If you've been following the recent topics, then you know your funeral home website is more important than just a few pages online. You know that search engine optimization can make a huge difference in how often you get found in search results. Now you also know where to get started to make improvements.
What if these changes do not show improvement in your website ranking? Or could other things be affecting your website to offset the good work you are doing?
Check these five items to see if any of them affect your website.
- No Inbound Links – Google, and the other search engines, will often find your website based on the other sites that link to you. The number of links coming to you and the quality of those links play a huge role in how Google determines your credibility and rank. See if local florists will link to you from their site. Most state funeral directors associations have websites, see if they will link to you.
- Too much Flash or fancy graphics on the website – Flash is the really interesting animation that goes in some websites. It is great to look at, but offers nothing for search performance. Anything in Flash is virtually invisible. If you have Flash on your website, make sure you do everything else right (Meta-Data, inbound links, etc) to compensate.
- Trouble with your website address – If your funeral home website address points to another website address without your funeral home name then that really hurts. For example, your website should be at www.smithfuneralhome.com, not www.freewebsite.com/yellowpages/smithfuneralhome. That is too complicated to fit on a business card anyway.
- Not enough content on your website – Generally, if you have less than 2500 words on your site, you will be penalized. If you have a small website without much content, install a Blog.
- Website is too new – The age of your website does play into the search algorithm Google and others use. The reason being, fly-by-night scam websites often go up and down quickly. There is not a lot you can do about this, but you can register your website address (domain name) for longer than a year. Doing this does give an indication that you intend to be around for a while.
How do you check some of these items? First, run your website through www.websitegrader.com . It is free and will give you lots of area for improvement.
Also make sure you have Google's Webmasters tools and Google Analytics installed into your website. Both of these tools are also free and provide a wealth of information.
