As a follow up to my goal of boosting our Google rank for the words “greenwich village,” it occured to me while hacking some site templates that a very minor tweak could possibly reap some huge benefits. If you check out the site for a moment, you’ll notice The Village Church logo at the top of the page.

Typically, this kind of thing would be placed on the page using something like a CSS background-image or perhaps an <img> tag. But, for some semantic bonus points, I’m using a method that’s somewhat like Fahrner Image Replacement (design geekery here) to display an image inside of an <h1> tag. You can view the page source to see what I’m talking about. The upshot is that while people see our logo, Google sees the text embedded in the header which, until today, has been “The Village Church.”

The beautiful thing is that I can place whatever I want in that header tag and Google will take note without disturbing the human user on the site. Even better, this header is contained in one include file for the whole site, so I can change this text in one place and see the effects across the site. Sweet. The header (and its title, for what that’s worth) now read “The Village Church in Greenwich Village.”

A lot of thought went into the site architecture when I was doing this redesign–it’s always nice to see a good design carry forward benefits into situations like this.