The Right Strategy for Taking Advantage of Keywords on Accountant Websites

As you're reading this article I'm going to make a number of material presumptions about you. I'm going to presume you're an accountant, I'm going to consider that you either have or intend to get a website, and finally I'm going to suppose that you have already seen the relevance of the internet in attracting prospective clients into your practice. It's rather late to reap the profits of being an "early adopter". Those companies have already reaped the benefits of being in the pole position, but there remains opppotunities for practices to excel that are willing to take some time to actually learn how to adequately optimize their websites. Of course I'm assuming a lot. You really need first-rate accountant websites to make this work, but if you know some simple tricks you can launch the procedure of improving your search engine rankings and this is the key to growing your firm today. Now we're not going to tell you everything you need to know about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, but we are going to get you started. First, SEO changes fast, so if you haven't been keeping up forget everything you think you know about it.

There was a time not to long ago when it was easy to get a good ranking in the search engines. All you had to do was "stuff" your pages with keywords, you could even hide them as invisible text or on pages that only the search engines could see, and you'd soon find yourself at the very top of the rankings. 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.

Still, the appropriate use of keywords within page content is remains vital to the success of well optimized accountant websites. One element that's remained very effective is the optimization of meta tags, particulary page descriptions and titles. Search engines will look at these tags and will consider them against the actual page content to determine a relevance score for the site. In other words, if your page title is "accountant websites in Nashville" but the page is actually about NASCAR the content won't have any "accountant" or "websites" related keywords and the search engines will know you're trying to play them. The thinking is that if a headline or title contains optimized words and phrases, it is reasonable to assume the content that follows from those headlines and titles will be on the same topic and therefore will also have a high degree of relevance.

There is another meta tag you've probably heard of is the "keyword list". Back in the old days the this tag was very important to a website's ranking. For the most part keyword lists are pretty much useless now. Most search engines don't apply any importance to your keyword list, and if any still do they're not giving it much more than a backwards glance. It can't hurt to use the tag, but don't expect any real results from it.

So how does this apply specifically to accountant websites? Well like all businesses before you can start building links you need to get your tags in order. Use your tags. Make sure your page titles and descriptions are honestly descriptive of your page content and give all your important pages (especially your home page) unique tags. 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. First, they allow you to continue to entice readers by offering them specific, highly relevant information on commonly encountered issues and topics that they may be wondering about, allowing you to position yourself as the solution to their needs. 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. This allows you to establish calls to action that ask the reader to click through to your site. You can also improve traffic to your site, and that's the true object of accountant websites: more traffic means more business.

Brian O'Connell is the CEO and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's largest web design firms dedicated entirely to first-class accountant websites. His firm presently provides websites for more than 5000 CPA, accounting, and bookkeeping firms.