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Bible.com is a vital component of the YouVersion digital brand. It recently reached a new high in terms of organic search performance. It is going over 5 million organic clicks from Google this year. That’s more than any year in the past! But, we know there is so much more we could be doing or doing better.
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WP/CMS Verse Display Plugin #7

Open joshshea opened 4 years ago

joshshea commented 4 years ago

Describe the idea you have in mind WordPress is the most ubiquitous Content Management System on the interwebz today, for better or for worse. Independent bloggers, reputable news outlets and various publishers use WordPress to facilitate their publications every day.

Further, the crux of SEO is {good, legit} backlinks. Even with a great site structure and amazing content (which, obviously, bible.com has), SEO is base on both your reputation and relevance. Both of these signals are calculated by the contextual links back to your site...

Hence, after some research, it seems that other Bible text sites are offering {outdated} plugins for WordPress that are facilitating pulling bible verses into a page, with the appropriate link back to their source sites. Bible.com, however, is not. (important to note - these other sites, particularly BibleGateway.com are outranking Bible.com in several key searches - primarily specific scripture book:chapter:verse searches)

There is a Bible.com plugin to offer a Verse of the day 'widget' - which is a constantly changing value on a website that a GoogleBot cannot effectively grasp consistently to provide relevant backlinks to a specific Bible Verse (a specific URI). This is a great plugin, but may not provide a great SEO boost, as it's content is constantly changing - and is also broadcasting the same text across many many websites, which may incur redundant content penalties. This plugin, therefore, is great for users, but may not be providing SEO benefits.

So - the idea is simple - to provide a WordPress plugin that would be facilitated by a visual UI in the WP admin to pull a shortcode, which would display a Bible Verse in a user-customizable method to track back to Bible.com.

Eg. A publisher/author 'cites' John 3:16, and can simply select that book, chapter and verse in a visual UI in the WordPress editor, and based on their settings, this will display the verse according their preferences, or simply link to it.

This may require additional resources exposed by the Bible/YouVersion API (book, chapter, verse return), but will yield great benefit - if the plugin is distributed appropriately, and marketed to the Bible.com users effectively.

I am happy to develop this plugin if the team so deems this idea worth it.

Defense for the idea - How the idea will improve growth? -- Should trigger increased legitimate backlinks to Bible.com, which will increase both popularity for specific URIs, and overall site Authority. - What area of growth it will improve? -- Organic Site Traffic and increased page rank on SERPs, over a measurable period, commensurate on user/publisher adoption (goes beyond scope of plugin, marketing efforts will be necessary to evangelize the tool to influential publishers and bloggers) - What do you think is estimated level of effort to implement this? -- Once the API is exposed {which I'm guessing is already exposed privately} it's a WordPress plugin - most likely developed within a few weeks from scope determination to deployment. It's a pretty light lift if the API is exposed. If not, 'screen-scraping' is an option, but that's yucky. :) Either way, it's a relatively light lift, that brings benefits to publishers, their readers and Bible.com (in my opinion).

Additional context Can provide upon request if necessary. Again - I volunteer to write the plugin if desired.

Further - this plugin can most likely be migrated to other relevant content management systems.

edit 28 (:D): I would imagine that we can limit this to Public domain, if applicable... and if necessary/required.

mkrajaci commented 4 years ago

@joshshea great idea.

joshshea commented 4 years ago

@mkrajaci - thanks!

I realize that there are licensing issues related to this... i suppose. But... there are also a bunch of public domain versions available (at least):

American Standard Version (ASV) Darby Translation (DARBY) Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition (DRA) King James Version (KJV) World English Bible (WEB) Young's Literal Translation (YLT) Reina-Valera Antigua (RVA) Biblia Sacra Vulgata (VULGATE)

I won't pretend to understand the legalities regarding my idea, but I think it's doable. I'd love to discuss ways to make this a thing if the YV team thinks it appropriate :)