Nowadays if you want your accounting company to produce you need a website. For most companies this means looking at "templates". Custom websites are preposterously pricey. Not many smaller firms can truthfully be expected to build a website from the foundation up. A superior, fully loaded custom CPA or accounting website can cost thousands of dollars to complete, while most templates sell for approximately fifty dollars per month.
Templates originally appeared as inexpensive alternatives to fully blown custom sites and by any modern standard they were pretty primitive. They were fine for hobby sites or small businesses in small markets, but they've never performed particularly well in the search engines. 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:
* Too Much Duplicate Content * "Nerfed" Meta Tags * I-framed Pages
Back in the old days, when most markets hosted only a handful of accounting firms with websites, these problems could be overlooked, but today this is no longer the case. Fortunately some accounting website template providers have actually taken the time to develop content management systems that confront these shortcomings. Others have not, and are still selling templates that are not adequate to proper "SEO", or Search Engine Optimization.
So 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...
All 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. This means to get a "standard" page to actually appear in the search results you need to modify the content of that page. In order to do this you need to be able to edit the content in the template, and not all providers let you do this. 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.
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. 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.
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. The use of iframes have a lot of advantages from a design perspective, but search engines HATE them. If your content is being presented to your clients in IFrame format the search engines will basically look at the page as blank. 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. As a rule not all websites that CAN be optimized ARE optimized. You will find plenty of SEO friendly websites without a trace of optimization ever actually having been done on them. 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 could be tolerable for some businesses in less than competitive townships, but make certain you factor it in when assessing the value versus the cost. Always keep an eye on the might happen in the future. You're very likely to retain your website for a long time, so be sure you get hold of one that will grow with you.
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