Here are our must have WordPress plugins (all of which are free):

WordPress SEO by Yoast

The WordPress SEO plugin is the very first plugin we always install on client sites. This plugin makes it extremely easy to ensure your post/page’s are well optimised for target keywords. It will allow you to optimise titles, images, meta tags, your XML sitemap and more. Any small business website should have this free plugin installed.

Akismet

Akismet comes pre-installed with your WordPress installation, you just need to get a key to activate it (which is a simple process). If your website is going to be operating a blog then at some stage it will come under attack from spam comments, Akismet does a brilliant job of filtering out those comments for you.

Contact Form 7

Any business website needs a method for allowing customers to make contact, usually via a contact form that can filter out spam. Contact Form 7 is a very customisable plugin that allows you to build a contact form and place it anywhere on your website, ideal for a small business website.

Sharebar

If you have a blog on your business website then you will want to make it easy for people to share your blog posts on social media sites. Sharebar installs a fully customisable bar on your blog which allows people to share your content across a variety of social networks at the click of a button.

WpTouch

WpTouch is a really useful plugin that automatically creates a mobile friendly version of your WordPress website. It’s not as ideal as having a purpose designed mobile site but it does the job of making your site accessible to mobile visitors.

ViperBar

Viperbar is a very handy plugin that adds a bar to the top of your website with a mailing list signup form. The bar is completely customisable including colours and text and it is a very nice way to encourage visitors to sign up to your mailing list.

Twitter Search

Ok so far nothing revolutionary here, I am sure a lot of you have used Twitter search before. Take a look at the screenshot below and you will begin to get an idea of the opportunities that are available if you are on the ball.

You will have to wade through a lot of crap and retweets but there are a number of genuine sales leads available on Twitter, more and more it seems people are turning to Twitter first to seek out recommendations from their contacts. If you monitor it properly there are plenty of opportunities available for you.

So how do you make it work?

Well first off you are going to have to come up with a list of “search terms” that you want to monitor, start thinking like a potential client on Twitter and use phrases that you would use to ask for recommendations. It may take a while to get your list together but it is well worth investing some time into doing it.

Next you need to regularly use these terms to search for opportunities on the Social Network using the Twitter search facility.

Woah, Woah, Woah I haven’t got time to be doing that all day!

The plan comes tumbling down at this point which is why you need a way to automate the process. What if you could get an email alert everytime someone searched for one of your search terms, that would be quite helpful right?

Automating the process

The next part of this post is hidden behind a “pay wall” but before you go reaching for your wallets/purses all you need to do is hit the Tweet button below and share this post with your followers, once you do the content will be unlocked.

10. Harold Crick
Played by Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction

Harold Crick begins the movie as an IRS auditor whose life takes a sudden turn when a strange voice begins narrating his every move.

9. Leo Getz
Played by Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2

Who can forget the loud mouthed, quick talking Leo Getz who is given the protection of Riggs and Murtaugh when he decides to blow the whistle on his money laundering employers.

8. Mollie Jensen
Played by Kirstie Alley in Look Who’s Talking

Mollie who? Ok so the star of the film is the baby (who’s thoughts are narrated by the voice of Bruce Willis) but the film also touches on accounting ethics when it is revealed that the child is the result of accountant, Mollie Jensen, sleeping with one of her clients!

7. Louis Tulley
Played by Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters

Accountant Louis Tulley finds himself possessed by the demonic spirit of Vinz Clortho.

6. Hermes Conrad
Voiced by Phil LaMarr in Futurama

Hermes Conrad is a Jamaican bureaucrat and the accountant at Planet Express in the animated series Futurama.

5. Oscar Wallace
Played by Charles Martin Smith in The Untouchables

The fame and the plaudits for bringing down Al Capone went to Elliot Ness but it was the FBI accountant Oscar Wallace who identified the tax evasion charge.

4. Norm Peterson
Played by George Wendt in Cheers.

Ok so not technically a movie but how could we leave out Norm, the legendary beer drinker from the classic Cheers series. Norm was an accountant before turning his hand to interior decoration.

3. Leo Bloom
Played by Gene Wilder in The Producers

Leo Bloom is accountant to Max Bialystock a Theatre Producer who is down on his luck. Leo, somewhat innocently, advises that should Max raise money for a production that flops he would legally be allowed to keep all of the extra money.

2. Andy Dufresne
Played by Tim Robbins in The Shawshank Redemption

Andy Dufresne was a banker who was convicted of murdering his wife and her lover and is sentenced to two consecutive life sentences at Shawshank State Penitentiary. Though not technically an accountant his knowledge of the tax code led him to become the accountant for all of the guards at Shawshank Penitentiary and eventually at other prisons in Maine.

1. Itzhak Stern
Played by Ben Kingsley in Schindler’s List

Itzhak Stern was a Jewish accountant and right hand man to Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist. Stern is widely credited with typing the list of names that became known as Schindler’s list, a list of Jews who survived the Holocaust because of Oskar Schindler’s intervention.

Have we missed anyone?

Using Google Alerts To Track Your Web Content

The first way, and probably most passive way, of keeping track of your content is to set up a Google Alert. If another web page enters Google’s index with the content you put into the alert you will get an email with a link to the offending website. This means that once the alert is up you don’t have to do anything but sit back and hope you never receive an email!

Head over to www.google.com/alerts to start.

In the search query field you want to paste in a sentence from your content (paste it inside quotation marks), it doesn’t matter which sentence but I usually take one from the first paragraph and not one that mentions your company name or web address (as these will likely be stripped out or changed). In the Result Type you want “Everything”, in the how often field you want “As-it-happens”, in how many I choose “All results” and then set it to send to your email address. Once this is set up if Google detects the same sentence on another website you will get an email to let you know.

Now obviously this is not a deterrent, there are some people who will copy content regardless of what you put in place, but it will allow you to take action to get the copied content removed.

Using Copyscape to Detect Copied Content

Your other option is to use the Copyscape plagiarism checker. Simply head over to www.copyscape.com and input the URL of your webpage and Copyscape will scan the internet looking for duplicates. I believe they have a paid upgrade called Copysentry that monitors the web for copies of your content but I have not used it so cannot comment on it’s effectiveness or how different it is to the Google Alerts technique above.

What Can I Do About It

The purpose of this brief post was to show you how to detect copied content, most of the time an email to the offending party asking them to remove the content will suffice but if you want a detailed look at the steps you can and should take then I recommend reading What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content, written in 2006 but still very relevant and well worth a read if this is something that is bothering you.

The list includes ebooks on:

• Improving your conversion rate
• Optimising landing pages on your website
• Improving your content marketing strategy
• Using Twitter for business
• Getting the most out of paid search ads

And much, much more.

Our personal favourites are “The Ultimate Guide to Landing Page Optimization” from Unbounce and “How to Use Twitter for Business” by Hubspot (which we are currently reading).

Click here to read the original blog post at unbounce.com

Building your own website can be a great cost saver when you are just starting out and you can get a fantastic sense of achievement from putting your own site together but there comes a time when your company outgrows that website and you need to call in a professional web designer.

Maybe you didn’t design it, maybe you went with one of the cheap template solutions offered by companies like Yell or Vistaprint. These are fine if all you want is somewhere to point people to when wanting more information but if you are actually wanting to use your website to generate and convert sales leads then you will have to call in a professional. In much the same way that it is not recommended for a business owner to plough time into doing their own accounts it is not recommended for an accountant to waste their time designing and optimising their website.

What are the warning signs that it is now time to get your website professionally designed?

When you look at your website it makes you uncomfortable, even embarrassed. If you are in a position where you feel uncomfortable directing people to your website because you know it is poorly designed then what are you waiting for? Get it properly designed so that you can show it off to your customers .

It is not easy to find information on your website. If you are repeatedly getting comments from people saying they were on your website but couldn’t find any information on the product/service they were looking for you have problems. For every person who decides to pick up the phone when they can’t find what they are looking for there are many many more who just hit the back button and go to your competitors sites.

Making simple changes to your site require you to get on the phone to a web designer. With modern CMS technology simple changes to your website content should be easy for you to do without involving a professional. Gone are the days where every little change meant a call to your web designer and a bill heading your way.

Your website has that “cookie cutter”, template feel to it so that it portrays none of your company image or personality. The sheer amount of businesses online these days means it is vital that your website helps you stand out from the crowd, this includes the visual design but also the content you provide. Make sure your business is remarkable and not just another business with a template for a website.

You cannot instantly tell what the site is about upon landing on the page. When landing on your homepage it should be instantly obvious what the site is about, i.e. what services you offer. If you can’t instantly tell what the site is about your website needs scrapping and starting over, it WILL be costing you conversions.

Your conversion rates being terrible is a clear sign that something is wrong. If you have managed to get some traffic to the site but rarely get anything resembling a sales lead you need to analyse the site and make changes. It is likely down to the fact that your site is not set up to convert visitors into sales leads.

You have a really high bounce rate and a really low “time spent on site” figure. This is a clear sign that people are landing on your site and quickly hitting the back button, your analytics software should be providing you with this information.

There is no brand consistency between your website and other marketing materials. The visual aspects of your website design should neatly compliment the visual design of your brochure, business cards, company letterheads etc.

If you would like to receive a quotation for a new website design from a company that specialises in websites for accountants then get in touch with us now.

Concentrate on high quality blog posts. A lot of small business owners make the mistake of assuming they have to post everyday or every other day and very quickly burn themselves out and run out of things to write about. I don’t recommend posting daily, unless you have the time to really put the time in to generate top quality content. I prefer a quality over quantity approach. Make your content really appeal to the visitors of the blog, solve a problem for them, offer them some guidance and generally build up your image as an expert in the field. There is no point in following the next steps to send more people to your blog if the content is weak.

Make sure you have a link to your blog on your website. This may seem like common sense but there are websites out there that have very active blogs and absolutely no mention of them on their main website. Make sure you are promoting your blog and blog content on your main website.

Promote your blog through social media

Link to your blog in your email signature. Every email that you send is an opportunity to send someone to your blog. You could even go the extra step and post direct links to your latest blog post in your email signature. So, for example, instead of just having a “Visit Our Blog” link you would have something like “Check out our latest blog post on 5 ways to blah blah blah”.

Promote the link to your RSS feed. I personally do not make much use of RSS but there are plenty of people who do so make sure your RSS feed is easy to find so they can subscribe to your blog.

Get social. Visit other blogs in your niche and leave comments on their articles. The key here is to leave good quality comments rather than just “Nice Post” type comments. The aim is to get noticed by the blog owner who may reciprocate and start visiting your blog or, ideally, may drop a link to your site on his/hers but also to get noticed by other people visiting the blog. If you are leaving good quality comments then you are increasing the chance that someone will click through to your website to see what else you have to say. When people see blog commenting as a strategy they immediately think SPAM! What I am advocating is really contributing to the article so much so that the blog owner will genuinely appreciate the comment and want to reply to you.

Make it easy to share. Most people won’t go out of their way to share your content, even if it is great, but if you make it simple you can get a lot of success. If you have a WordPress blog then there are any number of social sharing plugins you can use to encourage people to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.

Link to your blog from everywhere. If you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, web forums etc. make sure you have a link to your blog and are regularly posting links to your blog posts.

Encourage people to stick around. Again this is much easier if you are using WordPress but having things like Popular Posts or Related Posts in your sidebar or at the end of your blog post will encourage people to stay on your blog and continue reading. You can also create your content to encourage further reading, creating a series of lined posts is a great way to keep people engaged.

Guest Post on related blogs. Guest posting is not only a great way to build relevant backlinks to your website it is also a very good method of driving traffic to your blog. Writing a guest post on an established website allows you to tap into their readership and attract referral traffic, obviously you need to be providing top quality content so that you are piquing the interest of the reader to find out more about you.

Allow Guest Posts on your own blog. Flipping the point above you can also drive traffic to your site by allowing people to guest post. The author of the guest post will be keen to get as much exposure as possible so will promote the post in their own social networks and link to it from their own blog.

The main point to take away from this article is that you will not drive traffic to your blog if you isolate yourself, i’m afraid content is not enough, “if you build it they will come” does not work when it comes to blogging. You need to get social and network with as many people as you can, promote the content of others and you will start to see people promoting your own content. Blogging isn’t easy and it takes time but if you do it right it can be a great weapon for your website.

The way you manage it is by becoming much more organised in the way you run your presence(s) on social networking sites, instead of logging on and thinking of something to say or something to share have it all mapped out ahead of time.

Schedule Your Posts on Facebook

Not a lot of people know that you can schedule posts in advance on your Facebook page, in all honesty I only became aware of it a couple of months ago, but this is a great way to make sure your Facebook page is getting updated even when you are struggling for time.

The way I manage things is to sit down for an hour on a Sunday night and map out the week ahead, scheduling at least 2 posts per day for the coming week. Some of these might be quick questions, jokes, funny pictures or interesting news, others are usually links to blog posts that I think my Facebook page fans will enjoy. Once that is done I can relax knowing that my page will be updated daily without me needing to get involved, obviously if something newsworthy comes up or I see a great blog post that I want to share or I get some extra time to put into Facebook then I can add to the content that is posted but I will at least have a base of content getting posted on a daily basis.

How to Schedule a Post on Facebook

You will need to be an Admin of the Facebook page to enable you to post and schedule content onto the page. Getting posts into your schedule is really quite simple. Input the post as you normally would but instead of hitting “Post” you want to click the little “clock” icon at the bottom of the post box.

Then it is just a case of choosing the Year, Month, Day and Time for the post to be published and then hit the “Schedule” button, all done. Posts can be scheduled up to six months in advance at 15-minute intervals.

If, at any time, you want to see what posts you have got scheduled to appear you can do so by following these steps:

1. Open the Admin panel at the top of the page.
2. Click the “Edit Page” tab.
3. Select “Use Activity Log”

This will pull up a list of the posts you have got scheduled to publish and you can cancel them, change the publish time or choose to publish the post immediately.

I Already Use a 3rd Party App for This!

There are a number of 3rd party apps that have allowed auto-posting to your Facebook page like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck, so you may be asking why is this information even relevant to me. Well there is a strong theory in social media circles that posting via a 3rd party can impact your Edgerank and reduce the level of user-engagement you get on posts so it may be worth switching to manually scheduling your posts in Facebook itself.

What Are The Advantages of Scheduling Facebook Posts

Aside from the obvious advantage of making you more organised and relieving the pressure of having to find something new to post everyday there are some other advantages.

1. You can schedule the posts to publish in the optimum time for user-engagement. This is going to take some research and testing on your part but eventually you should be able to gauge which days and what times during those days are better for user-interaction (likes, comments, shares) and schedule your posts to take full advantage.
2. You can spread your posts out over the day or week rather than logging in and dumping 5 or 6 posts on people which does nothing for user-interaction and ends up annoying people.
3. Your page can be working for you even when you’re not. If you’ve got a holiday coming up you can take full advantage of the scheduling feature to make sure your Facebook Page never goes quiet.

How To Know When The Best Time To Publish a Post Is

There is no hard and fast rule here that I can give you that will magically improve your interactions, obviously don’t schedule your posts to publish in the dead of the night as nobody will see them! You are going to need to do a little bit of testing here to see what works for your audience. You can make notes or, being accountants, i’m sure you know your way around a spreadsheet, fire up a new spreadsheet and document a few details of the posts you make, like:

• The day of the week it was published
• The time of the day it was published
• The type of content i.e. link to a blog post, photo, text, question, survey etc.
• Level of engagement. How many Likes, Shares and Comments
• The interaction on your posts.  Hover over the “xxx people saw this post” and it will give you a breakdown of how many directly saw your post and how many virally saw your post. Someone virally seeing your post has been alerted to it by a contact Liking, Sharing or Commenting on it.

This may seem like a lot of hard work but once your spreadsheet is set up you are just inputting data which you can then use to get a better idea of what days are best for posting and at what time during those days.

By taking a little time to get organised you can make your presence on Facebook operate much more efficiently and reduce the amount of time you waste thinking of things to publish.

We would like to thank those who took part in the session and hope that the answers you received shed some light on areas you weren’t sure on. We will definitely be doing another session in the near future, maybe on a different subject to SEO, and we may test it out on a different Social Network such as Google+. Join our mailing list and/or Like our Facebook page to keep yourself in the loop.

So, getting to the point, lets have a look at the questions that were asked and expand on the answers we gave.

Are Meta Keywords and Meta Description Tags Dead?

When it comes to ranking factors, particularly in Google, then these two tags are pretty much dead yes. However, that does not mean that you should forget about them altogether.

The Meta Description tag below (click the image for a larger view) is from a blog post on this website about Local SEO for accountants.

Now take a look at how Google displays that blog post in the Search Engine Results, notice the text snippet under the link is identical to the Meta Description we specified?

This gives you an opportunity to effect the text that Google shows about your page and the text a potential visitor will see. This could be the factor that convinces them to choose your page instead of a competitors so put some time and thought into it. I have seen a website’s Click Through Rate (CTR) shoot up after tweaking a Meta Description.

If you don’t specify a Meta Description then Google will take a snippet from your website to use instead. When setting up your Description try to stick to 150-160 characters in length otherwise it may get shortened/truncated.

With regards to the Meta Keywords tag it doesn’t, and hasn’t for a long time, had any effect on search engine rankings. Back in the day, when they did effect rankings, people would just spam the hell out of them with every conceivable keyword they could think of so Google stopped using it. One other thing if you are religiously listing every keyword that your site is targeting into your Meta Keywords tag then you have just done the keyword research for your competitors and handed it over an a silver platter (anyone can see them and copy them).

How important is it to have your page in loads of directories?

When we answered this on the Facebook page we said “not important to be in loads, important to be in good ones” (essentially what we said, not word for word). I’d like to clarify that a little further. There are thousands of web directories out there and the vast majority of them are a complete waste of your time, they are all set up with the same software, most of them on shared hosting with hundreds of other directories and a high percentage of them have zero quality control. If someone offers you 10000 directory submissions for £50 tell them to go away.

There are a number of important directories that it is important to get listed in, especially from a Local SEO viewpoint. These would include the major sites like Google+ Local (not technically a directory but never-mind), Yell, Yelp and Qype (just bought out by Yelp). Then you would have location specific directories, you know the type, those centered around a specific locale. Then you have the industry specific directories, so for accountants you have the IzzBox directory.

A word of warning some of these sites, in my experience Yell and Qype in particular, can be quite aggressive in telemarketing to you once you sign up.

How often would you recommend adding new content?

Fresh content is important, it keeps the search engine crawlers coming back to index your site and it gives your website the opportunity to target more keywords/keyphrases. If you are publishing blog posts around services that you want to rank for then you are increasing your chances of pulling in long-tail traffic. We all have the main keywords that we would want to rank for but by generating fresh content on a regular basis we get the opportunity to rank for search terms we never even thought of. Think on this, direct from Google:

15% of the searches we see everyday we’ve never seen before.

Google handles over 3 billion search queries PER DAY and 15% of those are completely unique! There is no way you can sit and target your site for those, your best bet of pulling in long-tail traffic like this is to have a lot of fresh, on-topic, keyword rich content.

Obviously there is only so many hours in the day and the majority of those are taken up with running your business so how often you post comes down to how much free time you get or whether you are prepared to outsource the work. The are plenty of people who will regularly update a blog for you for a monthly fee, obviously they wouldn’t have the same level of industry expertise as yourself. For me, quality wins out over quantity, you are much better served writing one piece of content that people will find interesting/informative/helpful than writing 5 pieces of content that are pretty much copy/pasted from elsewhere.

One way I find it easier to manage is to set aside some time on a weekend to write some content, get 3 or 4 good quality posts written and then schedule them to go out over the coming weeks. This is easily achieved in WordPress, so you can just schedule them and not worry about content for a while.

What 5 things would you do to push a site up the rankings?

As mentioned on the Facebook page this one is a little difficult to answer without seeing the website, looking at what keywords are targeted and analysing the competition but there are a few key things that need doing:

• Make sure the site has been designed and coded with SEO in mind. If the code is a load of “tag soup”, as you get from a lot of the free/cheap website providers (1&1, Vistaprint, Yell etc.) then it is going to make things harder. When a search engine crawler views your site it is looking at the source code, not the actual site that humans look at, so if the code is a mess it is going to have a negative effect.
• Strong internal linking. Are you linking to other pages on your site using keywords in anchor text rather than “click here”?
• Optimised Title Tags. These are what show up in the search engines as the link test, also what display in the browser window/tab. It is important to have these optimised for your keywords and to make sure they are unique for every page.
• Optimised Headers. Have your main keyword phrase in a <H1> tag to emphasise it’s importance. Only one <H1> tag per page.
• If you have images on your page make sure you have your keyword in the image filename and also optimise the Alt tag.
• Plenty of unique, keyword rich content on the site.

Once you have optimised your on-site you need to set about getting backlinks. I would recommend blog commenting on relevant blogs, guest posting on relevant blogs, forum profiles and signitures (I doon’t mean sign up for a load of unrelated forums and spam them with links, rather find forums that are a good fit for your niche and actively participate) etc.

How important is social media in SEO?

Social signals such as Tweets, Likes, Google +1’s, etc. – carry weight in Google’s ranking algorithm, but as yet it’s hard to establish more than a guess on the impact. Search is becoming increasingly more social, particularlay since Google launched their Google+ platform so I think it is safe to assume that social media is only going to get more important.

Here is an article on how a web page was ranked purely through the power of +1′s and Shares on Google+.

Join us on Facebook

We hope you found the information above to be useful and would ask that you join us on Facebook to ensure you get a chance to fire questions at us during the next session.

• The title of the page
• Headings on the page. H1 and H2 etc.
• Throughout the content of the page
• Within the Meta Description

These are standard local SEO practices and should be done with any site looking to increase their visibility in localised search results, here are four additional tips for increasing local SEO visibility:

Have your address on every page

One of the best ways to ensure Google picks up the localisation of your website is to include your business address on evey page of your site. This is usually achieved by having the address in the site’s footer. If possible try to include this information in hCard microformat. hCard helps the search engines to seperate the address information from other information on the site. You can use this very handy hCard generator to produce the required code for you.

If you have multiple locations, give each location their own contact page so you can have one page devoted to each address individually.

Start Blogging

A business blog is a great way to generate geo-targeted content, by blogging about local events, local news or business interests. The main point here is to ensure you are blogging for the reader and not the search engine, make your content readable and interesting for a potential customer and add in geo-specific information to complement the blog post.

Don’t Stuff Keywords

I mentioned above that having your address on every page of your website is a great way to increase your local exposure, this does not mean stuffing a load of towns, regions or post codes into your website’s footer in the hope that you will rank for them all. The search engines don’t like it and it will do you much more harm than good. See our other blog post on bad SEO practices to avoid.

Get local with your link building

Try to find sites that produce content about your local area and seek to get a link from them. You can use Google to search for local blogs to comment on or local website that you can ask for a link. Searches like:

• Your City + “News”
• Your City + “blog”
• Your City + “add link”
• Your City + “submit link”

Does your local area have business clubs or associations you could join? Most of them will link back to your website if you join up. You can also use social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find local businesses or groups in your area that you could ask for a link.