The Right Methods for Marketing Accountant Websites- Link Exchanges
If you ever hear the expression Backlinks (the incoming links to your website) it’s most likely in regards to their importance to SEO. These links are tremendously useful in establishing the popularity of accountant websites and their placement on search engines.
After you get your website up you might notice a significant increase in requests from other websites, many of whom you never heard of before, looking to exchange links with your website.
A lot of people refer to this strategy as “link swapping”, although that’s something of a misnomer. Link swapping was a method we used back in the days of yore.
Suppose I was an accountant in Naples, Florida and you had a firm in key west. I would link to your website, you would link to mine, and we’d both get a boost in the search engines.
It didn’t take Google long to figure out that people were using it to game their results so they changed the way their system to track down these “reciprocal” links. When they find one they don’t give the links any value, but there’s a way to use a blog to get around this using blogs. For this to work the blogs need to have “unique URLs”. This means the blog can’t be hosted on the same domain as the website it’s promoting. Rather than linking to each others websites, we can link to each other’s accountant websites from our blogs. 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.
For the most part this is a win-win relationship, but there are some ways you can get burned. You need to keep an eye on your link partners or you may soon find yourself being taken advantage of.
1) Who are your new partners?
Don’t take an offer at face value. Take a little time to research the company you’ll be working with. You may think that there is no such thing as a bad link when it comes to SEO, but keep in mind that these links aren’t going to just be in the background; they will be visible on your site and your visitors and clients will be clicking on them.
A link from your website is no different from an endorsement. Your reputation is tied to your link partners. People will hold you responsible for this endorsement. If you’re linking with spammers and scammers the damage to your reputation won’t justify any SEO benefit your accountant websites might enjoy. Proceed with caution. Don’t link to any partners you have doubts about.
2) What’s it to ya?
Other accountant websites offer the best links. This isn’t to say that other links are useless, just less valuable. If you’re an accountant in Albany a link from another CPA firm or Albany business is going to look more relevant than a link from a flower shop in San Francisco.
Some companies have very specific instructions on where they want you to put the link and how it should be set-up. Sometimes they’ll insist that you put their link on a certain page. Some will insist that you link from your main site, even your home page or other high-traffic page. This is because these pages are worth more than the other pages on the site in terms of SEO benefit. But where do your links show up?
Many of these sites are scammers. Try to find the page where they’ll be putting your links. I’ll wager they’re offering a link page buried deep in the site. This isn’t a reasonable trade. This is a completely lopsided trade. They’re getting a high quality link from a respected accountant and you’re getting an obscure link from a spam site that doesn’t offer you any real SEO or traffic value. Other sites will give you a great link for a month or two, then they’ll quietly move or remove it after a month or two and hope you don’t notice.
3) You don’t mess around with slim.
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. They are 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. They DON’T like it when people try to game the system. 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.
This isn’t to say that every backlink opportunity is going to end up being trouble for you, but it certainly pays to look into the company and the offer thoroughly before making a decision. Marketing accountant websites is complicated, and you will have to seize opportunities that present themselves. But you also need to preserve a uncluttered mind and think seriously prior to committing your practice’s good name to a new link partner. These swaps might come across as an uncomplicated shortcut to success in the search engines, but every shortcut has a propensity of getting you lost someplace you don’t want to be.
Tags: accountant, search engine optimization, website promotion