If You Know Where To Look!

As a rule accounting companies have little alternative but to turn to website templates to get their business a website. Custom websites are ludicrously expensive. Painfully few small to medium sized practices can actually be expected to design a website from scratch. You need code monkeys, design professionals, copy writers… you can expect to pay a pretty big pile of cash and wait months for a custom accounting site. A template, complete with hundreds of pages of free reports, custom newsletters, interactive calculators and more, will usually cost about $50 a month.

Seems like a no brainer, doesn’t it? But there is actually one good reason that companies that could afford custom sites would often get them despite the outrageous cost.

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.

It’s a pretty common to trade off power for simplicity when designing software for “end users”. Template providers, however, in making their content management systems easy to use, often glossed over or ignored features that would make their templates more appealing to the search engines.

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. Many others have not. This makes some templates vastly superior to others when it comes to SEO, or “search engine optimization”.

Here are three things to look for in accounting website templates to be sure that the website can be properly optimized to the search engines.

• Duplicate Content: Let’s look at the “duplicate content” first as all template driven sites will have this problem. When you first get them even the best accounting website templates will have hundreds of pages of “standard” content. Google can identify this, and they don’t have much respect for sites composed entirely of “duplicate 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.
• “Nerfed” Meta Tags: Another common problem with templates is “universal meta tags”. On most accounting website templates there is only one setting for meta tags like page titles, page descriptions, and keywords that affect all the pages on the site simultaneously. If you want to succeed in the search engines make sure the meta tags on your website can be changed separately on every page of your site.
• Lots of I-framed Pages: 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 website templates make extensive use of IFrames, or inline frames; to apply content to web pages. Unfortunately, while I-frames are often obvious to even casual observers, they can easily be obfuscated in such a way that it becomes impossible to tell if a page is exploiting them at all unless you know how to read the source code. 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 may index the “inline” content, but they won’t credit it to your domain which is a long way of saying “iFrame pages are worth exactly nothing”. Make sure the content on your web pages isn’t being driven by iFrames.

When shopping around for accounting website templates it can be easy to be dazzled by pretty pictures and flashing animations. Before buying anything, though, take the time to look under the hood. You’ll need to dig a little to find out whether or not an accounting website template is SEO friendly or not. 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.

To be sure about a template’s suitability for SEO call each provider separately and ask about these features. If any one of these SEO features hasn’t been specifically addressed the template cannot be properly optimized. This may be adequate for some businesses in less than competitive towns and villages, but make certain you factor it in when evaluating the cost benefit. An accounting website template that can never be optimized for the search engines could be a huge liability to your company in the future if your market changes.