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.

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.

Of course, clients retain CPAs because of our experience and expertise in knowing how to save them money and grow their assets, but most CPAs also know that there’s something more that underlies all of this.

Our clients entrust us to provide solutions to some of the biggest problems they face because we offer them peace of mind. CPAs are paid to be flawlessly organized, trustworthy, and responsible in resolving client issues, and equally so in handling sensitive client information.

Why We Need Client Portals

The unique level of responsibility that comes with acting as stewards of our clients’ most sensitive information has made the use of secure, Web-based client portals an absolute necessity for all CPAs. Client portals allow a secure, streamlined, and customizable alternative to email for the transfer and storage of sensitive information, as well as an interactive platform in which to engage and collaborate with clients.

Since their introduction, client portals have been used to:

• quickly and easily transfer large files, including QuickBooks files;
• a way to receive client source documents and make completed tax returns available to clients;
• invoice clients and collect credit card payments; and
• provide a real-time environment in which to update payroll information for payroll clients.

The Question of Security

Using a password-protected client portal is tantamount to having a safety deposit box for each client’s files that only the client and his CPA have a key to. Many client portals include the same impressive 128-bit SSL encryption used by banks and other financial institutions to ensure that only authorized individuals have access.

Portals are also extremely reliable, usually offering the assurance of network uptime in excess of 99.9%.

CDs and Thumb Drives: A Real Advantage?

The transfer of traditional hard copy files to digital media has been in practice for years, and it’s a great way to reduce storage space, save cost, provide an environmentally responsible alternative to paper files, and add redundancy for backup purposes.

However, digital media of this kind has always had the same intrinsic flaws: information on hard drives, CDs, and thumb drives cannot be easily accessed or updated by individuals in different locations.

And because most email won’t allow more than 10 MB of data to be transmitted, larger files stored on CD or thumb drives have had to be sent by courier. This has meant a lot of extra expense and often unacceptable delays, not to mention the inherent security risk.

Due to these limitations, digital media has NOT been a great improvement from the archaic paper filing systems used years ago.

But with client portals, both the client and his CPA have immediate access to files anywhere in the world, as well as the ability to make real-time updates.

Client Portals Get Rave Reviews

Since most clients are familiar with Web-based systems – taking advantage of similar systems that have been in place for years to review bank statements and pay invoices –  they are quick to embrace and adapt to the use of client portals when working with their CPA.

In fact, they are so widely used now that many clients have come to expect client portals and show a strong preference for them over more archaic and less secure methods of payment, data transfer and storage, and real-time collaboration.

Find more accounting information, like details on how to become an accountant and CPA requirements, on AccountingEDU.org.

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.

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.

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.

This next-generation Tax Organizer is a dynamic web application that allows your clients to organize their tax information online, saving you time when preparing their taxes. You and your clients can securely access your client’s tax information anytime from anywhere, eliminating the time and expense involved in mailing paper organizers.

As always, the fully customizable Organizer offers you a secure way to catalogue your clients’ documentation and returns from year-to-year. Encouraging your clients to use the Tax Organizer can save you both the hassle of driving around town to deliver paperwork, and saves you the hassle of having to manually enter their information into your tax software.

Interested in learning more about the Tax Organizer? Click here to watch a video.

But no matter their specialty, one undeniable fact is true in every case: just as with any business that offers goods and services, professional accountants must have clients. It doesn’t matter how competent or client-centered a CPA is – without an adequate number of new clients to provide revenue and keep the doors open, his business will cease to be.

Therefore, one of the first and most important question any accountant can ask is, How do I get my clients?

It may sound prosaic, but it’s true: having really great accountant websites are the key to any successful accounting business.

These days, you have to have an online presence, or your marketing efforts will fall flat.

This won’t change in the future, either. With thousands of students studying accounting, coupled with one of the most challenging of economies, finding clients is becoming a very competitive endeavor. Having a website will remain critical.

Here are 10 tips for how to use accounting websites to find accounting clients:

1. Make sure your website looks professional. Creating a website is no longer a rarefied craft. Plenty of options exist for you to not only get a web address, but also pick a professional design that’s targeted exclusively to the clients you want to attract.

2. Don’t try to do it yourself – use a web designer. While your strength is with numbers, a professional web designer knows how to make your site look great and run smoothly.

The trick is to not just attract visitors to your site, but also keep them once they arrive. To that end, your site should be both lovely to look at and chock full of helpful info.

3. Don’t overlook the importance of social media sites for getting the word out. The simple act – which takes all of half an hour – of creating profiles on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn is enough to gain exposure.

Facebook is the most important of these. To get started on this popular social sharing platform, simply create a personal profile and then create a “fan” page for your business. Get your friends to “like” your page, and soon their friends and their friends’ friends will be seeing your business’s name and a link to it. Then, use Facebook (and the others) to keep your clients informed about tax season and other financial matters.

4. Links are vital to generating traffic – so, on your website, be sure to post links to your social media pages. If someone visits your site and likes what they see, this will be an easy way for them to help you spread the word. A “like me on Facebook” or “follow me on Twitter” link will expose you to even more potential clients.

5. Post links to the websites of your notable clients. When folks see your client list, and maybe even click through to your clients’ websites, it acts as that all-important “social proof” that helps you appear trustworthy.

6. Useful websites for generating leads are online merchant sites such as eBay and Craigslist. These, and other similar sites, have extremely high traffic rates and are designed with classified sections that advertise services. You typically won’t be charged to advertise your firm; advertising with these sites will expand your reach to well outside your local client base.

7. Traditional advertising on newspaper websites can generate significant traffic to your homepage and physical office. Take a look at your local papers. You might be able to also get in their online edition, where you could either be listed in their “marketplace” or be featured in a banner ad. In addition, seek out papers and local publications in surrounding towns that aren’t too far for a new client to travel from.

8. Hike it up a notch; look for websites that advertise specifically for accountants. There are lots of websites like Accountant Finder that list accountants for a small fee, making it that much easier for leads to find you.

9. Bid system and lead generating websites such as adknowledge.com are plentiful online. These services, when used properly, can get you in contact with the clients you want and who need what you have to offer.

Do your homework here and ensure that you investigate the site before you join it. Some have fees involved and some are fly-by-night operations. If you want quality clients, use a quality lead generation site.

10. Finally, seek out and listen to experts in your field and take the time to learn from their mistakes and successes. Using Internet resources such as Websites 4 Accountants is a great way to learn new tricks and tips that can greatly improve your lead generation, which will then increase your sales.

Obtaining clients for your accounting business can be a challenge. But when you utilize a high-quality accounting website as your start point, your marketing efforts can be very successful – and more than worth the hard work.

I’ll just assume you are an accountant, I’m also going to assume that you either have or soon will have a website, and finally I’m going to assume that you have already taken to heart the importance of the internet marketing in getting prospective customers to contact you. I’m assuming you already recognize the web is an enormously competitive market that changes really fast, and that in order to make use of it effectively as a prospecting platform it’s necessary to have optimized content with a very high degree of relevance to user searches.

To be frank I’m presuming a lot, here.

If all this is news to you then I’d suggest getting started immediately on finding a really good accountant website for your practice, and then coming back here to learn more.

You actually need good accountant websites in order to get this to work, but once you have a superior site under your belt, if you know a few simple tricks, you can start the procedure of improving your search engine profile.

This is the key to growing your firm in the information age.

Now we’re not going to tell you everything you need to know about SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, but we are going to get you started.

First, SEO changes fast, so if you haven’t been keeping up forget everything you think you know about it.

There was a time not to long ago when it was easy to get a good ranking in the search engines. All you had to do was “stuff” your pages with keywords, you could even hide them as invisible text or on pages that only the search engines could see, and you’d soon find yourself at the very top of the rankings.

Those days are long gone. Search engines began to recognize that these techniques were not necessarily leading end users to the kind of relevant information they were looking for, so the meta-crawlers were updated and SEO best practices had to change along with them.

Still, the appropriate use of keywords within page content is remains vital to the success of well optimized accountant websites. For example, a web page contains two “meta tags” that are still considered very important.

Meta tags don’t actually appear on the page, but the search engines see them as “titles” and “descriptions”. This is so the meta-crawlers that determine the relevance of websites will look to headlines and titles for the use of keywords. If the content of the page and the meta tags match the search engines will notice this, and this will boost the page’s “relevance” score.

Don’t even bother with cheesy old-school cheats like tiny text, keyword stuffing, gateway pages and mouse-over redirects. These tricks not only won’t work they’ll actually tick off the search engines.

Another type of meta tag, perhaps the most famous, is called the keyword list. Don’t waste your time on it. Most search engines don’t apply any importance to your keyword list, and if any still do they’re not giving it much more than a backwards glance. It can’t hurt to use the tag, but don’t expect any real results from it.

So how does this apply specifically to accountant websites?

Well like all businesses before you can start building links you need to get your tags in order. Use your tags. Make sure your page titles and descriptions are honestly descriptive of your page content and give all your important pages (especially your home page) unique tags.

You can also boost visibility by referencing your local area frequently–this will capture you a larger share of the people who are searching for CPA websites within your city or region.

On it’s own a website only has so much power, and in order to really do well in the search engines you’ll need help from other sites. That’s why more and more accountant websites are using blogs to boost both readership and rankings.

Blogs support effective websites in two vital ways. For one thing it’s a great way to draw readers. Accountant websites are great tools, but blogs are a lot more dynamic and fun. You can also use your blog to link to your main website, and search engines love that. It will be really good for your rankings to have an active blog full of relevant content linking to your your site. This lets you develop calls to action that ask the visitor to click through to your main website. And, obviously… you’ll attract fresh readers to the website. Readers are potential customers, so the more readers you earn the more customers you’ll get in the end.