Legal Search Marketing Blog

Large Firms Discover New Marketing Tool: Blogs

Article from Law.com about how larger law firms are starting to use blogs as a marketing tool.

Search Engine Ranking Factors

Great article from seomoz.org about the factors that can influence a web document's rank at the major search engines.

Some of the most important factors include:

• Title Tag
• Keyword Use in Document Text
• Related Term Use in Document Text
• External Links in Document
• Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages
• Uniqueness of Document Text
• Age of Document

Study Finds Strong Bias Towards Selecting Top Search Link

Study Finds Strong Bias Towards Selecting Top Search Link

Good article about a study that shows most users will click on the top search listing.

Professor Thorsten Joachims and colleagues at Cornell University conducted a study of search engines. Among other things, their study examined the links users followed on the SERP (search engine results page). They found that 42% of users clicked the top search hit, and 8% of users clicked the second hit. So far, no news. Many previous studies, including my own, have shown that the top few entries in search listings get the preponderance of clicks and that the number one hit gets vastly more clicks than anything else.

Google Going After Madison Avenue

Search 'N' Sell from the New York Post is a relatively short look at how Google is cozying up to major ad agencies, holding more than 100 training sessions to help them understand search marketing better.

Agencies are also given support teams so they can call around the clock with questions. Google's also taking part in this week's Advertising Week in New York apparently doing little last year.

SOURCE:  Search Engine Watch

New Blog Search Engine Submission Site

I ran across a new free blog submission service at Feedshot, which submits your RSS feed to currently 17 different blog search engines. It doesnt cover the new Google blog search engine but it says it will be soon. It also sends you a report with the submission results and its free.

New Meta Search Engine Shows You Results From The Big Four Search Engines

Good post from Search Engine Watch about a new search engine that allows you to do one search and see the results from Google, Yahoo, Msn and Ask Jeeves. Very cool tool.

A new meta search engine allows you to compare results from the four top web search engines, and tweak their relative importance in the mix by adding to or subtracting from the relative importance of each.

Myriad Search is a brand-new and relatively untested meta search engine designed primarily to help search engine optimizers with competitive intelligence research on keywords. Want to know which competitor is ranking well on specific keywords? Myriad Search will show you, presenting search results with their relative rankings from Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.

Media watchdog tells bloggers how to avoid censors

PARIS (Reuters) - A Paris-based media watchdog released a handbook on Thursday to help cyber-dissidents and bloggers avoid political censorship in countries as far apart as China, Vietnam and Cuba.

The guide, published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) with the backing of the French government, identifies bloggers as the "new heralds of free expression" and offers advice on how to set up a blog and run it anonymously.

Source: Yahoo News

Time Warner, Microsoft in talks on AOL-source

Reuters article about the possibilty that Microsoft and AOL might team up.  Though the article states the sale is at least two months from completion - and thus not a done deal - the potential of this merger could be a big play in the industry.

Deleting Disabled Keywords In Google Adwords

Post from the Google Adwords Blog

To give you the chance to review and activate previously disabled keywords after the launch of our new keyword evaluation system, disabled keywords have remained in your account for the past several weeks. Next week, they'll be deleted.

So, what should you do? You don't have to make any changes to prepare for this --- your previously disabled keywords will show up as deleted in your account, and you can still choose to re-enable them. However, if you'd like to keep a list of your previously disabled keywords on hand, you can create and save a custom keyword report.

Google begins limited test of Wi-Fi service

LONDON (Reuters) - Google, the online search leader, confirmed on Tuesday it has begun a limited test of a free wireless Internet service, called Google WiFi.

The existence of the Wi-Fi service, which offers high-speed connections to the Internet over short distances, is confirmed by public pages on the company's Web site and was first reported in a Silicon Valley newspaper in July.

Google spokesman Nate Tyler said the current test is limited to two public sites near the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters -- a pizza parlor and a gym -- located in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Read full story at Yahoo News