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.

There’s a simple concept for this new blog: we’re here to share with you what we’ve learned about search engine marketing, how we’re using it and maybe help you use it too. Check back here for frequent updates on new techniques, link building help, web marketing, site optimization and useful links, services and answers to common and uncommon questions.

If you’re just starting out with us and want to follow along from the very start, there’s no better way to start than by installing Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free tool for analyzing the traffic coming to your website. Once it’s installed, you can view detailed information about how visitors are using and navigating through your site.

Best of all, it’s free. Even if it weren’t free, I’d still reccomend it. Google Analytics is just that useful.

To get started using Google Analytics, signup here. You’ll need a Google Account, but that’s easy enough to set up using the “Sign Up Now” link.

Once you’re signed in, you’ll need to fill out some information, your name, your domain name, country, and similar information. Once that setup is complete. Google will provide you with a little block of code. With that, you can start having Google track your web site stats.

As you’ll see on Google’s instructions, you just need to add this code to the bottom of every page on your site that you want to track. If you’re using a website provider like CPA Site Solutions it’s probably possible to add this code to every page on your site from one central location. Just paste it to the bottom of the page’s HTML code, just before the /body tag.

We’ll dig into the details of Google Analytics in a later post. Now that you’ve added that code to all the pages you’re interested in, Google will start tracking your traffic. With Google’s data, you can carefully examine how well everything you’ve learned with us is working for your site.