Brian O'Connell, President

Believe it or not, if you want your website to get noticed by the search engines, you have to tell them.

Google and Bing actually rely on you – well, more precisely, on the information on your website – when deciding where to list you on the search results pages (aka “SERPs”).

But it’s not just the content of your pages that helps them. The search engines’ automated spiders that crawl the Web for content don’t read every single line of text.

In addition to the content on your pages, the spiders go to the coding behind your website. Within these codes are the clues they need about what the website is, how well it relates to the site’s content, and how high they should rank it.

If you want your website to rank well and bring in more business, you need to make sure your codes are filled out with the proper information.

Three Important Codes

The three important codes, or meta tags, for website ranking are…

• Page Title
• Description
• first-level Header, or H1

Page Title

The Page Title text appears within the <title></title> tag.

The text you supply within these codes appears in the very top bar of a browser when you view a web page. It also shows up as the “headline” of your site on the SERPs, as seen in this example:

Here's how the Page Title appears on the search engine results page.

Description

The Description meta tag appears this way in the code: <meta name=”description” content=.

Everything that comes after this tag shows up as the 200 characters or so that describe the site on the SERPs.

Here’s an example of the Description of Virginia Accounting Services in the Google search results:

Virginia Accounting Services' Description text is outlined here in red.

H1 Tag

Finally, the <H1> tag is for the major headline on each page. In the example below, “Payroll” is the H1 – and you can see it shows up as the biggest header on the page:

"Payroll" is the first-level header, or H1, on this page.

Now you know which codes are important to the search engines.

But what’s the best content for these meta tags?

Simply put: keywords.

Your Keywords Should Appear in These Codes

You should try to get your top 3 or 4 keywords into all three of these meta tags. That way, when the spiders crawl your meta tags, they find out what your website is about – a crucial step in figuring out how high to rank you.

For most accountants, the best keywords to use are:

location + top first and second service offerings

For example, Virigina Accounting Services focused on the following keywords, all of which can be found in the Page Title and Description for their home page (see above examples):

• Norfolk VA CPA
• Newport News VA
• tax
• accounting
• payroll

For more on which keywords to pick, check out this blog post on keywords.

We Can Help

If you’d like some guidance adjusting the code behind your site, we can help. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants at CPA Site Solutions are keenly aware of these and many other issues that affect your place in the SERPs.

Give us a call at 1-800-896-4500 or email support@cpasitesolutions.com to talk with one of our SEO specialists.

And stay tuned to our advanced SEO services coming in May by subscribing now to our blog.

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