Let’s discuss some things you can do to help better your website’s internet profile throughout the design stage.

Your CPA website design can be perfect and still be a total failure.

For it to make wealth the proper prospective clients need to be able to locate your site in the right moment, and the most dependable way to do that is to win a first-rate position on the search engine results pages.

Meta Tags: Your Page Title

Meta tags are a vital ingredient of the CPA website design operation, and the single most pertinent meta tag is called the page’s “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:

MyTown, ST Accounting: Practice Name

In this example, of course, “ST” is the abbreviation for your state.

A firm name isn’t usually a strong enough brand for people to just type in, so insisting on putting the firm name first is usually a foolish vanity. Very few accounting firms have the same kind of brand recognition as “McRib” or the kind of search frequency that “Jenifer Lopez” might have.

It’s also something of a waste to use your title on words that nobody else is competing for.

For most firms ther name just isn’t on anybodies keyword hot list. If you only get 70 characters to describe your page do you really want to spend them on your firm name? Unless there are 10 other firms with exactly the same name it’s pretty likely you’ll be able to get on the first page for that search term without any trouble.

Stick to your town, your state, and a primary keyword like “CPA”.

Meta Description Tag

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.

Again… Google isn’t going to let you go nuts on your description. There’s a 150 character limit so make it short and sweet but, like a headline, enticing enough to get people to want to read more.

Use Google Analytics

Tracking software allows you to monitor the activities of visitors to your site and Google analytics is not only free, it’s the best tracking program you can get.

It will tell you how many visitors you got, how long they stayed, which pages they visited, and much… much more. 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. The product can even help you decide where you might need advertise more or ease off.

Not sold? It’s much easier to add this system to your CPA website during the design process so PLEASE take the time to find out a little more.

Content is King

OK, this is probably the least original thing I’ve ever said. The reason it’s such a tired cliche is because it’s still true, and it probably always will be.

Good meta tags won’t help you unless the tags on each page are actually relevant to the content on their respective pages. 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.

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 go too crazy. Google can also recognize “keyword stuffing” and will discount the page if it has too many keywords in 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. Keywords used in the introductory and/or closing paragraphs look particularly prominent to search engines. They also 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.

Every Journey Begins with a Single Step

Once your accounting website design is published you still have some more work to do. You’ll actually want to do some “off-site” SEO by hustling up as many incoming links as you can, and you’ll want to improve your ranking on Google Places by claiming your business and getting your clients and associates to provide your company lots of good reviews.

All we’re trying to do with this post is guide you to the right path. If you’ll pay attention to these basic CPA website design rules from the beginning you’ll be appropriately positioned to stand out in the forefront of this brand new, extremely competitive marketplace.