Accountant Websites- Correctly Making Use of Tags

10/13/2011 16:58

If you're a CPA you probably already realize the significance of using your website and additional online resources to pull in new clients. You already recognize the world wide web is an enormously competitive market that changes in a flash, and in order to take advantage of it effectively as a prospecting tool, it's necessary to have optimized page content with an extremely high degree of relevance to searchers. This gives effective accountant websites additional visibility by ranking them higher in the search engines like Google. Search engine optimization (SEO) has changed quite a lot over the past few years, however, with the meta-crawlers that search engines use to determine page relevance becoming smarter and smarter.

A few years ago, many businesses simply "stuffed" their websites with keywords, frequently indexing keyword-dense pages in places only the meta-crawlers could find. However, search engines began to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily leading end users to the kind of relevant information they were looking for, so the meta-crawlers were updated and SEO best practices had to change along with them.

This does not mean that the content of the page, what we call "on-site factors" in the biz, doesn't matter. While you can no longer get a good ranking just by tweaking your page, you'll never rank well no matter how much work you do if you don't get a few of the basics right. One element that's remained very effective is the optimization of meta tags, particulary page descriptions and titles. This is because the meta-crawlers that determine the relevance of websites will look to headlines and titles for the use of keywords. If the content of the page and the meta tags match the search engines will notice this, and this will boost the page's "relevance" score. Don't even bother with cheesy old-school cheats like tiny text, keyword stuffing, gateway pages and mouseover redirects. These tricks not only won't work they'll actually piss of the search engines.

So how can accountant websites make effective use of these SEO techniques? Well, one of the first things you should do is ensure that all the pages on your website, from the homepage and landing page right down to each and every interior page, including the one that lists your contact information, makes seamless and well-integrated use of important accounting-related keywords. You can also boost visibility by referencing your local area frequently--this will capture you a larger share of the people who are searching for CPA websites within your city or region.

On it's own a website only has so much power, and in order to really do well in the search engines you'll need help from other sites. That's why more and more accountant websites are using blogs to boost both readership and rankings.

Of course there's limits to what even a blog can accomplish, don't expect this strategy to be any more than a good start to a succesful website. But a blog will help you keep your accountant website active in two ways. For one thing it's a great way to draw readers. Accountant websites are great tools, but blogs are a lot more dynamic and fun. You can also use your blog to link to your main website, and search engines love that. It will be really good for your rankings to have an active blog full of relevant content linking to your your site. Blogs can even lead straight to sales. All you need to do is produce an effective call to action with a text link back to your website. You'll also step-up traffic to the website, and that's the real object of accountant websites: more traffic means more clients.