Do you want better search engine optimization (SEO) for your funeral home and your obituaries? Of course you do! Here is a quick tip for improving your SEO.

Anchor text is a term that refers to the clickable part of a link on a website. In the following link, the anchor text is the word "here": Click here to visit our site.

To improve your SEO, you should ensure your anchor text includes the keywords for the destination link. If your anchor text is "here", like in the example above, you are not helping Google associate relevant keywords with the link. Let me give you a more concrete example. 

Suppose your local newspaper's website is going to link to your funeral home's website. That's great news, because more links mean better SEO! However, not all links are created equally. To get the most bang for your buck, the anchor text for the link should include your funeral home's keywords. 

Can you guess which of the following links for Urban Funeral Home is more beneficial?

Click here for the best funeral home in Ambler

Or

Visit the best funeral home in Ambler

The second option is better, because it associates the words "Ambler funeral home" with the Urban Funeral Home's website. That will improve Urban Funeral Home's rankings when someone searches on Google for "ambler funeral home" or "funeral home in Ambler."

Now let's apply the same concept to obituaries. How can you ensure the obituaries you provide your families show up prominently in Google when someone searches for that individual? The first step is to ensure that when you link to the obituary, you include the obituary name within the anchor text. 

Example: Visit the obituary for LeRoy Hans Munson

Understanding how your can utilize anchor text to target keywords is a great first step to improving your funeral home's SEO! See what I did there? :)

It was announced recently that Legacy.com was acquired by a larger company, one that is heavily invested in the ad business. There was much discussion of this acquisition on other sites, and there seems to be a lot of confusion and misdirection regarding whether obituary hosting sites like Legacy.com and Tributes.com are good or bad for funeral homes.

The short answer is that these obituary hosting sites hurt your funeral home's web strategy. In other words: Own Your Obituaries.

We've discussed before the dangers of allowing others to represent your obituaries on your behalf. We've also covered 5 reasons why you should host your obituaries on your own site. But since so many folks are still being tricked by these large obituary hosting sites, I'd like to illustrate these problems with some concrete examples.

The two main problems with the large obituary directories are that they hurt your SEO and hurt your branding. Keep in mind that as social media further expands your viral traffic, these drawbacks become magnified.

SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your funeral home's website rank high in Google and other search engines for your key terms. If you have good SEO, you'll get lots of organic search traffic. With good SEO, people who search for obituaries, funeral services, cremation options, and other industry terms will come flocking to your site. 

So how do you obtain good SEO? There are many factors, but primarily you need to have good, original content as well as links back to your domain from other sites.

Guess what a good source of original content is: that's right, your obituaries! However, if the obituaries are not actually hosted on your website, that original content does not help your SEO!

The problem with the obituary directory model is that the obituaries do not exist on your funeral home's domain. To illustrate this problem, let's take a look at a funeral home website that uses Tributes.com. 

You'll see that the funeral home's real domain is www.merlehayfuneralhome.com. However, watch what happens when you click on an obituary from their listing.

The obituary itself (and that valuable original content) is hosted on the domain tributes.com, not the funeral home's domain. As a result, when this obituary gets crawled, Google attributes the content as being owned by tributes.com, rather than your funeral home!

Remember, the other main factors of good SEO are links back to your domain. Any site that links to this obituary will be linking to tributes.com domain, not the funeral home's.

That's a double whammy against your SEO!

Branding

Funeral homes, like any other business, spend a lot of time, energy and resources building up their brand. When a visitor comes to your website, the way your site looks and feels projects your brand. Your colors, styles, look and feel constructs your identity that consumers associate with your brand.

But what happens when the majority of your visitors (up to 75% or more) go to an obituary that does not project your brand's colors, look and feel? Well, you just lost all that branding!

That is exactly what happens when your obituaries are hosted on another site. Take a look at Merle Hay's website branding.

Now compare that to what a visitor to their obituaries will see. It looks and feels like a completely different site! The layout, colors, background, and user interface are all different. This inconsistency disrupts the brand's identity that so much effort put into building!

We are not trying to unfairly bash any companies in this industry. We are simply hoping toeducate funeral directors on how their technology choices can influence their business. Hopefully these points help shed some light on the impact of owning your obituaries on your funeral home's website versus outsourcing them to an obituary directory.

The Funeral Innovations Facebook Power Rankings gives an inside looking into how your funeral home's Facebook Page compares against others in the industry.

Curious about which funeral home Facebook Pages are tops? Below you'll find the top 10 funeral home Facebook pages, as scored by the Facebook Power Rankings. 

The rankings are updated monthly with the latest scores, so be sure to get your funeral home's Facebook page ranked as soon as possible. Best of all, the rankings are free!

 

Top 10 Funeral Home Facebook Pages - April, 2012

1. Carson Celebration of Life Center
Maquoketa, IA
Learn everything you need to know about funerals and more by calling our toll-free information hotline at (888) 843-6110, or view us on the web at www.carsonandson.com.

2. Oakcrest Funeral Services
Algona, IA
Helping Families Celebrate a Life Lived. Serving the communities of Algona, Bancroft, Corwith, LuVerne, Renwick, Titonka, Wesley and Whittemore.

3. St. Therese Mission
ST. THERESE MISSION is a complex wherein special pilgrimages, celebrations, religious, cultural and environmental events will attract both Catholics and Non-Catholics from all over the world.

4. Burnam & Son Mortuary and Cremation Services
Bowling Green, KY
Burnam & Son Mortuary is a full funeral service establishment that demonstrates professionalism, dignity and compassion while conducting the highest standards of care in the disposition of human remains.

5. East Lawn
Sacramento, CA
East Lawn Memorial Parks and Mortuaries

6. Maquoketa Area Obituaries
Become a fan of "Maquoketa Area Obituaries" & get obituary updates. It's sponsored as a public service by the Carson Celebration of Life Center in Maquoketa. Call our toll-free info. hotline at (888) 843-6110; or visit www.CarsonAndSon.com.

7. Williams Funeral Home
Columbia, TN
Our funeral home staff is available to address any questions or concerns you may have. You can reach us by phone at (931) 388-2135

8. Chapel of the Chimes Hayward
Hayward, CA

9. Fred Hunter Memorial Services
Hollywood, FL
As the only family-owned and operated full service funeral home, cemetery and crematory in Broward County, we at Fred Hunter’s Memorial Services are dedicated to meeting your needs.

10. Cress Funeral and Cremation Service
Madison, WI
The three things that Cress Funeral Service values most is Service, Service and Service. We define Service as Love and Concern in Action.

Want to see the next 10 in the list? Check out the full rankings now.

We have had the pleasure of working with Mount Sinai Memorial Parks and Mortuaries, one of the largest and most distinguished Jewish mortuaries in the country, on their custom new web presence.

Mount Sinai is based in the Los Angeles area, with unrivaled parks and properties in Hollywood Hills and Simi Valley. Their memorial parks and mortuaries are absolutely breathtaking - see for yourself!

Mount Sinai came to us looking to revamp their web presence. Their existing site was not performing well within Google searches, and the navigation made it difficult for visitors to find what they were looking for. Additionally, the most important part of their site, the obituaries, were un-engaging and difficult to find.

We worked with Mount Sinai to design and deploy a beautiful, custom website that effectively reflected the unique nature of their brand and clientele.

We took into account many unique considerations when designing their custom web presence:

• Provide a classic look and feel with a modern touch
• Integrate colors and design that expressed their Jewish heritage
• Integrate simple, straightforward navigation and content layout that is easy to consume for visitors of all ages
• Display easy-to-find contact information for immediate assistance on every page
• Provide engaging, dynamic online obituaries with enhanced Facebook distribution

Another unique aspect of Mount Sinai is their clientele's expectation of privacy. Because of their stature within the Jewish community, particularly in the Los Angeles area, they serve the families of many prominent figures. As a result, the expectation of privacy is very important. 

This creates a challenge when designing a website that is intended to be both accessible and engaging. However, we were eager to work with Mount Sinai's staff to find a balance between privacy and accessibility.

We achieved this perfect balance through several techniques. First, you'll notice that photos of the deceased are rarely used - we do not display the deceased individual's image on the home page obituary listing nor on the obituary itself. 

Further, we provide the Mount Sinai staff the ability to enable or disable visitor tributes, photos, and videos on the online obituary. Some families they serve prefer to only list their loved one's service information, but not include an obituary or the ability to leave tributes. This was a unique feature developed for Mount Sinai's community.

So how is their new site doing? The results have been nothing short of spectacular! The first month on their new Funeral Innovations web platform experienced record levels in overall traffic, search traffic, Facebook referrals and mobile visitors!

Most of all, we are proud to work with a firm as distinguished and historical as Mount Sinai, and we are fortunate to have learned more about their unique Jewish community.

Have questions or want to improve your Facebook rank? Contact us now - we'd love to chat. 

 

It was inevitable. Ever since Facebook released the new Timeline layout for personal profile pages, we knew it was only a matter of time before the Timeline came to Facebook business pages. And that day has now come. 

Today Facebook announced that it has enabled Timeline layouts for Facebook Pages, and you have 30 days to prepare before it's pushed to your page automatically! Want to see an example? Click here.

What does this change mean to you?

Layout 

The layout of your Facebook Page will now be dramatically different. Check out the before and after shots of the Fred Hunter's Facebook Page below. You'll notice the big new "cover photo", as well as the timeline format of the content. This will be the first thing your visitors will notice.

Before:

After:

Cover Image

The cover image is the attention-grabbing banner of the new timeline layout. Be sure to choose a photo that gets your fans' attention and represents your brand well. 

But be warned: Facebook has strict rules for the new cover image. You cannot include your website address, email address, mentions of the words "Like" or "Share", or any call to action. Since Facebook can revoke your Page, it's important to heed these warnings and not cross this line of self promotion.

Setting your cover image is easy, just click "Add a Cover" and upload one from your computer or choose an image already uploaded to Facebook.

Curate Your Timeline

With the new timeline, you can highlight, edit or delete content you want to emphasize or remove. So go through your timeline and click the star to highlight your best posts, such as those that are visual or important. Starred posts will show up as full width.

Tabs

Your application tabs, such as the fan-gate and microsite will still exist, however by default all visitors will go straight to your timeline view. 

Admin Panel

As the Facebook Page admin, you'll see a new Admin Panel at the top of your page. This gives you a quick look into some of the stats and updates taking place on your Facebook Page. In the admin panel, you'll also see a new feature: private messages. This will you to have private communications with your fans, to answer questions or provide them help without leaving your Facebook Page.

Conclusion

The new timeline for Facebook Pages is a game changer for funeral homes! It completely changes how your fans will interact with your page, and makes quality, shared content even more important. If you already publish good, engaging content to your Facebook Page on a regular basis, you'll love the new timeline because it'll make your Facebook Page look even more beautiful and your fans will stay on your page longer. 

Do you have questions on the new timeline? If so, we'd love to hear from you! Just contact us today.

We're excited to announce the release of Carson & Son's brand new funeral home website! Carson & Son is a Maquoketa, Iowa funeral home with whom we have partnered for several years in various respects. We've recently worked closely with Don Carson to design and construct a one-of-a-kind web presence to differentiate their unique brand. 

Carson & Son is a progressive firm, and was among the first funeral homes to embrance the concept of "Celebrations of Life", rather than focus simply on death and mourning. They now offer a suite of One Last Time Events, (including One Last Round®), which are personalized celebrations of life that honor the deceased individual's unique life lived. 

When we began designing his new web presence, Don knew he wanted a look and feel that reflected his firm's progressive nature. It was critical that the design be modern and unlike any other in the industry. In fact, Don wanted a web presence that didn't even look like a funeral home website at all!

Rather than dark and subdued, he wanted bright and welcoming. Instead of static and old, he wanted modern and dynamic, with videos, slideshows and engaging elements. I think you'll agree that his new web design is a home run!

Browse around Carson & Son's website and you'll notice the beautiful touches, large and small, that make Carson's site different.

• Bright, welcoming colors within the background, text, images and buttons
• Beautiful obituary listing, easy to access right on the home page
• Interactive, informative, and engaging slideshow of services
• Intuitive and easy to use navigation from every page
• "Pet Passings" - full fledged obituaries for pets
• Custom blog, showcasing local news and events
• Unique cornfield background design, which highlights Carson & Son's heartland roots
• Full Facebook integration to drive viral traffic

Facebook

Don also wanted to harness the marketing and communication power of Facebook. We worked with Don to create an elegant and effective Facebook strategy, starting with his uniquely designed Fan-Gate and custom, interactive Microsite. Using the FI Copilot, Carson & Son's Facebook wall remains active and engaging.

The result has been one of the fastest growing Facebook Pages we've seen, already with over 150 new fans since launching from scratch!

We're proud to say that our partnership with Carson & Son has resulted in a new web and Facebook presence that ranks among the best and most unique in the entire industry!

 

Facebook Pages don’t grow by themselves. In order to grow your fan base, you must take action to promote and market it. Once you do, your Facebook Page will prove to be an invaluable marketing tool, each and every day.

Follow the tips below and your fan base will be growing in no time!

Note: To get 10 bonus tips, visit our Facebook Page now! 

1. Invite Your Friends

Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But this is where you must start! There are two ways of inviting your friends directly on Facebook:

1. The “Invite Friends” link on the right side of your Facebook Page lets Page admins select a bunch of friends to invite at once. 

2. The “Share” link on the left side of your Facebook Page lets anyone share the page to their personal profile, with an optional message. This is actually more effective than the invite friends method above, since sharing it to your profile makes it more noticeable to your friends.

2. Promote on Your Website

Add the Facebook “like” or “recommend” button to your website, so visitors can become a fan with a single click, without leaving your site! You can construct the code for this button from Facebook:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/

 

3. Add Your Facebook Page to Your Email Signature

You can set this up in just a couple minutes, and it’ll continue to pay dividends by promoting your Facebook Page to everyone you email through out the day!

 

4. Hook to Twitter

Why update your posts in two places each time? Synchronize Facebook with Twitter, so every time you post to your Facebook Page, it’s automatically tweeted to your Twitter account!

It’s extremely easy to setup: just to go http://facebook.com/twitter to synchronize your accounts.

 

5. Add Facebook to your Business Cards

Each time you hand out a card to a colleague or community member, they’ll have your Facebook address in the palm of their hand! 

 

6. Add Facebook to Your Obituary Notifications

We send thousands of obituary notifications on behalf of our clients, each day. And every email contains a link to their Facebook Page.

 

7. Get a Vanity URL

By default, your Facebook Page’s web address (URL) will be long and obscure, with a bunch of meaningless numbers and letters. Fortunately, Facebook lets you shorten it to something easier to remember!

Facebook used to require you to have at least 25 fans to get a vanity URL, but now every page can!

Just go to http://www.facebook.com/username to choose a shorter address for your Facebook Page.

Just one word of warning: once you set your username, Facebook will not let you change it!

8. Facebook Comments

Replace your blog’s comments with Facebook comments to gain more exposure and distribution. Every comment that is left is also optionally shared to the user’s Facebook profile, providing more distribution back to your blog!

Additionally, any comment you add is also posted to your funeral home’s Facebook Page, engaging your fans. You can find the comments plugin here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments/

As an added bonus, Facebook Comments dramatically cut down on spam, since it requires a valid user account!

9. Fan Gating

Did you know that sending new visitors to your Facebook Page’s wall is a huge lost opportunity? If they don’t fan your page the first time they see it, they’ll probably never return. 

Fan Gating is a technique to show a custom splash page to non-fans, encouraging them to “like” your page and become a fan, thus gaining you long-term marketing exposure to them. Fan-Gating has been shown to increase your fan conversions by up to 300%! 

10. Share Good Content

Sharing good content is the single most important way to succeed on Facebook. The reason is that when your fans engage with your posts (like, comment, or re-share), two important things happen:

1. Subsequent posts by you will be shown to them more prominently by Facebook.
2. Your post will be exposed to your fan’s social network, thereby promoting your page to new potential fans! 

In other words, good posts result in more growth.

 

 

Want More???

 To get 10 bonus tips, visit our Facebook Page now! 

 

 

At the ICCFA Wide World of Sales Conference in Las Vegas, we had the pleasure of presenting to the audience on how funeral homes can go viral on Facebook. We described the basics of setting up a Facebook Page for your funeral home, and presented some tips for growing and engaging your fan base. 

We were floored by the response! We were amazed at how many funeral directors recognized the value of Facebook, yet before the presentation, they were still unsure of how to take advantage of the opportunity.

Make no mistake, Facebook is a huge wave washing over this industry, and those who "learn to surf" are going to succeed at the expense of those who don't. 

Check out the presentation slides below. To access exclusive tips for improving your Facebook presence, just fan the Funeral Innovations Facebook Page and download our whitepapers: 

1. 20 Funeral Insider Tips to Get More Facebook Fans
2. 15 Tricks for Funeral Homes to Engage Their Facebook Fans

The end of another year means another opportunity for a year-end list! Here's you'll find the 5 most popular Funeral Innovations blog posts of 2011. If you missed any of these, be sure to read up on them to stay on top of the industry!

As a bonus, I've included a short summary of what made each post imporant and why it was particularly popular in 2011.

5. Top 5 Reasons Why Your Obituaries Should be Hosted on Your Website

Many companies sperad misinformation to take advantage of funeral directors, particularly when it comes to the value of obituaries and search engine optimization. This article busts one of those lies and educates funeral directors about why it is critically important for your obituaries to be hosted on your own website, rather than through a 3rd party site or iframe.

This article was particularly popular because many funeral directors can relate to how companies within this industry try to take advantage of them. Educating and empowering funeral directors on the importance of having the obituaries on their website was very eye openeing to many folks.

4. SEO for Small Funeral Homes

Small funeral homes have a distinct disadvantage when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), since their funeral home website naturally has fewer backlinks and less authority within Google. Fortunately, this article offered several tips that can drammatically help a small funeral home's SEO, and increase the amount of organic traffic they attain.

This blog post appealed to many funeral directors because the tips for improving SEO, while targeted towards small funeral homes, can actually improve the performance of any funeral home website!

3. Announcing Remembrance Codes

This year Funeral Innovations became the first company in the industry to use QR codes as a way of memorializing your loved ones. Funeral Innovations released a new way for these small barcodes to be scanned by people's cellphones to be brought to a loved one's permanent online memorial. While many other companies have since followed our lead, we were the first to put the QR codes on monuments, to link the physical stone to the online memorial. We now are using QR codes within service folders so service attendees can quickly access to the funeral home's mobile website and leave a tribute.

Read the article to learn more about how Remembrance Codes work. This article garnered a lot of attention because it introduced a new concept of using QR codes within the funeral industry, that has since been more widely adopted by others.

2. Leaders vs Followers in the Funeral Industry

In 2011, Funeral Innovations became the industry's leader in Facebook for Funeral Homes, offering custom Facebook Pages for funeral homes, including powerful fan-gating techniques and Facebook Microsites, full-fledged tabbed websites right within Facebook. Our new approach to Facebook for funeral homes, along with our beautiful designs gained us a lot of attention. Our competitors were caught off guard by our offerings and scrambled to catch up, in some cases copying our designs and marketing a little too closely! But imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and we are indeed humbled by the overwhelmingly enthusiastic reception to our Facebook solution.

A little controversy is always good for getting attention, and this post was no exception. Published at the end of 2011, it quickly became one of the most popular posts on this blog, receiving a huge amount of viral traffic through Twitter and Facebook. 

1. Top 25 Funeral Companies and Funeral Homes on Twitter 

In advance of our presentation on social media for the funeral industry at the ICCFA Wide World of Sales Conference, we compiled a list of the top funeral homes and funeral companies on Twitter. Little did we know just how popular this list would become! It has driven an enormous amount of viral and organic visitors, and continues to be one of our most popular posts ever, even a year after it was initially published! 

This post became popular for several reasons. It's particularly useful to know the top funeral companies on Twitter, especially with so many funeral homes now recognizing the value of social media. Additionally, many people who are searching for top funeral companies are coming across this post, and it has consistently ranked as one of our most trafficked organic results. 

And the good news is we'll be compiling a new list of top funeral companies in social media in 2012. So keep your eyes open for that!

What's Coming in 2012?

We hope you enjoyed all the amazing and exciting developments from 2011. We encourage you to continue returning to this blog for education, insights and announcements of the latest innovations in the funeral industry. We promise you that 2012 will be an even bigger year than the last!