Let’s you and I have a discussion about improving your website’s internet visibility right from the planning and design stage.

You can have the best CPA web design on the entire planet and in the end it could still wind up a total flop. In order for your site to succeed commercially the right people need to be able to find your site at the right time, and the best way to do this is to get a good position in Google.

Choose Good Page Titles

Meta tags are a crucial part of your CPA website design, and the single most important meta tag is called a “page title”.

Don’t try to take over the internet with unreasonably long title tags. You can make a title tag as long as you want but after 70 characters or so the search engines are going to ignore them.

As a CPA firm you’re going to want your title tag to include your market and some primary keyword. You’ll want it to look something like this: “YourTown, ST Accounting: Practice Name”

You’ll notice that in this example we used “ST” as the abbreviation for your state. When writing page titles keep in mind that very few searchers actually write out the name of their state, so as a rule it’s best to optimize your page to the abbreviation.

Title tags do appear in the margin of most browsers, and as a result many web noobs want their firm name to figure prominently in their page title. This is almost always a huge mistake. Titles are a primary element of a pages relevance to a specific search term so unless your firm has a recognizable brand like “Netflix” or “Kelly Clarkson” it’s not likely to actually be used as a search term by people looking for your service. Also, your firm name is probably not a terribly competitive phrase. Odds are you’ll eventually rank well enough in it without even trying. Keywords like “accountant” and “CPA” are highly competitive, as is the name of most towns. You’re going to have to work hard to get listed for these keywords so use your title tags to get a leg up on them.

Don’t Neglect Your Description Tags

The “Page Description” is also a meta tag, and it’s rather like the red-headed stepchild to the “Page Title”. Google doesn’t use it to rank sites anymore so a lot of CPA website designs ignore it, and this is a mistake because Gooogle actually displays this tag as part of it’s search results. This makes a good page description an important factor in converting an impression into a click-through. Keep your description tag below 150 characters or Google won’t display the whole thing or may not even use it at all.

Use Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free product that allows you to view the traffic that occurs on your website. Google Analytics also has the ability to show you what keyword phrases people used to find pages of your site. This product has so many advantages that I would make it mandatory for you to have if you are looking to improve the position or ranking of your site in the search engines. All you need to do to make it work is add a strip of code to the bottom of each page.

Google Analytics offers a lot of market research factors that most site owners never use, but as an accountant you’ll very likely see some value in it. For example, you can use IP addresses to get a pretty good idea what nearby towns your visitors are coming from. This can help you determine where your marketing dollars are returning value, and where you might be wasting money. For more information on Google Analytics and what it can do for you, just type “google analytics” in a Google search.

Provide High Quality Content

Meta tags in and of themselves used to be enough to get a CPA website good rankings, but scores of meta driven sites began to crop up with truly terrible content. This resulted in pages of spammy irrelevant content appearing at the top of search pages and Google quickly changed their algorithm. The search engine robots have become very sophisticated and can easily compare a pages tags to it’s visible text and make sure they match.

Google is hip to all the dirty tricks that spammers used to rely on like cramming the page with keywords, using tiny text, writing hidden text on the same colored background, etc, so don’t even waste your time trying to be clever. You need to take the time to write some good, high quality content that will demonstrate to Google that the page is truly relevant to the title by using your title tag keywords in the text. Don’t overdue it. The best way to optimize the page is to NOT worry too much about optimize the page. Shoot for about a 1% keyword density, so if your page is 500 words try to use each keyword in your title about 5 times.

The search engines won’t just count your keywords. They also consider the placement of your keywords on the page. If they see keywords in headers they tend to assume they are more relevant. The same is true of keywords found in opening paragraphs or in the article summary at the very end of the page. They look at keywords in highlighted fonts like boldface and italics. They even consider the relevance of other pages on the site that link to the one they’re ranking.

Finish The Journey You Started When You Designed Your Website

Design isn’t the end of your journey, it’s the beginning. It doesn’t make any difference how search engine friendly your practice’s accounting website design is you’re going to have a country mile or two to walk if you really want a superior search position in today’s market.

You’ll need to do some “off-site” SEO by bringing in as many “backlinks” as you can, and you’ll need to get a good position on Google Places by claiming your business and getting your clients and friends to write your business numerous good reviews.

All we’ve done today is put you on the right road. If you pay attention to these easy CPA website design principles during the planning and design phase of building your site you’ll be reasonably positioned to stand out as a leader in today’s exceedingly competitive marketplace.

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