Legal Search Marketing

Archive for August, 2005

Law firm marketing guru Larry Bodine had a good post last week with tips from top blogging expert, Kevin O’Keefe about getting more traffic to your legal web site. 

I would say I agree with most everyone of these tips and suggestions from Kevin and have listed them below with some comments. These are great ideas for any law firm interested in Internet Marketing, search engine optimization or legal blogs, which should be every law firm!

-  People don’t trust sponsored links.  Those are the paid ads at the side and top of Google search results.

:: (I think to some point this is true and I know personally I will always check the organic results before the sponsored results but they can work for some law firms and they will produce more traffic overall and can no doubt result in more clients. The key though is that you should be most concerned about your law firms organic or free listings at Google and the other search engines.

Getting your current legal web site optimized for the search engines or creating a new legal blog are the best ways to long term organic success at Google, MSN and Yahoo.)

-  A site map will help raise your search engine results, because it’s a page of links to your site.

:: (This is very true and its key to have a site map on any web site because it serves a dual purpose by giving the search engine spider a place to index all of the pages in your site, and it also gives the visitor an easy way to find things within your site.)

-  Nobody reads your calendar on your blog.  You might as well get rid of it, because people will search your blog by topic but not by the date you posted something.

:: (I never thought of that and its true, people would usually not click on a date, they would click on either a recent post or a category within your blog. I’m taking all calendars off my blogs, thanks Kevin!) – two paragraphs and two sentences each, maximum.  No one will read anything longer. (I guess I violated this rule right here!)

-  A blog post should be short

:: (I tend to violate that as well as I’m doing now but I think it usually makes sense to just have a short post with a link to further information.)

-  Just quote and refer other blogs and you can get huge traffic to your own blog.  That’s what Kevin does, and his blog has a Google ranking of 8 out of 10 (this is very high). Kevin says he does no original writing on his own blog, and instead has created a clearing house for information from others. "You get the viral marketing buzz by quoting other bloggers," he said.

-  Put content in the <title> tags on your site.  Most home page title tags say "Welcome to our site," when they should instead describe the services of the firm instead, improving search engine results.  Most lawyer bio pages are titled "lawyer bio," which is a mistake.  Instead, each bio title tag should have the lawyer’s name, industries and skills.

:: (This is VERY key for any law firm web site. The TITLE tag is the most important part of search engine optimization. If you don’t have unique titles on each of the different pages, your not going to get as good of exposure and will never be ranked in the top 10 for your firms main geographic and/or practice area keywords.)

-  Start using RSS.  This method of syndication will be built into the next version of Windows, known as "Vista."  RSS will be built into Internet Explorer, Word and Outlook.

:: (RSS is very important and creating a weblog or BLOG for your law firm will give you an RSS feed, which others can then use and subscribe to your blog and see your posts.)

-  Kevin uses Netnewswire to follow 200 news feeds.  He sees the title, sources and when the post went online.  He organizes them by category and decides which to put on his own blog.

-  He uses Newsgator to search for certain words, like "marketing," his own name and his company name.

-  Major law firms are launching blogs, including Davis Wright Tremaine’s Telecom Law Blog, Sheppard Mullin’s Antitrust Law Blog — one of 7 blogs the firm publishes in place of its newsletters and PDF files — and Preston Gates & Ellis’s Electronic Discovery Blog.

:: (This is no surprise and it would make sense that all law firms develop some kind of blog presence in the future. They can do very well in the search engines and can be a very good complement to your existing legal web site.)

If your law firm needs any assistance with your existing legal web site or have any questions on creating a legal blog, contact me.

The WSJ reports that next week MSN will announce a new ad program called MSN Keywords and this is another example of how MSN is trying to mimic Google and encroach on its search territory.

Microsoft next week will announce that an invitation-only test of MSN Keywords will begin in October with 500 advertisers and search-engine marketing specialists. The service will move MSN closer to how Google handles advertising, by using live auctions of keywords. MSN Keywords is one tool of a broader set of new advertising services called adCenter that Microsoft is building on MSN. Microsoft executives say they hope the tools will allow companies to tailor advertisements by giving them more detailed information on Web users than is currently available.

Reuters reports that a Washington state judge temporarily blocked a former Microsoft VP from starting work at Google.

A Washington state judge on Thursday temporarily blocked a former Microsoft Corp. vice-president from heading up rival Google Inc.’s new research center in China.

The ruling by Kings County Superior Court Judge Steven Gonzalez marked a small victory in a wider battle to keep Kai-Fu Lee from working at Google.

Microsoft sued Lee and Google last week, claiming the former head of its Beijing research and development center had violated his employment contract by agreeing to take a job at Google.

We have helped launch another legal blog at The Traumatic Brain Injury Legal Blog, which is brought to you by Stewart L. Cohen, Esq. of Cohen Placitella and Roth.

The Traumatic Brain Injury blog is a project of TraumaticBrainInjury.com, LLC. whose mission is to be the leading internet resource for education, advocacy, research and support for brain injury surviviors, their families, and medical and rehabilitation professionals.