How to make your sermon more searchable

Making a sermon accessible is different from making it searchable. Your sermon is accessible as soon as it is preached. Transcription, closed captioning, sign language and braille make your sermon more accessible. 

Making sermon content searchable means enabling a searcher to find your sermon content. For example, if a Jerome is looking for sermons related to "forgiveness" he will be able to find your sermon entitled, "Finding Forgiveness in Christ." But if he is searching for the term "grace," he will not find your sermon, because the "grace" does not appear in your sermon's title, even though you interchangeably referred to the terms throughout the sermon. In order to give your sermon the optimal level of searchability, it will need to be transcribed and then posted on your website so that search engines can find the content.

Searchability 101 - post your content online

To recap from the Accessibility page, first get a website, then start a blog on that website, then have your sermon transcribed ideally by a human, but a machine is better than nothing.
Create a new blog post.
  1. In that post, you should make the sermon audio or video file available.
  2. Next to that audio or video file, paste the entire sermon's transcription.
  3. Make the post live and available to the public.
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For an example of a sermon that has been made much more accessible to the general public that most sermons, visit "Serve with Character" by Greg Byman at http://www.stjoecommunitychurch.org/sermons/stand-up-part-3-serve-with-character.
That's pretty much it.  It's a small step, but what a step. Transcribing and posting your sermon content not only makes your material accessible and searchable, but empowers sermon projection.