those outside that department and translate the language of management for those in [SEO].” All parties should understand the inevitable trade-offs involved with SEO. Sometimes the brand needs to come first, sometimes Legal wins and sometimes the money isn’t there for the technology, but everyone needs to recognize what is and isn’t at stake.
5. Rationalize SEO spending
   Review and justify SEO spending as carefully as you do other technology investments and have an SEO disaster recovery plan.
6. Create a portfolio by evaluating risks and returns
   “There is a myth that IT investments can’t be evaluated because many of the advantages are intangible or can’t be monetized.” Sound familiar? Ensure your results are measurable.

Those are just some of the ways in-house SEOs can take heart in and learn from the challenges their IT colleagues face. What will you add to the list?

Looking for better ways to track your favorite blogs and news sources? Check out AllTop.com from start-up guru Guy Kawasaki. Similar to Popurls.com, you get a single-page dashboard of headlines with previews for a variety of topics. Readers of this blog may be interested in AllTop’s coverage of Religion, Social Media and Nonprofits, but you’ll also find aggregations for:

Autos
Career
Celebrities
Cute
Design
Egos
Fashion
Food
Gadgets
Gaming
Green
Health
Humor
Journalism
Mac
Moms
Music
News
Oddities
Photography
Politics
Science
Small Business
Social Media
Sports
Twitter
Venture Capital
Windows

And yes, you can submit your own sites for consideration through info@alltop.com. Social media optimization has a new friend.

(Tip of the hat to the entertaining and informative Penelope Trunk.)

• Follow-up on March 10, 2008: Dave Naylor’s wish list for AllTop.
• March 11, 2008: Official AllTop announcement.
• March 11, 2008: TopRankBlog covers AllTop and several other aggregators, including socialblogroll.com, originalsignal.com for tracking SEO news and other categories, seomash.com, searchbrains.com and UK’s NewsNow (Christianity to SEO).

Resource Shelf noted a study today about the effects of Web document formatting on user comprehension and behavior (PDF). The University of Washington researchers recreated several different versions of an information site, with one set lacking global navigation (Figure 1 below) and another having tabbed navigation (Figure 2). Other variations included no introductory text (1A, 2A), introductory text followed by bulleted categories (1B, 2B) and introductory text with embedded links (1C, 2C).

Figure 1: Three variations of pages without global navigation.

Figure 2: Three variations of pages containing tabbed navigation.

Some of the findings of how presentation influences reader behavior surprised the researchers:

• Introductory text (B) without embedded links doesn’t increase factual comprehension; nor does it increase total time spent on site
• Tabbed navigation (figure 2) doesn’t influence comprehension of the material, but it does encourage site exploration and increases user satisfaction.
• Introductory text with embedded links (C) increases referential comprehension (understanding how the material relates to other topics), but at the cost of severely reducing satisfaction-particularly in the absence of tabbed navigation (1C vs 2C)
• Link lists without introductions (1A, 2A) generate more page views than link lists with introductions (1B, 2B).
• Tabbed navigation (figure 2) increases the number of pages viewed. While not mentioned in the study, there’s likely an upper limit to how many navigational tabs you can add before this works against you. Just ask Amazon.

So, users like tabs (no surprise), but that introductory text isn’t necessarily going to help comprehension (surprise). Embedded anchor text is good for SEO and reader comprehension, but bad for reader satisfaction. As the abstract states, “structural cues that promote understanding are not necessarily those that promote exploration or enjoyment.” Choose wisely.

Kathryn A. Mobrand, Elisabeth Cuddihy, Edward Galore and Jan H. Spyridakis from the University of Washington published The Effect of Structural Cues on User Comprehension, Navigational Behavior, and Perceptions. Their study involved 282 engineering undergrads from UWA who reviewed Web sites based on the U.S. National Park Service Web site for Big Bend National Park in Texas.

Since I’m considering changing this blog’s name to ChurchMojo.com, I created a Google alert for “church mojo” to monitor the activity on that phrase (and registered the domain). As a Gmail user, it surprised me to see that Google had flagged one of its own Google Alerts as spam.

Adding “googlealerts-noreply@google.com” to your Gmail Contacts will correct the problem, but shouldn’t Google whitelist itself in the first place? And what do you think about ChurchMojo.com as a domain name?

Having just completed the SEOmoz SEO quiz, should I be flattered by the title or disturbed by the implications? Really, I’m on the creative white hat side of the spectrum.

Are you an SEO Expert? Take the SEOmoz quiz and find out.

My post on SEO for photos included a tip on adding your photos to Google’s image labeler. Here’s how to do it.

1. Log into your Google Webmaster Tools, the free application that gives you a glimpse into how Google sees your site.
2. Select “Tools” from the left navigation.
3. Mark the checkbox next to “Enable enhanced image search” and hit OK

Your pictures are now available for tagging through the Google Image Labeler, which gives you a better chance for them to show up in search results.

Google Webmaster Tools includes an image option under “tools”

Select the “Enable enhanced image search” checkbox.

Happy Web Diva offers three SEO tips for images based on a PodCamp presentation by John Ellis in response to Google’s universal search. Here are her takeaways along with a few I’d add to the list.

1. Use keyword-rich file names separated by hyphens.

2. Use the alt attribute with keywords.

3. Add an image caption.

To that great list, you can add:

4. Set the title attribute in addition to the alt attribute using the same text. Some browsers require such an attribute to get the tool tip to pop up. Do not use “Photo of Danny Sullivan” or “Picture of Danny Sullivan.” The search engines already know it’s a photo, they just don’t know who/what’s in the photo. Instead, use:

<img src=”/directory/something/danny-sullivan.jpg ” width=”200″ height=”250″ alt=”Danny Sullivan in full rant mode” title=” Danny Sullivan in full rant mode”>

5. Turn on “Enable advanced image search” in Google Webmaster Tools. (Here’s how.) Doing so makes your images available for tagging through the Google Image Labeler which in turn helps with SEO.

6. Link your thumbnail to a larger, higher resolution version. Put it on a separate, optimized page–so you can track your traffic–rather than linking directly to a JPG. You might also use Flickr, although as Natural Search Blog and SEOROI have pointed out, the site has started no-following most of their links. Nevertheless, it’s still an opportunity to drive traffic.

So, what photo optimization tip are you going to add to the list?

The parish website is down.

These words, perhaps inevitable, are ones I don’t want to have to say or read in an email, especially when approaching the busiest time of the year for church websites. Here’s how we prepared and responded to a recent outage so you can be ready when it happens to your church.

1. Confirm with your admin and/or hosting provider the nature of the outage and when you get expect a resolution. Pad that resolution time because recovery often takes longer than expected.
2. Contact the parish office to let them know you are aware of the situation and the (padded) estimated time for resolution if known.
3. Send an email to your breaking news distribution list, one of the three essential email newsletters every church should have in place. Inform them of the situation and provide an alternate way to get essential church information. In our case, we were able to provide news updates in the email itself.
4. Notify your website editors and contributors that they will not have access to make site updates. It’s helpful to already have a listserv or distribution list in place for the team since you won’t be able to look them up on your site in this situation.

Our site is expected to be out no more than a couple of days so we’re not redirecting the URL to another site, although we do have a Google Pages placeholder ready in case that ever becomes an issue. See Google Page Creator for details about creating a Google-hosted page.

How have you handle outages? Any other steps to add?

In 2007, we saw the NFL throw a flag at churches using Super Bowl gatherings for fund raising. The Souper Bowl of Caring is a way for church and community groups to address hunger and poverty issues through donations and by hands-on involvement the Saturday before the Game That Cannot Be Named. The organization started in 1990 and raised over $8 million in 2007.

You’ll find resources to get you started on the SouperBowl.org site so you can legally leverage the big game.