At some point you've heard the phrase "backlinks". Backlinks are the links scattered throughout the net that point to a website and they are essential to your website's search engine marketing push. Backlinks are an important metric exploited by search engines like Google. These search engines regard inbound links to be a measure of a site's comparative relevance and bank heavily on them when deciding the position of accountant websites in search engine results.
After you get your website up you will likely notice a serious increase in emails from other websites, many of whom you never heard of before, wanting 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.
Unfortunately this doesn't work any more, but there are ways to get around this restriction by 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. If you don't have a blog, or if your blog is on your main website and doesn't have a unique URL you'll need another web property to exchange links.
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 these guys anyway?
Don't take an offer at face value. Take a little time to research the company you'll be working with. Keep in mind that people are going to see and even follow these links so it's important to make sure you're not linking to "bad neighbors".
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 in a link?
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.
Keep an eye on the fine print, too. Some companies are going to try to trick you by getting you to agree to give them high value links in exchange for weak ones. Often times they will request it be on your home page or another popular page (or every page). This is because these pages are worth more than the other pages on the site in terms of SEO benefit. The question is, what are they offering in exchange?
Before exchanging links with someone take a look through their site and see where their backlinks are placed. 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.
You don't have to look far to see the wreckage that Google penalties have left behind, but perhaps the most famous company to ever get hit by the infamous Google "ban hammer" was Overstock.com. They were lucky in that the Google ban didn't actually force them out of business, but it cost them a fortune. They got caught trying to scam Google for higher rankings and Google slapped such a fat penalty on them that the online retailer decided to start their SEO efforts all over again from scratch with a new domain name: O.co
It is not unusual for companies that email you out of the blue to be considered link farmers, especially if they don't have a valid, non-SEO reason for wanting to link to accountant websites. As you can guess, this isn't a "neighborhood" you want to be associated with. Getting involved with a link farm can get you blacklisted, and once your domain is banned it's very difficult to get re-indexed. In my opinion questionable links just aren't worth the risk.
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. Promoting accountant websites is hard work, and you have to seize opportunities that present themselves. But you also need to keep a clear head and think critically before committing your good name to a new link partner. The best means to staying out of the rough is to regard your links as endorsements for excellent goods and services instead of SEO shortcuts. If you ever notice yourself exchanging links simply for the search engine optimization value stop and take a long critical look at the business you're endorsing and ask yourself, "Am I actually inclined to be responsible for my friends doing business with the owner of this site?"
Kenny Marshall is a maketing guru and former Officer of CPA Site Solutions, one of the United States' leading website companies dedicated solely to providing
outstanding accountant websites.
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