Improve your visibility with search engines

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of improving your website’s visibility in search engines to increase traffic. This article covers a few basic tips to help attract more visitors to your site and TaxDome portal once they go live.

Start with titles

Search engines typically give high priority to page titles, which appear in browser tabs and search results. Every page should have its own title. Keep titles short, descriptive, and specific enough to attract your target audience.

For example, the title for taxdome.com is “Practice management software for accounting and tax firms - TaxDome.”

For more on titles and SEO, see Neil Patel’s article on how to write title tags for SEO .

Develop your content

Content is the most important part of a website. Some essentials:

• Make sure the content is well-written. Consider working with a professional writer or editor.
• The more polished your website is, the more traffic it will receive.
• Regularly update your content and remove anything outdated.
• Use a simple navigation structure to make content easy to find.
• Keep text easy to read. People tend to scan rather than read long blocks, so use headlines, subheadings, bullet lists and bold text to aid readability.
• Use original language. If the same content appears on multiple URLs, search engines may penalize your rankings.

Write a meta description

A meta description is a concise summary of a page’s content that appears in search results. When writing meta descriptions, follow these three rules:

1. Keep it short (no more than 150 characters).

2. Focus on the client.

3. Repeat the main message.

Use keywords

Keywords are the terms people type to find content online. As a website owner, you can use keywords to connect with potential clients looking for your services. To be effective, keywords should be well-researched, carefully chosen and used in context. Some tips:

• It’s helpful to build a keywords list.
• Add keywords into your title and description in a clear, natural way.
• Include a location in your keywords. For example, if you offer bookkeeping services in San Francisco, use phrases such as “bookkeeping in San Francisco.”
• Keywords work well in headlines, subheadings and boldfaced links.

Use static URLs

There are two types of URLs—static and dynamic:

• Static: your-domain-name.com/category/the-best-tax-practices
• Dynamic: your-domain-name.com/category/?p=018775

While search engines can handle both, static URLs are easier for users to read and remember. It’s also good practice to include one primary keyword in a page URL. Avoid underscores (such as best_tax_practices) because Google reads them as one word (besttaxpractices); use hyphens instead (best-tax-practices).

Use ALT attributes for all your images

Search engines don’t read images—they read the ALT text instead. Use keywords as ALT attributes to help search engine crawlers understand what an image represents. Placing keywords in the text surrounding your images also helps.

For example, if you’re uploading an image of a 1040 form, use “Form 1040” in the ALT attribute.

For more on the ALT attribute, see the Mozilla Developer documentation .

Get links to your site

When people link to your site, you get new visitors. Avoid investing in sponsored backlinks—spammy or highly promotional articles with a backlink to your website won’t bring much traffic, nor will they give your site credibility.

Focus instead on offering real value. When you share your knowledge, insights, practical tips and free tools, you’ll receive links from users who find them useful. The best way to get links is to create content that people will want to share—for example, a blog post with relevant tax statistics or industry insights.

Use social media

Having a brand presence on social media can increase traffic to your website and build your firm’s reputation.

Pay attention to mobile

Make sure your website looks good on mobile devices. Your site should automatically scale to fit different screen sizes to provide a good experience for mobile users.

Create useful 404 pages

The 404 page is what users land on when they navigate to a page that doesn’t exist on your site. To improve the user experience, create a custom 404 page with the following:

• A clear message that the page can’t be found.
• Links to your site’s home page and most popular pages.
• A way for users to report a broken link.