Promote Your Business by Using These Vital CPA Site Techniques

A lot of accounting businesses wait until their site is posted before considering guidelines to help them better market it, and this is a horrendous irony. There are a few really critical steps your business can take during the design stage that will pay substantial dividends down the road. Your firm's CPA website design can be consummate down to the last detail and nevertheless be a total failure. In order to earn capital the right people need to be capable of locating your website at the right time, and the only real way to accomplish this is to earn a better ranking on the search engine results pages.

Title Tags Matter

There are hidden tags on individual web pages referred to as meta tags designed specifically to communicate with search engines like Google and Bing. One of these tags, the "Title" tag, is terribly valuable to the way Google will position you pages. Don't try to take over the internet with unreasonably long title tags. You can make a title tag as long as you want but after 70 characters or so the search engines are going to ignore them. I'd recommend using some variation on this title tag:

MyTown, ST Accounting : Practice Name

You'll notice that in this example we used "ST" as the abbreviation for your state. When writing page titles keep in mind that very few searchers actually write out the name of their state, so as a rule it's best to optimize your page to the abbreviation.

A firm name isn't usually a strong enough brand for people to just type in, so insisting on putting the firm name first is usually a foolish vanity. Titles are a primary element of a pages relevance to a specific search term so unless your firm has a recognizable brand like "Netflix" or "Kelly Clarkson" it's not likely to actually be used as a search term by people looking for your service. Also, your firm name is probably not a terribly competitive phrase. If you only get 70 characters to describe your page do you really want to spend them on your firm name? Unless there are 10 other firms with exactly the same name it's pretty likely you'll be able to get on the first page for that search term without any trouble. Stick to your town, your state, and a primary keyword like "CPA".

The OTHER Meta Tag

The "Page Description" is also a meta tag, and it's rather like the red-headed stepchild to the "Page Title". Google doesn't use it to rank sites anymore so a lot of CPA website designs ignore it, and this is a mistake because Gooogle actually displays this tag as part of it's search results. This actually makes age descriptions really important since they are often the first impression searchers get of your firm. A good search ranking won't help you as much if you have a lame description that costs you clicks! Again... Google isn't going to let you go nuts on your description. There's a 150 character limit so make it short and sweet but, like a headline, enticing enough to get people to want to read more.

Add Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free product that allows you to view the traffic that occurs on your website. If a visitor comes in from a search it will tell you what keywords they used to find you, which page the search landed them on, and whether they stayed long enough to read it or just "bounced" back to the search page. The amount of information provided by this product makes it an absolute must for any serious CPA website design. Even if you don't use it right away I can guarantee at some point you're going to want exactly the kind of conversion data that Google Analytics offers. All you need to do to make it work is add a strip of code to the bottom of each page.

Content Matters... a Lot

Good meta tags won't help you unless the tags on each page are actually relevant to the content on their respective pages. The search engine robots have become very sophisticated and can easily compare a pages tags to it's visible text and make sure they match.

Google is hip to all the dirty tricks that spammers used to rely on like cramming the page with keywords, using tiny text, writing hidden text on the same colored background, etc, so don't even waste your time trying to be clever. You need to take the time to write some good, high quality content that will demonstrate to Google that the page is truly relevant to the title by using your title tag keywords in the text. Don't overdue it. The best way to optimize the page is to NOT worry too much about optimize the page. Shoot for about a 1% keyword density, so if your page is 500 words try to use each keyword in your title about 5 times.

Every Journey Begins with a Single Step

After your accounting website is public you still have a lot more work to do. If you ignore these fundamental guidelines, though, you'll quickly find you're working a lot harder to get the same results. Once your design is published you'll want to begin attracting links, and you'll have to figure out how to promote your website on Google Places. All we've done with this post is guide you to the right road. If you'll consider these simple CPA website design rules from the outset you'll be well positioned to step in as a leader in today's strange, exceedingly competitive market.