Posts Tagged ‘Law Firm SEO’

Lawyer Website SEO – Top 10 Tips

Tuesday, March 25th, 2014

Search engine optimization (SEO) is designed to increase visibility for lawyers’ websites and make your Internet brand easier to locate by legal consumers.

Here are the tried-and-true Top-10 for lawyers’ websites:

  1. Legal content. Optimized legal content has everything to do with drawing legal consumers to websites for lawyers. It’s pivotal for your landing page and the rest of your webpages to contain valuable, relevant legal content, because that’s what legal consumers are looking for when they enter the search.
  2. Legal consumers. Websites for lawyers target a very specific audience: legal consumers. Depending upon your areas of practice, that definition can be narrowed to legal consumers in search of your specialty. Legal consumers are the reason lawyers’ websites exist.
  3. Keywords. SEO professionals perform online traffic reporting to identify keywords that make your Internet brand more identifiable to legal consumers. Legal content is optimized using relevant keywords. Avoid “keyword stuffing” and other tactics that are counterintuitive to SEO strategy.
  4. Internet brand. This is the online counterpart to your offline law practice. This isn’t just about the appearance of lawyers’ websites, although the logo, graphics, and other images are important, too. This is about understanding your SEO and social media strategies, and how it relates to your identity. Search engines identify your Internet brand through SEO. Legal consumers find your Internet brand online using search engines.
  5. Clickability. Simple navigation persuades legal consumers to stay at lawyers’ websites for a visit. Icons, links, and highlighted text should be easy to identify when a legal consumer is scanning a webpage. Clean, unbroken links and pages that load quickly make clickabilty simple work.
  6. WordPress. This is “the beast” of tools for lawyers’ websites and everyone else. WordPress loves SEO! The free software is an optimization-wealthy environment, and simple to customize using plugins (do the research). WordPress can be customized to make your Internet brand more appealing to legal consumers.
  7. Links. A website for lawyers needs links to drive legal consumers to the site. Link stuffing gets messy, and linkspam should be eradicated – both can jeopardize your search engine rankings.
  8. Images. An inviting image or two can make your message loud and clear to legal consumers. Much like legal content, images generate metadata that search engines seek as their spiders crawl the ‘net. This means optimized titles and tags are quite important to the identification of your Internet brand.
  9. Smartphones. Legal consumers, like most Americans, are dependent upon their smartphones and other mobile devices. Shrinking lawyers websites to fit a smartphone screen isn’t practical, but you can build a smartphone-friendly version of your site. Apps are also an excellent way to bridge the smartphone gap, and are ripe for optimization.
  10. Prioritize. Legal consumers are your priority and, no matter how excellent your SEO strategy is, losing site of the audience your targeting can doom your Internet brand. This means legal content that is focused, and relevant to legal consumers – and keeping it fresh by uploading 4-5 legal blogs per week.

Lawyer Website SEO is Our Business
Lawyer Success, Inc. can correspond to any website for lawyers to WordPress pages, lending legal consumer appeal through continuity. Our SEO strategists bring traffic to your Internet brand to grow your client-base. Ask about our Free, No Risk lawyer website design – guaranteed results!

Free Advice Hotline – Call (800) 877-2776 – Sales Support Office in Kansas City, Kansas; Chicago, Illinois; Tampa, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; San Francisco, California and Destin, Florida.

If Content is King, Then Links Must Be Queen

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Although we’ve all heard that content is king—and this is certainly true in many ways—remember that a page can be completely satisfying, readable and incredibly interesting, however if it is not bringing in visitors your website could languish and die. In short, even the most compelling content will not make your website successful on its own, although it should definitely be one of your primary goals when setting up a site. Generally speaking, the purpose of any one page on your site should be to bring in visitors, rank well, and convert visitors through sales or reader satisfaction.

While it is true that a fabulous, well-written, informative article will bring in a certain amount of natural links, and will also satisfy your readers, it will not get you the ranking and traffic you are looking for. In other words, the king and queen should work companionably together to make your website a smashing success—they both have a specific and necessary role to play, and ideally should integrate those roles to further your site.

What Does Google Think?
The general belief is that Google values content over links, however a Google developer was heard to say that incoming links from authority sites carry more weight with Google than strict on-page optimization. Other authorities speculate that Google looks equally at content and links, however Google does operate under the assumption that webmasters will only link to other sites if they find them to be highly relevant or helpful. Those who understand the power of linking, however may be taking part in link exchange programs, using links purely as a tool to gain the best rankings.

Once Google’s complicated algorithm takes this into consideration, content may take on a new importance in judging relevance. In other words, not only will the content on your own page be judged for its relevance, but the content from your links will also be judged in your final rankings. Rumor has it that anchor text has ceased to count as highly in Google’s calculations unless the text you are using in the link appears on the page being linked to. Because of this, remember to always use your target keywords in your site content, and ensure your incoming links also contain those words.

The King and Queen Must Live Harmoniously
SEO best practices dictate that quality content and links must live together in harmony for true success. This means your goal is to create the perfect balance of superior copy and high-quality, relevant links which will boost your rankings. All great content and no links will leave you floating around cyberspace where users will be unable to find you. On the other hand, lots of links with truly dreadful or even mediocre copy will allow people to find you—then they will wish they hadn’t.

Remember—the Right Kind of Links is Crucial
Organic links are what you are looking for in your quest for website success. Trying to fool the system through questionable link building techniques-such as using spam links from link farms or buying massive quantities of low-quality links—will flag your site to Google who will likely penalize you for such black hat practices.

No Copied Content Allowed
Quality content is unique and informative, and never, ever, duplicated from another site. Spun copy can also bring penalties to your website. And really, do you want to be known for low-quality or copied content when you are marketing and promoting your site and your brand? The bottom line is—don’t choose between content and links. Use them both, use them wisely and sit back and bask in your success.

The Importance of Keyword Research in Effective SEO

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

In the world of SEO, keyword research may well be one of the most important factors to your ultimate success. If you are relatively new to the world of search engine optimization, you may be a bit fuzzy on exactly what keyword research entails, and why it is such a critical component of your SEO strategy.

What is Keyword Research?
Even if you have spent hours and hours fine-tuning your web pages with a goal of getting higher rankings with Google, it will all be for naught if you have not targeted the very best keywords and keyword phrases. Selecting the wrong keywords for your website or blog can greatly decrease the relevant traffic your site will receive.

What’s My Target Audience?
Just as in any marketing strategy, whether online or traditional, your ultimate goal is to know your audience. If you don’t fully know and understand your audience, then you will not be able to reach them. You may be required to focus on specific location, specific region, specific business, trade, service or product when you are deciding on your very best keywords and keyword phrases. Your goal will be to cover each and every aspect of your product or your particular service which could be searched for by users. Because each page on your website may likely be dealing with a different aspect of your business, the keywords for each page will necessarily be different. Once you truly know your audience and have looked at your site from their perspective, you will have gone a long way in identifying your target audience.

Rely on Facts, Not Your Personal Feelings
Many inexperienced website owners start out with keywords and keyword phrases that they simply “feel” are right and are the most likely words users will search for. Unfortunately, even though this may seem like common sense, or appear fairly obvious, your chosen keywords may not mesh with the ones your buyers or users are typing into their search bar. Once you are a part of a specific trade or niche, your vision tends to narrow, and you erroneously believe that others understand these trade-specific terms in the same way that you do.

If you are unable to take your own feelings out of the process, ask friends or family what search words they would use if they wanted to find a business like yours. You may be very surprised to find their chosen keywords and phrases are completely different than the ones you chose. Ignore your gut feelings and go with the facts, and you will avoid a possible wild goose chase. There are several keyword research tools you can incorporate which will offer pertinent data in your keyword search.

What is the Overall Process?
First of all you will enter the discovery phase in which you will basically brainstorm and come up with a laundry list of possible keywords which are related to your site and your target audience. Next you will analyze these keywords and phrases, and will additionally add information about your competition into the mix. You need information about your competitors in order to determine how many pages are competing for Google’s place of honor. Analyze your competitors based on search terms and how many pages are indexed in order to get the clearest picture. You will then select a shortlist of keywords, and finally you will make the absolute optimal use of your chosen keywords throughout your website copy, your HTML code and your meta tags.

Focused keyword phrases give your site the very best chances of ranking highly, as well as bringing targeted traffic to your site, which in turn results in higher sales conversion ratios, therefore keywords are a key element in your overall SEO strategy.

The Best SEO Strategies for Increasing Link Popularity

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

What is Link Popularity?
Second only to keywords, links are critical for website success. Link popularity, in short, is the measurement for the number of links to your website from other websites. But wait—I should have definitely added the word “quality” to that sentence, because low-level links just for the sake of having links can actually hurt you much more than they will help you. Both Google, as well as some other search engines, take their complicated algorithm and rate your website based on many things, one of them being your link popularity.

High Quality vs. Low Quality Linking
In other words, each quality link which points back to your site is, in effect, a vote for your website. If I have a link on my own website which links to your site, then the theory is I believe your site to be valuable, and of high quality, thereby giving you my vote of confidence. Keep in mind, however, that if my website happens to be considered a low-quality, poorly-rated one, then my vote of confidence may hurt you more than help you. High quality links will come from established directories and institutions rather than somebody’s obscure personal homepage. In general, however each one of these website link “votes” pushes your website up the search engine ladder, and can be an incredibly important SEO strategy.

Submit to High Quality Web Directories for Successful SEO
The highest quality web directories are those which manually review your website—and charge a fee for this process. But wait, you say, isn’t Google penalizing those who acquire paid links? The answer to this is yes—and no. While search engines truly don’t like paid directory links, they don’t devalue the quality web directories which manually review websites for submission. This is an important distinction to remember when you are considering submitting your website for a paid review.

Research Your Web Directory Prior to Submission
Make sure you have fully researched the web directory you are considering, and ask whether or not websites are rejected. After all, if all websites which are submitted pass with flying colors, there is little value in obtaining a listing. Ensure the web directory has plenty of quality URL’s listed as low-quality sites will harm you more than help. Although some directories are quite expensive, if you can find the budget, try to purchase at least one quality directory listing per month.

Submit Articles Regularly
One of the best-known strategies for building backlinks on your website is to take bits and pieces of your site’s content, and re-write, adding enough quality information to submit as a standalone article. The critical factors in submitting articles is that they absolutely must be the highest quality, they must use your keywords judiciously throughout, and you must include links back to your website either in the resource box at the end, the author bio area or in the article body itself.

Where to Submit Your Articles
Ezine (www.ezinearticles.com) is considered one of the best places to submit your articles, but you can also look at www.articlealley.com, www.articlebase.com and www.articlecity.com, to name just a few. Whatever you do, however, don’t simply submit an existing article from your website, as you may run into possible duplicate content issues. Even submitting one article to several sites every two to three weeks can add up significantly throughout the course of a year.

Create Quality Website Content and Keep an Eye on Your Links
If you are consistently generating high-quality content on your website, you will establish links automatically, or organically. If you always provide content which your readers find interesting, compelling and, ultimately, helpful, you will develop a vast array of high-quality links, and you can consistently provide this level of content is you always remember that you are writing for your customer. Don’t simply write your articles and update your website with quality content and assume your links are healthy and happy. Monitor the effectiveness of your inbound links by entering your URL into the box at the top on https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites. On the button labeled “Pages,” you will see the number of pages Yahoo has indexed on your site, while the button labeled “inlinks” will show the links which point back to your website.

While there are many more strategies to increase link popularity, start implementing the basics today—links can truly make or break your website, so afford them the importance they deserve.

The Best Off-Page SEO Strategies

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Search engine optimization techniques can change as quickly as the weather, and what you learned—and put into practice—today, may be outdated by tomorrow. Unless you are an avid reader of all the latest SEO practices, you could easily lag behind in the race for newer, better, more productive SEO methods. On-page SEO concerns what search engine spiders can glean about your site through the content and structure of your website. On-page SEO will have you looking at your keyword selections as well as how your meta and ALT tags are used to your advantage. On-page SEO encompasses internal links, content, keyword density and site maps. Off-page SEO, however, refers to activities which are conducted away from your own website, such as the number of inbound links from other websites—also known as backlinks.

Why are Inbound Links Important?
Search engines use inbound links as a method of establishing trust, determining relevancy and gauging the popularity of your site. The more websites which the search engine finds which are linking back to your site the higher your own web pages will rank. Because of the vast amount of websites delivering low-quality content, Google has attempted to minimize this through inbound link perusal. The theory is that if other high quality websites are linking to your site, they apparently believe it to be worthy and credible.

Start a Blog
Blogging is one of the primary—not to mention the most powerful—ways to promote your company online. If you write a blog which includes huge amounts of unique and informative content that others in your niche will find helpful, interesting or even amazing, you have taken a very important step in off-page SEO. You can promote your blog through posting your own comments in other blogs within your niche or service-related blogs which allow links in the comment section, just don’t go overboard.

Commenting on other’s blog sites in your area of expertise will also increase the chances of others visiting your blog so long as you always leave your URL site when you comment. Blog commenting can generate valuable backlinks much more effectively than you might imagine, but take the time to really read the other person’s blogs, and make intelligent and provocative comments.

Help Crawlers Find Your Content
Keep the titles and descriptions for your webpages as clear and relevant as possible. Search engine spiders have a memory of sorts, so the first impression of your website is critical. It’s better to put your best foot forward from the very beginning, rather than to try and go back later and re-work pages in an attempt to convince the spiders to give you another look. Help search engines find your content through sitemaps and lots of relevant internal links, and make sure your URL strings are not full of garbage.

Register your Website in Lots of Web Directories
You want maximum visibility for your website, and website directories are a bit like the yellow pages in that they allow visitors to find your information. You will place a link in the directories back to your site, so that visitors who are searching for information can read about your site. Being registered in web directories also lends credence and authority to your site.

Using Social Media to Your Advantage
Social networking sites can be great places for gaining fans, friends and followers, not to mention making valuable business contacts and expanding your network. Facebook is the leader of the pack, although many businesses also incorporate Twitter and LinkedIn into their social media off-page SEO.

There are many more off-page strategies such as advertising using Google Adwords to promote your site, participating in forum posting in your niche, targeting an audience through the use of a press release, exchanging links with reputable webmasters and article submission, to name a few. Start slowly and work your way through a few of them and you will be amazed at how quickly your site will climb the ranks and how successful it will be in attracting highly targeted traffic.

Tactics Which Can Kill Your Website’s SEO

Friday, March 16th, 2012

While some SEO tactics are simply ineffective, others can be considered downright unethical, although you obviously want to avoid both types. SEO practices which are considered less than ethical are known as “black hat” techniques (as opposed to “white hat” SEO techniques which are not only acceptable but desirable). The ineffective SEO techniques take your time and money, yet produce only short-term results, so you want to guard against them as well.

Commonly Used Less-Than-Ethical SEO Techniques
A link farm is a group of websites which have been created with no other purpose than to generate backlinks to other sites. These sites have absolutely no useable content of their own, rather they simply sell links to those who are attempting to add links to their website and increase their rankings. This is an SEO technique which is simply not worth it for a variety of reasons. Not only are you required to shell out money for the links, but as soon as Google—or any other search engine—recognizes the site as a link farm they will ignore all the links, and may even penalize you for using such a low-level technique.

Cross-linking is also considered an unethical practice, and consists of one person having multiple websites, and linking between them—for the sole purpose of creating links. While it can be perfectly acceptable to occasionally link one of your sites to another, creating sites which have no value in themselves simply to be able to add another link is not only a waste of your money, but just like link farming can end up getting you penalized. There is virtually no reason to engage in cross-linking when you can easily get links simply from writing high quality articles and posting them on your primary website.

Cloaking your website involves returning altered website pages to the spiders which crawl your site while your human readers see something entirely different. The goal of cloaking is to improve your search engine rankings by misleading search engines into thinking your content is different than what it actually is. It’s much easier simply to optimize your content to begin with than to risk having your site removed or blacklisted when the cloaking is discovered. Any site that appears differently to a search engine than to the human eye will be deemed to be engaging in cloaking, preventing the search engines from effectively doing their job—and costing you dearly.

Keyword stuffing is also frowned upon by search engines, but more importantly can alienate your readers. Inserting a large number of keywords into your content and meta tag in an attempt to increase your site’s rankings and bring more traffic to your website—artificially—is known as keyword stuffing and it is considered unethical, and, in some cases can be considered an attack technique. This means the keyword stuffing is used to send traffic to websites which are considered fraudulent or even malicious. Keywords may also be hidden in the content through matching the font color to the background, or putting the keywords behind an image. Google’s increasingly sophisticated algorithms have enabled it to quickly identify irrelevant terms as well as to spot keywords which are clearly out of context or simply overused. Google may remove a site completely if they detect the use of keyword stuffing, so don’t do it. Use your keywords wisely, but always make sure they make sense within the context of the content.

Don’t waste your valuable resources engaging in unethical or black hat SEO techniques, rather take the time to set your site up correctly right from the beginning, and only use time-proven, high quality, ethical practices which will move your site up the ranks slower, but steadily, without the potential for penalties or banishment.

SEO Optimization—On Page or Off Page?

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

The battle continues to range as to whether on-page SEO is better than off-page SEO. If you are a bit fuzzy on exactly where the difference lies, off-page SEO generally refers to items which are outside your site—link generation programs and social media efforts to name just a couple. On-page SEO refers to the specific copy on your website, whether or not your website design is SEO friendly, and the code, title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords and internal linking which appear on your website and are crucial to your site’s success.

On-page SEO is absolutely necessary in order for your website to reach its full potential, and truthfully, if you have a website which has been successfully live for several years, possesses very deep, well-structured, quality content, then a bit of tweaking may well be enough to make your website as successful as you desire. On the other hand, if your website is a relative newcomer to the Internet, then it is highly likely you are going to have to jump into the off-page factors if you want to be recognized as a quality site.

What Can On-Page SEO Do For You?

On-page SEO can enable each page within your website to rank highly for a particular, prominent keyword or key phrase. On-page SEO can allow you to prioritize which pages within your website are of higher importance based on their navigational structure and internal links. Finally, on-page SEO can give a page rank based on a portion of the links from off-page ranking factors.

What Can Off-Page SEO Do For You?

Off-page SEO can, to some extent, compensate for flaws within your site’s pages, as well as for less competitive keywords. Excellent off-page SEO can bring a brand new site to the first page in a Google search in a matter of weeks. Off-page SEO can keep your most important web pages at the top of the search engines by virtue of link quality and relevance, and finally, off-page SEO develops authority for your site and the pages within it.

Challenges of a New Site

If you have only recently launched your website, then there is a chance it may be lacking content as well as high quality links to your site. In order to develop your site’s SEO as quickly as possible, it’s imperative that you present exceptionally high-quality content which is of value to your readers rather than tons of marketing fluff. Blogs are an especially great way to create quick, meaningful content for your site’s visitors, and the best blogs gain quickly in popularity, bringing traffic in to your website. The more quality content on your site, the more likely readers will find something they want to link to, so consistent posting of great content is key.

Challenges of an Old Site Which is Largely Un-optimized

Suppose you have a relative older site which has never been thoroughly optimized even though it’s been on line for two, three, four or more years. Even better, assume this site has always had tons of quality content as well as authority with the search engines. Truth be told, you are sitting on the Hope Diamond of search engines. By simply tweaking your on-page SEO, and incorporating a relatively few off-page SEO techniques, you may soon find your site the rock star of the Internet.

Which is Better?

Many SEO experts believe that the best website rankings may come from mixture of approximately 60% on-page SEO tactics and 40% off-page SEO tactics, although in some cases links alone have been known to push a page straight to the top. The age and authority of your website, combined with the quality of your links as well as your supporting, high-quality content are all factors in determining how much time and energy you need to devote to on or off-page SEO.

What Does Google Look For When Positioning Lawyer Websites?

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

The original plan of the Google PageRank algorithm was to determine the important and relevance of Web pages in order to position them within the search engine results pages to best serve the Google user.


One of the most important determing factors in the rating for Pagerank was the number of Web links referencing a Web, the relevancy of those links to the site the link to and the Pagerank of those Web pages the links were placed.

Because lawyers know that top placement on search engine like Google can generate lots of new clients and leads to their law practice, many companies began the unscrupulous practice of retailing links to attorneys. This practice is considered to be a “Black Hat” technique for generating inbound links to a Web site. “Black Hat” technique is a term used by search engine optimization gurus meaning, you are cheating and if you get caught your Website is likely to suffer.

In recent weeks it came to my surprise that one of the largest lawyer website development and Internet marketing companies was engaging in the “Black Hat” technique of selling links or Pagerank to their customers. As a result, Findlaw and their Web properties lost 2 points off of their PageRank score which was a huge blow to their prominence and credibility with the search engines and legal marketplace.

As a result the links purchased by Findlaw customers are pretty much worthless. In my opinion, I would imagine that any link supplied by Findlaw to any other Website will probably have no effect on search engine optimization.

Our company has been performing lawyer website search engine optimizationsince 2001. Our clients reach the top of the search engines because we develop sites that are topic specific, geographically targeted and provide a wealth of highly relevant content. Call us at (769) 218-6099 for a free review of your lawyer website seo.