SEO is a technique which is widely used to make your legal website or blog more visible in an environment (the Internet) where there are already plenty of websites with the exact same type of law firm or legal specialty as your own. Most research will tell you that if you want to get the desired traffic to your legal website or blog, you need to be within the top 10 in the search engines. As you probably already know, however, competition to be in that top 10 is fierce, and staying there once you’ve made it is just as difficult.
SEO crosses the barriers between search engines, as they all operate by the SEO Bible, and allow your business to attract more of the “perfect” client, thus increasing your offline business. If your law firm has spent thousands—or more—creating the highest quality, most creative legal website around, but have left it running in an un-optimized manner, then you are simply spinning your wheels on the Internet. In older advertising terms it is something like have the most fabulous sign made up for your firm, then sticking it in the storeroom, where obviously your targeted clients will never see it.
While SEO is imperative, ethical SEO is critical for natural or organic search engine rankings. Major search engines such as Google are highly developed and able to easily understand the credibility of SEO techniques. By the same token, they can quickly identify unethical search engine techniques, with a potential consequence of blacklisting your website or even banning it. While “black hat” techniques can boost your search engine rankings quickly, in the long run it is a bad choice. In case you are unclear about what constitutes “black hat” techniques, here are some of the most common:
- Keyword stuffing involves the repetitive use of the same keyword phrase over and over in your meta tags, comment tags, alt tags or the actual copy on your website. Repeat your targeted keywords no more than six or seven times within each 200 words.
- Inserting hidden text or links that are readable by search engines but cannot be seen by your human visitors is not good use of SEO. All search engines consider these hidden text and links to be spam and will penalize the page, or possibly the entire site.
- Cloaking involves a software program to direct search spiders to a group of pages which are created to “trick” the spider and re-direct the user—while cloaking can have some proper uses, by and large it is used to deceive search engines, and is therefore considered spam.
- Creating mirror sites or duplicate content and placing them on multiple servers with different domain names, and search engines will not only suppress duplicate content but will also count them as a violation of the search engine’s spam guidelines.
- Link farming refers to putting hundreds of links on one page to sites which are essentially unrelated to your site content and can contain poor quality content that is useless to your potential clients. Reciprocal links can associate you with “poor neighborhoods,” so you should avoid link farming at all cost.
- Irrelevant link exchange is often considered unethical SEO, and no matter how tactfully or carefully you hide them, hiding repetitive keywords is also considered unethical.
These types of spam can cause your firm to lose your rankings and be booted off the search engine index; while search engines have varying rules for spam detection, the end result will be the same, and it can be extremely difficult for your firm to recover from a ban, which is why ethical SEO is so critical. Used correctly on your legal website or blog, proper search engine optimization techniques will almost certainly get you ranked higher in the search engines, and achieved legitimately, organic links can last indefinitely. Acquire your search engine rankings fairly, and maintain them ethically for far-reaching positive results.
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