6 Central Steps- SEO and Accountant's Websites

When designing websites for accountants it's essential to take some time to search optimize them so your site will rank satisfactorily organically in search engines like Google. Your welcome page is the single most visited page on the website which makes it the most vital page to optimize.

Identify the Keywords You'll Optimize To

Focus your SEO on a few important keywords to get the best results. Most searches will include a location, so your town name and state should be on your list. Next up is your profession. Many people will search for you using keywords like accountant, accounting, and CPA. Next, think about the products and services you offer; tax prep, audits, etc; and use those as keywords. The word "keyword" is in and of itself a bit of a misnomer. A keyword can consist of two or more words so you might want to think of them as "Keyphrases". I would recommend choosing two, maybe three of the following keywords:

* Accounting

* CPA

* Accountant

* Accountants

* Tax Preparation

* Business Planning

* Financial Planning

* Audits

Don't forget to include your city and state. This is extremely important. If you try to optimize your site to a competitive keyword like accounting without localizing it I can guarantee your website will disappear into a sea of other results. Also, always use the abbreviation for your state as a keyword. Most people searching by state use abbreviations rather than writing out the full state name. Here's a good example keywords for a hypothetical accounting website in Florida.

* Daytona Beach

* FL

* Florida

* Accounting

* CPA

* Accountants

* Audits

Make Sure Your Content is Unique

The next step in making websites for accountants search engine friendly is writing the actual copy, or "content", for the page. Write 400-600 words and use each keyword 4-5 times. When writing the content try to break it up into different paragraphs and have a paragraph for each keyword. Keywords used at the very beginning and very end of your copy will get a slight boost.

Create Headlines and Use Keywords in Them

Headlines don't just help catch and direct the readers eye to subjects that interest him, search engines love them too. Search engines consider anything they see in a paragraph "header" as more "relevant" to the page, so use your keywords in them wherever possible. Instead of just bolding the headlines apply keyword rich header tags. Each page should have a single H1 tag for the main title and the paragraphs should have H2 or H3 headlines. Almost all web page editors have a setting for headers.

Title Tags and Keywords

Your "Title Tag" is your most important on-page keyword display. This is a "meta" tag, and if your keywords aren't in your "document title" tag you will never score well in it. Each page can have a unique title tag, but as usual your welcome page is the most important. Page titles can be long, but the search engines will ignore everything after the first seven or eight words. List your firm name last as this is not a competitive keyword. A good page title would be...

White Plains, NY Accountants: New York CPA & Audits- Conjectural Financial Services, LLC

"Link Sculpting"

Link your keywords to relevant internal pages on your website. For example you might decide to optimize your welcome page to the keyword "Business Planning". In order to show the search engines that this is an important keyword to you you'll want to add a text link to your home page with that keyword in it and mapping to a page called "Strategic Business Planning".

Alternative Text

Have a nice photo of a popular landmark that is located near your business? Add one to your home page. The search engines can't see images, obviously, but if you add a nice keyword rich "alt tag" they WILL be able to read that. An "alt" or "alternative text" tag can be added to an image by examining the image in your website's page editor.

Websites for accountants are not that hard to optimize. If you grasp what what needs to be done you can get a substantial boost in search engines like Yahoo with a minimum of effort. You may have noticed that this post doesn't breach the subject "backlinks" at all, and there is no doubt, these links are the principal factor for winning sound rankings. This isn't meant to be a thorough tutorial on SEO, but a short primer on the easy things you can do to get the search engines to pay attention to your website.