Domain names are very important when it comes to dealing with search engines. Wondering how important? Take a look at the recent article from the Notable Samurai. Here are some details and how it applies your own CPA website.

There are many CPA firms that wonder about what to use as a domain name for their CPA website. The default is to use their firm or last name. While that certainly gives you a unique domain name, it isn’t strong when it comes to search engines.

Even Larger Corporations Need a Good Domain Name

What It Really Means. The article basically points out how creditcards.com gets a better search result than any major credit card company. This is for the search term “credit cards” and yet the credit card companies have much better page rank. Not only that they have a huge number of incoming links, are talked about in the news all of the time, etc.

What It Means to You. Your domain can be much stronger if it includes some of the words that people are using to search. How strong? As the previous paragraph points out, in some cases strong enough to do better than some major established domains. Think of keywords that people might use to find you…

Your Location. One obvious keyword is your location. When an online search is made, more people want to find someone they can trust locally. So if you live in Winooski, Vermont then Winooski may be a good keyword to have in your domain.

What You Do. The next obvious one to use is what you do. If you are a CPA then you want to use this as a keyword as well. So, taking the example above, consider using winooskicpa.com.

This gives you a leg up when you are starting your CPA website. Want more proof? Norm has a blog that talks about this same domain issue with a Lemus and Company in Florida with cpadoral.com as a domain.

Have your own thoughts on domain names? How have you found your own domain useful with marketing your CPA firm? Fill out the comments below and share with other readers.

Incoming links from blogs, articles and other websites are absolutely essential to your search engine optimization planning. The more links that point to your CPA website, the better. Even if the content of your CPA website isn’t optimized, numerous relevant, keyword targeted, incoming links can more than make up for that deficiency.

It’s possible, in fact, to rank number one in search results for your chosen keywords just through incoming links. That’s not to say you should neglect your site’s content when optimizing your CPA website for search engines – it’s just an illustration of the power of incoming links.

There’s quite a few ways to bring in links to your CPA website, but today we’re looking at just one of them. We’ll cover the others in a future post.

The most direct way to generate links to your CPA website is to create them yourself. It takes some time and some research, but it’s otherwise very straightforward.
Quite simply, get published on blogs or other sites and include a link back to your site.

First, you’ll need to build a list of sites, blogs, message boards and forums that accept comments or – better yet – contributions in the form of articles, columns or guest blog posts. Sites relevant to your own are best. If the site’s subject and keywords match your own, the links from that site to yours will carry more weight.

It’s easier said than done, but once you’ve got a list of sites and blogs to contribute to, it’s time to write some content. Often, you can do this work yourself without devoting an overwhelming amount of time. For example, if you contribute to a discussion on an appropriate web forum, simply include a link to your site in your signature or account’s profile. If you comment on a blog post and you have the option, include a link back to your site.

Not only to blog comments and forum posts take up little time, they’re doubly valuable because you’re interacting with a community. You can build your own reputation and value to the community while you’re generating incoming links. If you bring value to the blog or forum with your posts, more people are going to click your links and they’ll be more likely to give you their business once they arrive at your site.

Longer content – more than just comments and contributing to discussions – articles, guest blog posts and other submissions to sites are very useful as well, but require a bit more work to generate the content. It’s worth the time (or the money spent hiring or finding a writer) because every published article or post can be grown into an ongoing relationship with a publisher where you can continuously generate links into your site.

When writing your content and preparing your comments and posts, be sure to make your links relevant to your text and subject. If you’re talking about tax strategies for small businesses, link to the page on your site that deals with tax strategies for small business owners. Include your keywords in the link text whenever it makes sense, but a mix of link text and link targets is better than the same link and link text over and over again.

Every incoming link can help, but when you’re generating the links yourself, you can ensure that you get the most out of every one. It may take some work, it may be hard work, but the result can be worth the effort.

In a future post, we’ll touch on more ways to generate some incoming links. In the meantime, you can get started generating links to your site right here. Leave a comment and a link back to your site below.

Your perfect copy does you no good if your site’s visitors don’t stick around to read it.
Your excellent Google page rank brings you no more business if your visitors do nothing more than glance at your page before reaching for their browser’s back button.

You’ve got just seconds – at best – to grab the attention of a new visitor to your site and convince her to read all your carefully optimized and edited content. Just one or two interesting pictures is enough to connect with a casual visitor long enough for her to turn her eye toward your text.

Appealing to the people that visit your site is easy: clear, high quality images of yourself, your office, your local area or anything else unique and relevant to the content on your page will do. Appealing to Google with those images is a little trickier. Google, after all, can’t see your your images.

To ensure that those images are optimized for search engines just as much as the rest of your content, you’ve got to help Google figure out what your images show.

• File Names. Take a look at your image file names. If you pulled the image directly off your camera, it probably has some generic file name like the time and date the photo was taken. Give it a good descriptive file name. If possible, include one of your keywords.
• Alt Tags. When adding the image to the page, use the Alt and Title tags. The alt tag text will display whenever the image cannot be loaded. The title text will display when your mouse hovers over the image. Like your file name, use a keyword here if it makes sense.
• Keywords. Google considers the context of the image, so be sure that your keywords are represented in the text surrounding the image. A page full of images may be fine for your human readers, but it doesn’t help Google much. Give Google something to read.
• Updated Your Pictures. Update your images occasionally. Google loves fresh content and images are no exception. When you update your content, bring in some new images too.
• Relevance Is Key. Relate your images to your text and your text to your keywords. Provide what people want to see, and Google will find it.

In short, think about your images the same way you think about optimizing your text for search engines. Make your content relevant, helpful, and attractive to your readers, and you’ll be well on your way to maximizing your search results from Google.

OK, now that I have your attention, let me explain what I mean. Your CPA firm is no less a brand than Tiger Woods, Apple Computer or Rolex watches. However this post is about search marketing, and while most people will know where to go to buy an iPhone, I am betting the businesses and individuals who need accounting and tax preparation in your area, may not know of your firm. If they do know about your company, they probably already know how to find you without using a search engine.

This post is about Search Engine Optimization and reaching the folks who know nothing about you. I’m going to guess that you are perhaps slightly interested in appearing on the first page of search results for Anywhere USA Tax Preparation. Keep in mind it is Google’s responsibility to show relevant search results for the term being searched on. Therefore you naturally stand a very good chance of being on the first page of search results, if not number 1, for your firm’s name, especially if the searcher also included your city or town name.

If you have ever run a pay per click campaign and included your firm’s name as a keyword you bid on, you may have noticed that Google charges you very little, perhaps only pennies, to bid on your firm’s name or website address as a keyword. The reason is even in pay per click sponsored listings, Google’s main priority is to show relevant search results, and they know your website is the most relevant search result for searches on your firm’s name. You may very well pay less to be higher in the sponsored listings for your firm’s name than someone else bidding on your firm’s name as a keyword.

So applying this theory to search engine optimization, your firm’s name is not your keyword. So when you perform on-page SEO for your site, having your firm’s name in the page title does nothing for your SEO effort. In fact it can even dilute the importance (ie: relevance) of your target keywords. The page title is what you see at the very top of your browser window, is what appears in someones bookmarks if they bookmark your site (and don’t manually name the bookmark), and is what appears in big blue text in the search results pages.

For one or all of those reasons, some firms demand having their firm name in the page title. If you are one of those firms, I would ask you, what do you think is a more attractive link to someone who searches on “Anywhere USA Tax Preparation”, a blue link that says “Bauer and Evans CPA”, or a blue link that says “Anywhere USA CPA, Accounting, and Tax Preparation”?

Now this is just one blog post, on a topic that has developed a whole industry. Adjusting your site’s page title will not result in first page search results. In fact Google tells us there are over 200 things they look at when considering placement in the search results. However the page title is certainly an important aspect of your on-page SEO effort and a good place to start.