Why is Search Engine Optimization Important?

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• November 2009 Issue
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From the Nov. 2009 Issue

If you are interested in acquiring new business, then you need to understand what search engine optimization (SEO) is and how it can deliver qualified prospects to your doorstep. In other words, SEO is how your website is found on the Internet. A website that has been effectively optimized for search engines can deliver motivated prospects to your firm. On the other hand, a website that is not search engine optimized is essentially lost in Internet space, which renders it worthless from a marketing perspective.

WHAT IS SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?
Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic a website receives directly from search engines. Essentially, if you improve your website’s position within the major search engines, via descriptive search term phrases and keywords, you will receive more traffic to your website. You will also increase visibility and generate more leads than a website that is not search engine friendly.

While SEO may sound simple and easy to do, it takes considerable planning and knowledge, and may take several months to deliver results. As more businesses employ SEO into their Internet marketing strategy, the more competitive the landscape becomes for securing top search engine placement. And with the emergence of social media tools like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogs, an entire new layer of techniques are being deployed to strengthen SEO for progressive accounting firms.

SEO is mostly technical in nature. It combines source code programming with business marketing, website architecture, visual presentation and persuasion copy writing woven into the fabric of a website. Virtually all website developers do not factor SEO into website construction because it’s hard for the client to see, drives up cost and incurs extra labor.

To effectively optimize a website and make it search engine friendly, a website developer must understand how search engines work along with the factors that are important within the search engine algorithms. In addition, a developer must also research the terms that a firm’s prospects will type into search engines when attempting to locate specific services. With this knowledge, a developer can practically reverse engineer how the website is developed so that it meets the needs of search engines and your prospects.

WHY BOTHER WITH SEARCH ENGINES?
Search engines are the most important source of “new” visitors to your website. Since millions of people use search engines to find websites, maximizing your visibility can be a powerful and cost-effective part of your marketing program. Search engines are reliable and cost-effective, and they enable web surfers to search thousands of websites in seconds for all kinds of information. Bottom line: Search engines represent an inexpensive opportunity to attract visitors to your website.

SEO has been around since the mid-1990s, and was the primary responsibility of a company’s webmaster. By the late 1990s, website owners started to realize the business potential and value of having their websites ranked highly within the search engines, so they started to deploy tactics to manipulate rankings and game the system. To offset these “black hat” SEO tactics and recapture control of which websites received top rankings, the major search engines changed their algorithms and became more complex and proprietary. Today, the major search engines actually ban websites that deploy overly aggressive SEO techniques from their results. Today, Google ranks websites using more than 200 criteria as part of their algorithm.

Search engines have become a huge business and are always working towards improving the technology used to crawl the web and deliver better results to users. However, there are limits to how a website is constructed, which programming languages they work with, and whether the search engines will index a website. Where the right changes can deliver thousands of new visitors to your website, the wrong moves can hide or bury your website deep in the search results where visibility is minimal. That’s why your goal should be to have a “search engine friendly” website that makes it easy for the major search engines to index your site.

DO PEOPLE REALLY USE SEARCH ENGINES TO FIND ACCOUNTANTS?
Absolutely! People use search engines to identify a multitude of accounting services. And this is occurring far more frequently than it used to. Using a search engine empowers web users to locate a firm that provides the exact type of service they require and a tax and accounting professional with the proper qualifications. The number of people searching online, and the time they spend searching, continues to increase.