Legal Search Marketing Blog

Microsoft Shares Fall Due To MSN Search Performance

TheStreet.com reports that Microsoft's share fell as much as 13% today due to Microsoft's search engine, MSN Search. Microsoft was not prepared for "the rising cost of competing with the better-positioned Net players, notably Google," TheStreet.com reports.

Bloomberg reports that Microsoft may be "investing too much at the expense of profit" in MSN Internet properties, $2.4 billion more, to be exact. TheStreet.com says that MSN Search's search revenues were down in the first quarter and that they expect MSN Search to "lose advertising share" in the 2006 calendar year.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch

Law Firm Web Sites: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Good article about law firm web design by Jim Austin of The Legal Intelligencer.

Some interesting highlights...

Fewer firms are using "splash" pages -- animated graphics or Flash presentations with little to no content. Splash pages increase download times, confuse search engines and can discourage visitors looking for content. Also, firms are moving away from tired legal clip art -- columns, scales, briefcases, etc. The decrease in splash pages and big, boring graphics also lets firms make better use of the real estate on their home pages for constantly changing content, to highlight big news and upcoming events, and to tie print advertising campaigns to the firm's Web site.

"Lawyer bios are still the single most important part of a law firm site," Buchdahl said. He said he is particularly impressed with firms like Arent Fox, which has made of point of adding a "life beyond the law" section to lawyer biographies, outlining lawyers' hobbies, interests and other details of the person behind the legal credentials.

Yahoo! Tests New Search-Engine Ad Model

Forbes is reporting that Yahoo has released a test version of its new search monetization in Scandinavia and will expand the rollout to the U.K. in July.

Codenamed “Project Panama,” Yahoo’s new model will be similar to that of Google, which ranks search-engine ads by both the amount advertisers pay for keywords and the relevance of the ad. The Google-like algorithm should result in higher click-through rates than its older model that ranked ads only by the amount paid for keywords.

How To Setup Custom Domain Name For Blog

You can create a basic blog using most blogging services like Typepad or Blogger but your then stuck with a generic domain name.

If you want to use a customized domain name like www.legalsearchmarketing.com, you must first setup some advanced settings in the blogging software and then also with your web hosting or domain accounts. Here are the steps needed at Typepad to setup a customized domain name with your registar.

1)  Setup your blog with Typepad and then goto the control panel, choose "site access" and then "domain mapping". Then you need to run through the wizard to setup the domain.

2)  Setup your domain name with your registar like Godaddy.com and make sure the domain name is parked.

3)  At Godaddy.com, choose Total DNS Control and create a CNAME record and enter the information from the Godaddy wizard in step #1.

4)  Then once the CNAME record is setup, go back to the typepad blog and the domain mapping section and set the domaim name as "active".

That's it, now instead of having a long domain name with the typepad.com address, you can have a geographic specific keyword rich domain name like Chicago Estate Planning Law.

Not all registars will allow you to make advanced DNS changes and sometimes you might have a domain name that is already setup with a web hosting account, in that case you can usually make the same kind of edits with your web host.

Yahoo! Search Index Update

The Yahoo blog reports that they did a index update over this past weekend. As a result, you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages that are included in the index.