Accountants matter. Accountants matter a lot.

That’s a major reason I love my job so much. You don’t need to sell a bill of goods to sell accounting services. Accountants provide real value to the businesses they serve. They are able to provide expert assistance with taxes throughout the year as well as at tax time as well as help companies boost their bottom lines by helping them streamline their businesses and track their profits and losses.

Almost everyone will likely need a reliable accountant sometime in their adult life.

As an accountant I want you to honestly consider how your business is portrayed on the web. Ask yourself, are you making a strong first impression? The days of relying on newspaper ads or the phone book listings are over. Everyone has replaced those methods of finding professional services with the Internet.

You might say, “Well, I rely on my reputation and word of mouth”. Sure, word of mouth is great. In fact, this is how you’ll get most of your best clients, but it won’t give you a steady flow of new clients.

People use the Internet for everything now and that includes finding an accountant. So this means that you can no longer neglect that website of yours. It is time to start strengthening your online presence so that it matches the level of professionalism you exhibit in person.

Since websites for accountants are a service business, accountants websites need to provide information in the most simple way possible. This means simple navigation and layout with fresh content. Since people are on the Internet to answer a question or solve a problem, the best websites are designed to answer a question or solve a problem. So now that you understand the need to give your website an upgrade, here are a few ways to avoid disaster and make your redesign effective!

Sloppy Sites Are a Death Knell
Even the most simple explanation of accounting may be confusing enough for your reader to continue browsing on the Internet. Therefore it is important to leave out lots of numbers, charts and spreadsheets. Most people who look at your website are simply trying to find out about your services. Help them evaluate if you are a good fit for their needs instead of getting into the boring details of accounting practices.

Don’t Make Visitors Feel Stupid
Many accountants make this mistake. It’s possible to make yourself look smart without making your prospect feel dumb but it takes a little forethought and consideration. As an accountant, you use a lot of terms that the average person will find confusing. Make an effort to speak as plainly about your services as you possible. Don’t get bogged down in the details. If you try to explain how you’re going to do everything you’ll leave the reader either bored to tears or feeling wholly inadequate. Just tell the prospect what you’re going to do and how it will benefit them.

Be Accessible
Your website is a primary way for people to get in touch with you. Make it easy for people to find your contact information on your website. Make it intuitive so that they don’t have to search around the page for it. Put your phone number and address in the footer of every page and add lots of contact forms to your site. Use Facebook “like” buttons or “share with a friend” links to make it easy for visitors to share what they find on your site.

Don’t Use Your Business Site as a “Learning Experience”.
Your business website is not the best place to learn how to design websites. Even the best trained web designers put out a dud or two before they get the hang of producing a well organized, good looking website.

Understand your limits. Compare your web design skills to what is expected on even a basic website for businesses in your field. It is likely that you don’t have the web design skills to create a professional website. Therefore you should hire a professional web designer. The pay off will be well worth it.

Search Engines: The Contemporary Marketplace
Back in the old days there was an expression designed to explain the three most important elements to a successful business… “Location… Location… Location.” This cliche is as true today as it was a century ago, but the marketplace has changed. What matters isn’t your physical location. What street you’re on or where your storefront is in relation to commuting and pedestrian thoroughfares no longer matters much at all.

What matters now is your location in the search engines!

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a very important component of a website. Essentially, SEO helps increase your search engine ranking, which will in turn lead people to your website. If you have a brilliant website that nobody can find, it isn’t doing you any good.

Don’t Blow Your Chance at a Good First Impression!
It is important to provide users with a pleasing aesthetic and an easy, streamlined experience on your website. A visitor landing on a sloppy looking site will go straight for the “back” button and functionality issues, such as links that don’t work, are frustrating. They also call into question your level of professionalism.

Don’t be Afraid to Sell Yourself
Don’t forget that a website is just a tool to promote your services. It can be easy to get caught up in the creation of a website. Remember the big picture and focus on selling you and your services. Make your website for people to find you and learn about your services. For one thing, if you seem shy about what you do it will look like you lack confidence in yourself, and secondly… what you do matters. You’re not selling anyone a bill of goods. You’re going to save your clients money! That’s something to proud of, so don’t hide from it. Sell… sell… sell. It’s good for you and it’s good for them.

People have varying levels of experience with accountants. For a lot of people, it can be intimidating. You need to show people that you understand their needs and can offer a solution. Reassure them and stay true to yourself so that when they meet you in person you’ll already have a rapport. If done well, you’ll have an easy way to gain new clients.

Leads are essential to any business practice, and especially to the field of accounting. Beyond simply looking for leads via effective accountant websites or undergoing customer inquiry and sales contact, leads must be sorted and nurtured so that they can be reused and recycled for later business practices.

In addition to the benefits of lead nurturing in developing new client business for your accounting firm, lead nurturing ensures you don’t miss the potential for a business merger.  In today’s economy, you can’t let an ideal business relationship slip away. Lead nurturing ensures you can consider all options when developing new business.

While lead nurturing may seem time-consuming or redundant, it is absolutely essential to market to potential clients. Here are several reasons why as an accountant, you should use lead nurturing to develop meaningful relationships with potential customers.

1) 77% of potential sales come from longer-term leads
By ignoring future opportunities that may arise from unnurtured leads, you run an enormous risk of losing revenue. Knowing who you have already touched and with whom you can expand your professional relationship allows you to grow your accounting firm and expand your networking reach exponentially.

2) Leads tend to change their mind over time
Allow your leads to consider your professional services rather than demanding an immediate “yes” or “no”.  This gives them the opportunity to weigh their options and decide what works for them. Continued touches mean that your accounting firm stays at the front of their mind.

3) Lead nurturing is a relatively simple process
After initial contact with leads from accountant website traffic, easy follow-up calls and addition of the leads to a mailing list is an almost effortless way to grow your business.  Light touches that are well timed show discretion and concern for your leads, and do not add to you or your staff’s workload.

4) Lead nurturing elicits trust in clients
If you express genuine concern for your leads, they will more likely be inclined to engage in business dealings with you. Ultimately, the human side to accounting converts leads into customers, where as the business side can make you seem distant, cold, and unapproachable.

5) Lead nurturing suggests thoroughness
The process of following up with a lead shows consistency, even in the preliminary stages of business dealings that will translate into dedicated, consistent, and high quality results. The intent of lead nurturing is to win the lead over and convert them to a client for your accounting firm.

6) Lead nurturing allows you to better understand your leads
In learning which parts of the accounting website lead nurturing processes bear favorable results, you will be able to empathize with your clients and to ultimately serve them better through the life of your business relationship.

7) Lead nurturing puts you ahead of your competitors
Simple, light touches for your leads beyond initial contact, set you apart from the competition, particularly those who do not practice lead nurturing.

Lead nurturing prevents redundancy
For leads who have turned you down entirely, further touches can sometimes feel like harassment and are very counterproductive; leave them alone. Isolating leads which rejected your firm altogether prevents redundancy and prevents the development of a bad reputation amongst leads who are as yet undecided.

Can Your CPA or Accounting Practice Learn Anything from a Failed Business?

Borders’ chapter 11 filing came as no surprise to anyone who watches technology. The cause was their refusing to take up digital delivery.

For accountants, emerging technologies like websites and online networking can seem just as remote from their core business as they did to Borders. But learning from Border’s example can help ensure that accounting firms do not make similar mistakes.

Historically, communications didn’t change much until the last few decades.  Then, electronic communications quickly overtook print communications, making products and services much easier to find, access, and deliver. Increased access to information online means less paper production, which is more environmentally friendly.

Today’s world is online.  Almost every reading material you can think of is available electronically. Forward-thinking marketing approaches like compelling websites for accountants are simply imperative.

Not long ago Borders Books was at the top of its industry. It had a proven product, a strong brand name and enviable market position. But despite the technological changes over the last decade, Borders chose to pursue a strategy of business as usual. Borders turned up their noses at e-books.  They ignored electronic communications of all sorts. It simply wasn’t their world.  They didn’t bother to become technologically literate. This was a crucial strategy error. Even their proven marketing tools failed them.  Marketing cannot save a bygone business model.

Technology continued to advance and Amazon and Barnes and Noble were early adopters. It wasn’t long until their e-book and online sales added significantly to their bottom line.  Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble pulled ahead of Borders based on their electronic savvy.

Meanwhile, Borders slept.  Previous customers of Borders who became excited by the electronic possibilities had to use more accommodating booksellers. As in any industry, once a customer has made a switch to another company and finds it satisfactory, that customer is almost impossible to retrieve.

Even after Borders figured out that they were losing market share, they kept doing the same old thing.

Meanwhile new technological horizons kept opening up. Former admirers soon realized that Borders’ marketing team was behind the times, deficient in technological leadership and vision. Border’s heel-dragging continued.  It’s almost as if they feared technology.

Reluctance to embrace technology spawned a series of further marketing missteps. In an effort to shore up eroding profits, Borders raised prices in retail stores and online, antagonizing their loyal customer base. Customers revolted, moving their business to Borders’ competitors. This was the final straw for Borders Books, which was forced to file for bankruptcy.

So what does this have to do with your practice?

In every industry, businesses must adapt to a changing technological climate or become obsolete. Similar to any other business, professional accountants must follow and accept the evolving world of technology and newfangled web marketing tools such as good quality websites for accountants. That is the pith of Borders Books’ lesson for CPA firms.  Avoiding its biggest mistakes will help keep your practice .

For Outstanding Results, Leave It to the Professionals

Using a skilled video team ensures you’ll have a high-quality website video. It also makes sure that it passes on a message that is well-defined and succinct.

As you would expect, you need your CPA or accounting company to distinguish itself from your competition. Make sure that your video lifts you above the crowd. If your video is an introduction to your firm on your home page to give visitors a taste of who you are and what you offer, you may want to consider a budget to pay a professional. What kind of service portfolio do you offer? You can add a lot of personal character to your videos to connect to your audience. Make sure to use a tripod so that your videos don’t give your audience vertigo. Make sure your video holds your prospects’ attention. If you think a pro will accomplish this goal, then by all means, create a budget for a professional videographer. Above all, hiring a pro to create your video ensures that your video’s quality is as high as it can be. You also want to make sure it is ready for your website.

It is possible to create great results yourself. Make sure you are using a high quality camera attached to a tripod. A high quality microphone is a good choice. You will also need software to encode your video. Good lighting works best. Be sure to use backgrounds that are plain.

Plan Your Video
You will need to create a strategy before your video shoot begins. Make sure it is well planned. Budgeting is very important; the longer the video, the more your video is going to cost. Best practices for videos are debated by many. As a rule, a minute to two minutes is plenty. Viewers will click away after five or even four minutes. Make sure your video is not that long. You will also need to decide who is going to be in your video. You will want to effectively sell your CPA firm’s services. This can be accomplished without a partner in the video. As long as you feel that your employees can be a positive representation of your firm, you will likely pay them less than you’d pay professional talent.

Impress and Hold Your Audience
Most importantly, your video needs to deliver useful, relevant content that captures and maintains the interest of your viewers. There are literally hundreds of competing websites for accountants vying for your audience. To make yours stand out, make sure your video captures and holds visitors’ attention. You should also consider the tone of your video. Do you want to use humor? Do you want your video to appear more serious? Both methods can be effective. Either way, what is important is that your video is realistic. Videos that bring qualified visitor traffic to successful websites for accountants allow prospects and clients to connect with your firm on a personal level. A personal connection is a great way to build trust. It also creates a call-to-action that converts a prospect into a customer. A video that sounds like a sales pitch is going to flop. You will not convert visitors into customers with that strategy.

Distribution and Marketing
When your video is finished, make use of it with sharing sites. Market your firm with your video! Your video should be distributed to video sites like YouTube and Vimeo. They can be embedded right on your home page. This not only exhibits your video, it grants a convenient link between your video on the sharing site and your website. Your site will benefit from the domain authority of the video distribution site, which will favorably list your video on search engine results pages.

A really good video can be  a great asset on your website and can actually help to promote your company before you ever meet with or speak with a prospect.

In  the 1990s, video cameras were bigger than a shoe box, weighing more than 10 pounds, and required a group of experts to make a good video. As such, videos were prohibitively costly for a typical small business. Modern video cameras are a lot smaller and cost much less, so it is possible to create excellent videos without a professional team.  Numerous video distribution websites also provide opportunities for everyone to share their videos.

Be cautious about how videos are presented on your site.

Sharing websites like YouTube and Vimeo have risen in popularity.  These sites simplify the process of distributing videos online. The ease with which videos can be shared has on occasion resulted in some degree of laxity where discretion is concerned.  While homemade, funny videos have a home on the internet, they really don’t belong on practical websites for accountants. Monkeys flinging fecal matter and movies of dogs talking don’t really have a place on most professional websites no matter how funny they are. Make sure that videos really add to value to your website.

In addition to providing value for your prospects and current clients, an online video is a great opportunity for search engine visibility. When you post your video to sharing websites such as YouTube and Vimeo, it associates your video with your desired keywords, providing you the benefit of their powerful search engine authority. Use the code to embed your uploaded video onto your website pages.  This will increase the search engine rank for your video’s keywords.

Why should you use a video?
A well produced video is a powerful addition to a website, but not all CPA websites need to have video on them. For example, a video can take the focus away from the important points you’re trying to make on your website, so it is important to create a video strategy that effectively promotes your business and/or adds value to your current clients. In the competitive landscape, videos offer a great advantage.  Creating a solid marketing identity online is boosted greatly by a high-quality video.

Marketing:
Introducing your CPA firm with a website video is a great way to visually appeal to your prospects.  This is a powerful combination with the messaging of your site text. Adding a video to introduce a CPA firm can be transformational.  It can turn an otherwise plain-looking CPA site into a dynamic web presence. A video can present your firm and is a chance to provide important details about your services.  This gives you a chance to present your firm as an expert in the subject matter of accounting. Videos also provide an opportunity for visibility beyond your local area, while keeping the personal interaction of viewing the face(s) associated with the firm.

Offer Value to Your Clients:
A website video gives you a chance to provide value-added services to your customers.  Your satisfied customers can then act as advocates for your brand, which helps bring in new customers. A potential subject for a video is demonstrating to clients how your firm offers its services.  This is also applicable to potential clients, as well. Your video topics can be diverse, such as how to prepare tax organizers to take to accountants.  It could also be really specific, like how to track car mileage. Online videos offer around-the clock support to your customers, which makes them an immense boon to your company.  Without a doubt, they are also a continuous source of publicity.

Next time we’ll talk a little about the benefits of hiring a professional to help you produce your video.

Generally accounting and CPA firms have little alternative but to use website templates to get their business a site. Custom websites are preposterously expensive. Very few small to medium sized firms can honestly be expected to create a site from the foundation up. A superior, fully loaded custom CPA or accounting site can cost thousands to make, whilst most templates sell for around fifty dollars per month.

So why would any accounting firm shell out thousands of dollars for a custom website?

In a word: “Google”.

Website templates have been around for years and they’ve always been an inexpensive and effective alternatives to expensive custom sites, but they’ve traditionally had problems getting good rankings in search engines like Google and Bing. In order to make them quick and easy to use the companies that provided even the best accounting website templates tended to sacrifice certain technical niceties that would make it exceedingly difficult to really optimize a site for good rankings.

The problems templates often have are:

• “Duplicate Content”
• Dumbed Down Meta Tags
• I-framed Pages

As the web has become more competitive some of these template providers have shifted gears, successfully overcoming these limitations without substantially increasing the complexity of their content management tools. Others have not, and are still selling templates that are not adequate to proper “SEO”, or Search Engine Optimization.

Before we go on, if you have one of our CPA Site Solutions Accounting Website Templates you have nothing to worry about. All our site designs considered these factors. If you’re a CPA Site Solutions customer and you have questions about how to take advantage of your accounting website’s advanced SEO features feel free to give your designer a call!

Now… if you’re still shopping around for a website, or if you have a website with one of our many fine competitors you are probably thinking, “how do you know what to look for if you want to find accounting website templates that are SEO, or ‘search engine optimization’, friendly?”

Here are a few pointers…

Can You Edit & Add Pages?
All professional accounting website templates come with large amounts of standard content. This content is identical between all the websites from a given provider and this creates problems getting pages “indexed”, or “listed” by Google. Search engines don’t want duplicate results coming up in searches, so as a rule they will only list such a page ONCE and they ignore every page they see after that with the same content. Customizable pages can overcome duplicate content issues. Make sure your template provider allows you to modify and add pages freely to your site. Nobody expects you to modify all 600 pages on a typical accounting website template, but it will make a huge difference if you personalize as few a five or ten pages.

You can edit and add pages to your CPA Site Solutions site using the Site Manager tool.

Can You Edit Individual Page Titles & Descriptions?
Another common problem with templates is “universal meta tags”. On sites like this there is only one setting for modifying a sites meta tags. This means every page on the site must have exactly the same tags making it impossible to optimize more than one page on the site. To properly optimize a website you’ll need to be able to assign different meta tags to different pages.  When shopping around for accounting website templates make sure the one you choose allows you to set the meta tags individually for every page on the site.

You can edit page titles and Descriptions on your CPA site Solutions website using the site manager tool. There is also a universal meta tag setting for folks that don’t want to spend the time optimizing their site or who need to make major title changes (very handy if you move your office to a new town or open a new branch office) but we strongly recommend optimizing your important pages individually.

Are You Getting Important Content Delivered as “Inline Framed Links”?
I saved this last issue for the end of the article because, quite frankly, it can be hard to identify. You may even want to retain a website professional to help you get the answers here. Many sites use a coding trick called IFrames, or inline frames, to deliver content to your website. Template providers like I-Frames for a lot of reasons, but their primary advantage is that using them makes it very easy to keep site content updated and make changes to hundreds of websites at once. Unfortunately search engines don’t much care for sites that use them. Search engines will see pages with inline content as basically blank. They can see the content, but they won’t consider your website the source of it. They will follow the inline content in very much the same way they might follow any other link. This means if the content gets indexed it will be credited to the template provider rather than you. Since it can be hard to tell whether or not a website is using these “framed links” you might want to ask but verify. Find out from the provider if they deliver content using inline frames, but before committing to a site have a web professional examine their product and make sure that they aren’t using them.

CPA Site Solutions does not deliver content to your site as i-framed links.

Don’t settle for a casual observation of a sample site to find out if a template is search friendly.You may not be able to tell. Take the time to contact providers and ask specifically about these issues.

A first class website needs to be well designed inside and out. Being good looking, content rich, and easy to navigate is important but it’s also important that the site can be properly optimized for the search engines. An SEO friendly site with a lazy owner may not be taking advantage of a template providers search features. For example it will often appear that a site has universal meta tag settings, when in fact the owner just hasn’t bothered to change the title of any of his pages.

I wish I could say, “you get what you pay for” but I’m afraid that’s not even true. There are some very expensive “premium” accounting website templates that are actually pretty lousy in terms of their SEO potential. If your vendor hasn’t specifically addressed all three of these issues Google won’t be likely to take your site seriously. Occasionally this isn’t really a problem. If you’re the only accounting firm in your town with a website you can probably do all right without ever optimizing your site, but keep these factors in mind when measuring the value versus the cost. An accounting website template that can’t be optimized for search engines like Google could become a huge liability to your company in the future if your circumstances should change.

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.

WordPress blogs give users good flexibility as far as the template they have access to along with further functionality to their blog in the form of plugins. Other WordPress bloggers  create these unique applications, which are then upheld and endorsed by WordPress.

What the heck is a “Plugin”?

Anyone with a WordPress blog for their accountant websites can add plugins, and there are a multitude of uses and benefits to installing them; both for yourself and for your readers.

Some plugins are simple and can add things like social media buttons to your blog.  Others are more complicated, such as a plugin that integrates a full image gallery with dozens of viewing options. People use them often because they add a lot of fun, interesting and useful features that would otherwise require a lot of code writing.

Where can I download them?

Like anything, you can find plugins all over the internet. One of them is within the admin panel of your blog. Your admin panel has a menu item called Plugins.  To install one, simply click install!

There is also a WordPress Plugins page that is devoted to listing plugin options. You can search for all different types to narrow down what you’re looking for, and you can also view the most popular plugins. Downloading plugins from here requires an extra step.  You’ll need to locate the downloaded file, then unzip it before you can upload it to your WordPress blog.

However you choose to download and install them, plugins are easy to use. The only potential difference would lie with the security settings of the server that is hosting your blog.

OK, I downloaded a plugin, how do I get it to work?

Once you have found the plugin you would like to use, and if you installed it via the WordPress interface, you will need to activate it under the Plugin menu item.

Unzipped plugin files should be uploaded to wp-content/plugins folder. Then just go to the plugin menu and click activate. It’s usually just that easy!

Some plugins will work immediately, others require that you add code to your template. Additionally, some others require different adjustments aside from coding that need to be completed before the plugin will work. You’ll know which method you’ll need to follow after you activate the plugin, and if you have any questions about what needs to be done, you can always check the plugin authors’ site which will be available from a link within the Plugins menu.

How do I test this thing once it’s installed?

After you install the plugin to your blog, you want to verify that the plugin is working correctly. You can sometimes test your plugin right from the plugin settings menu.  Otherwise, simply go to your blog page and test it from there.

Once you have verified the plugin is working, you’re all set and you can continue to install and activate any other plugins you would like!

Of course, there is always the possibility that your plugin won’t work right away.  If this happens, double check that you didn’t miss any steps, and you may need to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress for some plugins to work. You should also review the instructions on the plugin authors’ site.

Is all this really necessary?

In a word?

No.

Plugins are fun and useful, but if you are happy with the functionality of your blog and only get a few of junk comments, then there’s no desperate need for you to start installing gobs of plugins.

Eventually the spammers will find your accountant website’s blog and you’re going to want to download and install some spam control, but you don’t have to do anything. WordPress stands quite nicely on it’s own.

For those of you who demand additional functionality from a blog or for people who don’t have the time to design, the plugins afforded to the WordPress nation are a good energy saving feature.

If you ever hear the term Backlinks (the incoming links to a website) it’s probably in regards to their significance to Search Engine Optimization. Backlinks are exceedingly useful in deciding the relative popularity of the best accountant websites and their ranking on search engines like Google. You’ll soon discover that loads of site owners all of a sudden want to be your buddy once you go public with your own website, especially as your site becomes more successful.

You’ll start getting emails from companies you’ve never even heard of that want to “exchange links” with you.

Be careful here. Some of these offers are automated and completely obsolete. Back in the old days we used to use a technique called “link swapping” and this technique no longer provides any search engine optimization benefit at all.

Here’s how it used to work:

Suppose I was an accountant in Naples, Florida and you had a firm in key west. I put a link to your website on my links page, you put one on yours pointing back. We both get a boost in the search engines.

This just doesn’t work any more. Google looks for these “reciprocal links” and ignores them on the (altogether reasonable) assumption that the owners of the websites involved are just trying to game the system.

Fortunately there are ways to get around this restriction by using your blog.

Most businesses have blogs that are hosted on unique URLs (web addresses that are different from their main website). Rather than linking to each others websites, we can link to each other’s accountant websites from our blogs. Google doesn’t recognize these links as “reciprocal” and this gives them some value.

Of course if you don’t have a blog, or if your blog is hosted directly on your domain you’ll need some other solution. You’ll need some other web property to link from or you’ll be giving out much more valuable links than you’re getting.

It may seem like a win-win situation where you both receive SEO benefits, but there are a few significant hazards you need to consider before accepting.

1) Know Who You’re Dealing With

Don’t take an offer at face value. Take a little time to research the company you’ll be working with. Keep in mind that people are going to see and even follow these links so it’s important to make sure you’re not linking to “bad neighbors”.

A link from your website is no different from an endorsement.

Your reputation is tied to your link partners. A link to a less-than-reputable website or business can harm you more than the SEO benefit from their link could help you.

2) Make Sure the Deal is Fair

There are many factors that the search engines look at when determining the value of your backlinks.

• Links from home pages have much more value than links buried deep in the site.
• A page with only one or two links on it has much more value than a page with ten or twenty links on them.
• Links from pages that themselves have lots of inbound links have more value than links from pages with few or none.
• Backlinks from sites that are relevant to your market will be given much more weight than sites that are loosely if at all related. Links from other types of firms still have value, especially if they’re in your market, but they won’t look very relevant to you.

Keep an eye on the fine print, too. Some companies are going to try to trick you by getting you to agree to give them high value links in exchange for weak ones. Often times they will request it be on your home page or another popular page (or even every page). In return they offer a link from a page buried deep in the bowls of an obscure website.

Some will also give you a great link, then after a month or two passes they’ll either move it or remove it completely and hope you don’t notice.

This isn’t a reasonable trade. Not only is this location less ideal for SEO than where they asked you to add their link, it’s practically impossible for anyone surfing their site to find it and will generate no foot traffic to your site either.

3) Remember Who the Boss Is

If you’re a website owner and you’re concerned about your search ranking make no mistake about who the boss is: You answer to Google.

The system Google uses to keep track of link popularity is called “PageRank”, and they’re very proud of it. It was invented by Larry Paige, one of Google’s founders, back in his Stanford days and it’s been getting tweaked and improved many times a year ever since. Google is sincerely trying to provide the best possible search results to their users, and they work very hard and spend a lot of money to achieve this goal.

Google doesn’t like it when people try to game the system. In fact Google would prefer it if nobody ever did any SEO at all, but let’s be honest here. In a competitive market you either compete or you wither and die, so that’s an entirely unreasonable position and they know it.

What Google has done is tried to limit what it considers harmful SEO techniques and forbid them in constantly changing published documentation collectively called “Google Webmaster Guidelines”. It reserves the right to punish websites that don’t adhere to these rules.

When groups of websites get together and form what Google calls “link farms” they reserve the right to penalize websites, or even de-index them altogether. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does the results to a business can be catastrophic.

You don’t have to look far to see the wreckage that Google penalties have left behind. Whole companies have been put out of business because they were suddenly de-indexed by Google.

Perhaps the most famous company to ever get hit by the infamous Google “ban hammer” was Overstock.com. They were lucky in that the Google ban didn’t actually force them out of business, but it cost them a fortune. They weren’t link farming, mind you, but they were using some pretty clever (and very sneaky) tricks to make themselves look more important than they were by getting universities to post keyword rich links back to their websites.

Google, who puts extra value on links from educational sources, didn’t take kindly to this and hit them with such a horrific penalty that they were forced to drop their multi-million dollar SEO campaign and start all over again with a new domain name.

It is not unusual for companies that email you out of the blue to be considered link farmers, especially if they don’t have a valid, non-SEO reason for wanting to link to accountant websites.

When you accept link exchange offers from companies that you’ve never heard of the odds are high that you’ll be linking into what search marketers call a “bad neighborhood”. This is a term search marketers use for link networks that have been flagged by Google, or are likely to be flagged in the future, of routinely violating their webmaster guidelines.

You do NOT want Google associating you with a bad neighborhood. Getting involved with a link farm can get you blacklisted, and once your domain is banned it’s very difficult to get re-indexed. It just isn’t worth it.

I’m not saying all offers to exchange links are bad. I’m simply advising caution.

Marketing accountant websites is a challenge, and you need to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves but you also have to preserve a unclouded mindset and think critically before committing your practice’s good name to a link partner.

Link “swaps” may seem like an effortless shortcut to better search position, but these shortcuts, like any other, can easily get you lost somewhere you’d rather not go.

This month, we’ve added three new features to your Site Manager to make it faster and easier for you to make changes to your site.

Customizable Header Images

It’s now a snap to swap out the stock photography image on the page header to something that reflects you and your firm. Click on a page in your Site Map, and click on the header at the top of the page. A box like the one at the right will open. Select Custom Image from the Header Style drop-down and select or upload the new image.
Page Settings Tab

The new Page Settings tab, found on the far left of each page in the Site Manager, eliminates the need to back out to the Site Map to change page titles or header images.  This allows you to easily alter the page titles that appear in your navigation bar.

Upload Files Button

It’s always been easy to upload image files to include in your website. From any page within the Site Manger, just click on the More Options link at the top of your screen, and select Upload Files. Click on the Files folder on the left, and upload your file. This works with PDFs, .DOCs, and almost any other file type you can cook up.