That was only so they could have a unified presence with each ward and stake having an official site on LDS.org. Sure they look minimal at times now, but they are planning new features that will really make these stand out and these will always be somewhat more than what many people can program themselves. These will prove to be highly useful to many.

On the ‘search engine optimization’ matter, there have been some recent changes in the search engine industry of late that will change the way most earch engines rank sites.

Now they will take into account the age of the site, and the relevancy of the content. For example, if a site has a webring link or an FFA (Free For All) link page, it may not be looked on as favorably as it might have in the past . The links should be to similar or generally related content, and the content of the page should be relevant to the overall page. Page Rank is no longer considered that important now.

The Church has it right on both counts. The lds.org site has existed in some form since 1997 but only with conference talks added by the Church after the conference is over, and the content since 2000 has been added to by the Church itself on a rather frequent basis, with links largely to other websites owned or maintained by the Church or its other organizations, such as BYU.

One problem has been the long URLs. There’s a certain point at which Google will bypass a particular page’s URL and not list it if it is too long of a character string in one part of a URL, usually the last part (as is seen in some of the beta site pages right now). There are some other URL string issues that should also be resolved, which will actually help search engines spider all applicable pages on the site properly, the end result is that the desired result of putting up lds.org, getting the words of the Prophets out to the world, will be available to anyone, just by searching on a topic and finding the lds.org results in their search. And not just one page, but maybe quite a few separate article pages at that.

One of the goals of SEO (search engine optimization) is to find out what search terms people are using, which “should” bring them to your site, but are actually taking them elsewhere. Looking at your own logs doesn’t tell you that. Ttheoretically, you want to look at your competitors’ logs.

For instance, my blog gets people from around the world looking for the Book of Mormon in various world language translations. My blog side-bar has links and phone #’s that people can go to and call. Theoretically, I’d like those people to originally go to the proper LDS.org web page. My goal is to supplment, not steal from, whatever is on LDS.org and Mormon.org

Call to action for bloggers: If you have a public counter/tracker, send Larry the URL. If you have a private one, or a private referral log, send him an occasional snap-shot if you think that LDS.org or Mormon.org should be getting some of those referrals from search engines.

That may help him see what people are looking for, determin if it is something that the church websites could/should be offering, and how to craft or improve DS.org and Mormon.org pages to rank better for those queries.

If you are tech-savvy, set up something to “grep” (filter) those logs, and send him just the referral entries from search engines.

I also like the comments by J. and Geoff.

Oh to have a crystal ball and see how this develops.