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?

While coming up with your new year’s resolutions and enjoying some bowl games, remember to update the copyright year on your site so you visitors will know your site is current.

If you’re running PHP, here’s a way to set it and forget it:

<?php echo date('Y'); ?>

For example, Copyright © 1999-<?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> will always display the current year. Stick it in a footer or other global-include file and you won’t have to worry about it in 2009.

Any other tips to kick off the new year?

Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog wrapped up a reader poll of their favorite keyword research tools. Here are the free ones for SEO since most of us church webmasters aren’t working with much of a budget. See the full list if you can pony up for a paid tool or for PPC.

• Wordtracker – Ongoing free trial is available where you can get a reduced list of keywords emailed to you.
• Digital Point – Provides data from Worktracker and Overture, though the latter is no longer updating its data. While you’re there, check out the terrific keyword position tracking tool.
• SEODigger – What’s that church up the road ranking for? Find out.
• SEO Book Keyword Tool – One of many cool tools on this site.
• Trellian Keyword Discovery – Get a free taste of their premium product.
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool – Built for PPC, but works for organic search brainstorming.
• Good Keywords – You’ll need to download this one to your desktop, but I haven’t been nagged by them.
• Google Suggest Scraper – From Dave Naylor, so watch out for bad language on the landing page and don’t use it on the Sabbath.
• SpyFu – See organic rankings, related terms and estimated PPC cost.
• MSN AdCenter Forecaster – Another one built for PPC, but can be used for organic church terms.
• Apogee Meta Tag Collector – What are those other churches using in their meta keywords and descriptions tags? Even if the keyword tag has lost much of its value as far as search engines concerned, you can glean what the competition thinks is important. Links the results to Overture, Keyword Tracker and KeyWord Discovery.

Just remember that when you conduct competitive research through someone else’s servers, it’s not a secret.

So, which tools do you use? For example, Google’s Hot Trends wasn’t on the list…

Want to help your church or other non-profit charity rank better in the search engines? Giving of your time and expertise might get you rewarded in the here-and-now, not just in the hereafter. Bruce Clay, an internet consulting firm, is offering a free full-conference pass to SMX in Seattle and two free SEO training courses for the best search engine optimization plan.

Pick a charity that is already using the Web for outreach. That might be your own church or a neighborhood charity. Submit your plan and if it’s picked, make plans for SMX and two rounds of Bruce Clay training. Your flights and hotel aren’t included, but about $4,000 of training is covered. Find out more on the Bruce Clay site.

How About Our Own SEO Contributions for Charity?

This may be too big a commitment for many, so how about we try a mini virtual charity SEO contest here? In the comments, suggest a church site or online charity that could use some SEO help and that would be open to implementing our suggestions. We’ll pick one and see what our readers can come up with. The prize? Um, better rankings!