Legal Search Marketing Blog

How To Get 8 Out Of 10 TOP 10 Rankings at MSN

Getting top 10 search engine rankings is the goal of most search engine optimization projects.  It makes sense that if your in the top 10 for a keyword related to your firms practice, that you will get some traffic from people looking for the type of law you practice. How about if you were able to get ALL TOP 10 rankings for certain keywords!!!

Ive got one client who has a number of different sites including many mini sites that are focused on specific practice areas such as corporate law, tax law, litigation, estate planning and others and most all of them are listed pretty well in the organic search listings.

At MSN for the keyphrase Chicago Tax Law the firm has the first 7 spots and then also the 10th place for a dominating 8 out of 10 top 10 rankings!   Its harder to achieve that at Google BUT they do have 3 out of the top 10. 5 out 10 at Yahoo.

Having multiple sites can be a very good idea and a way to focus on different sets of keywords. Yet its important though to not just repeat the same content on multiple sites, you must have unique content in order to have success. The more unique content, the better, content is and always will be King!

SEO Doesn’t Guarantee Blog Visitor Loyalty

Good post from Andy Beal about how most traffic to your blog will come from the search engines, BUT that its not enough, you must provide quality content relevant to what people are seeking for your blog to really flourish.

***  Mixed blessings for SEM come from a Boston University study entitled Traffic Characteristics and Communication Patterns in the Blogosphere.

First, the good news: the majority of blog traffic comes from search engines. Search engines accounted for 43% of referral traffic in the blogosphere. Hurray for search engine marketers! Their diagram of referral traffic (below) does not include the 28% of blogosphere traffic without any referral data (probably bookmark or type-in traffic).

Now for the bad news: “Despite the intimacy between traffic and search, however, optimizing a blog for search engine algorithms does not win the blogs retention or popularity,” as MarketingVOX put it. Yep, all the rankings in the world don’t make your blog well read, popular or sticky. You have to do that.

SOURCE:  Marketing Pilgrim

Google Income, Profits Up

Google reported its first-quarter financial results today, with profits up 69 percent to $1 billion, or $3.18 a share, on revenues of $3.66 billion, up 63 percent year-to-year.

Google execs spent much of the earnings call emphasizing the importance of its core businesses, search and search advertising. The company has been criticized of late for its apparent lack of focus, exhibited by its dabblings in offline media, intended acquisition of display ad network DoubleClick, and other non-search activities. More details are available from ClickZ News.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch

Google Still The Search Leader

Hitwise’s latest numbers indicate that Google, already the clear leader among search engines in the US, is still growing at a pretty healthy rate.

All the other major search engines have declined in the last year. Google, on the other hand, now drives 64% of US searches—10% growth over last year.   Google is obviously the most important search engine to have your law firms website listed at.

SOURCE : Marketing Pilgrim

MSN adCenter Update Coming Soon

A new release of the MSN Pay Per Click adcenter is planned for 4 to 6 weeks, but you can play with it today at the adCenter Beta site.

Here is a summary of some of the new features:

1. Cross campaign keyword search: This is a cool feature where you can search for a phrase at a global level, and adCenter will return all the keywords that use that phrase on a single screen. You can then work on and edit those keywords without having to go in an out of the different individual campaigns.
   
2. Pop-up help: Pop-up help will appear next to any item you have questions you have on a topic by hovering over a question mark icon on the screen.
   
3. adCenter now supports Firefox: A great improvement for those of us who use Firefox almost exclusively.
   
4. Expanded Bulk Upload Capabilities: Bulk uploads can now be done at an individual campaign level.
   
5. Tagging and Favorites: If you have a campaign or a set of keywords that need more management than others, these can be tagged so they will automatically show up and be accisble from your initial login screen.
   
6. Breadcrumbing: This is a neat new feature that allows you to hover over the breadcrum bar, and then see a list of peer web pages in a drop down list right there. So if you are in a particular campaign, and want to navigate directly to another campaign, you can do that quite easily.
   
7. New negative keyword management options: Negative keywords can now be specified at the campaign level

Overall some good improvements in adCenter's usability and functionality.

SOURCE: Search Engine Watch