Choosing the  right domain name or domain names can be pretty key when starting up your law firm’s website. Domain names are considered to be pieces of Intellectual Property and are highly valued.

Usually you can get a good enough domain name at Godaddy for $10 per year, yet sometimes you might consider buying a premium legal domain name when the high quality names are taken.   Having your firms main keywords in the domain name can be very beneficial towards your organic SEO campaign.    Yet finding a name like Chicago Probate Lawyer or New York Injury Attorney.com will probably not happen, those names are long gone.  So if you want a premium domain name, you will need to pay for it. Its always a good idea  to get a domain name expert to help you find the best value and best available names for your practice.

There are a few important points to consider when choosing the right domain names for your law firm. The most important is that you probably want to register multiple domain names  and the first domain names a law firm should register are its full name (smithlaw.com), a hyphenated name (smith-law.com), or an abbreviated name (elaw.com or evlaw.com).

Then any major practice areas should be considered (accidentlaw.com, probatelaw.com) in addition to website names that contain any other keyword phrases (WashingtonLawyer.com, WashingtonPersonalnjury.com). If a firm is successful at getting good domain names, success with search engine traffic should follow.   You should only register names though if you plan on utilizing them at some point as websites or blogs and having unique content on each.  It wont work to just buy a lot of names and just point them to the same site, or create  a bunch of duplicate sites.  Yet it would prevent your competition from having those names, so many law firms will buy multiple domain names with the idea of using them down the road, and also preventing anyone else from using them.

.COM’S ARE ALWAYS GOING TO BE THE BEST DOMAIN NAME

DOMAIN NAME CONSULTING FOR LAWYERS

We can assist your law firm with finding the right domain names for your legal practice. We can help find your main domain name and register it in your firms name, and also we can help find the best available geographic and practice area related domain names.  Contact Lawyers Court for more information on domain names for lawyers.

BACKUP WORDPRESS BEFORE UPDATING

Its important to backup your wordpress files on a regular basis and if your going to upgrade, make sure you backup your database files first.    This way if something goes wrong after teh upgrade, you can always go back and restore the previous version.

Also sometimes when you upgrade wordpress, certain plugins might not work properly unless they are also upgraded.  If something doesnt seem to work after you upgrade, try and disabling some of your plugins.  If you install a plugin and something goes wrong, especially if you see a white screen, then you need to rename the plugin you just installed.

LATEST WORDPRESS VERSION

The latest stable release of WordPress is Version 3.2.1. You can download it here.  They are working on version 3.3 now and it will be released soon.

Highlights of the new Video Manager are:

• Simplified top and left navigation bars to help you get to the tools you need more quickly
• Icons to indicate privacy status, if monetization is enabled and scheduled publish status
• Badges to indicate whether videos are HD, Creative Commons and/or captioned
• A new look that’s consistent with our fresh coat of digital paint

If your a lawyer, its a good idea to have a YouTube video account where you can store all of your videos. Then you can easily embed the videos into any posts or pages you create on your website.  YouTube is a very popular site and another reason to have your videos setup at YouTube is that Google will at times use some YouTube video results in its universal search results.

Getting links is not an easy process, one way to get quality links is to get a listing in either search directories such as Yahoo, Best of the Web, Joe Ant or others.

Another option is getting a link from a legal directory and if your a personal injury lawyer, getting a link from a specific personal injury site could make a big difference.

PERSONAL INJURY ACCIDENT LAWYER DIRECTORY

The personal injury attorney directory has listings of the top personal injury lawyers from around the United States.  List your personal injury, auto accident, truck accident, wrongful death or other kind of personal injury related site in the directory today.

The directory has 3 different types of listings starting at $250 per year. This includes a listing on multiple pages using the link text you would like.  This is a Follow directory, which means the links do count. Some directories are “No Follow”, meaning even if you get a link from the site, it doesnt really count as far as potentially improving your organic search engine marketing efforts.

This site has content related to personal injury and motor vehicle accidents in the Bellevue, WA area.  We have created pages for each of the firms motor vehicle accident areas, as well as creating a Personal injury resources page that has personal injury sites, Washington Rules of the Road, Car Accident FAQ’s and personal injury related articles.  We have also created a blog for the site, posting unique content relevant to the Bellevue area.

Visit the Bellevue Auto Accident Lawyers to view site.

When the suit was first filed in February 2010, the plaintiffs — which included a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, California — claimed that Yelp’s sales team said it would remove a “false and defamatory review” only if the vet bought advertising at about $300 per month. As CNET points out, that original suit was dismissed earlier this year and the plaintiffs were given a month to refile, which they did.

Now it’s been dismissed again.

In a blog post today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman called the lawsuits “misguided” and said he’s “pleased” that the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice today, meaning it can’t be refiled.

While we were confident that Yelp would ultimately prevail because we knew the allegations were false, it is helpful to have the matter resolved early so we can put these allegations behind us.

This isn’t the first time Yelp has been hit with accusations of wrongdoing. (And may not be the last.) From reading numerous articles over the years, anecdotal evidence suggests that Yelp’s sales staff can be overly aggressive in courting small business owners, while also unable to explain to small business owners why certain reviews remain on their Yelp business listing and others are filtered out — not a good combination for communicating with many SMBs. Adding to the confusion was that Yelp used to offer advertisers the ability to promote positive reviews on their profile pages — a feature that Yelp finally killed in April 2010, just a couple months after this class action lawsuit was originally filed.

Yelp better have a good Class Action Attorney!

The key updates and changes include:

• Expanded Crawl Details: This includes showing inbound links for any URL including 300, 400 & 500 codes. Plus URLs listed in Robots.txt and Malware headings.
• Improving Email Alerts: This include malware alerts, crawl increase requests, and more.
• URL Normalization Suggestions: Bing will offer URL normalization tips but turn them off by default. Also they have increased the number of query string parameters from 25 items to 50 items per site.
• Deeper Data In Index Explorer: So with this, please expect Traffic Data appearing within the Index Explorer tool.
• DNS verification: You can now verify your website via DNS for domains in your account.
• adCenter Data Integration: Avg CPC column will now show up in the Traffic data.

LAWYER DIRECTORIES

There are many different types of lawyer directories including AVVO, Lawyers.com, Law Firm Directory and many other.  Some offer free listings and others offer paid listings.  Some work better then others, meaning some drive more focused and qualified traffic to your site on a consistent basis. Some listings are free, others are very expensive.  We make sure you get the most value for your dollar by listing your site in the directories that will drive the most focused and qualified traffic to your web site.

Getting links from any other site that has a similar theme to your site can be valuable for organic search engine purposes if the linking site is also well linked and ranked. Some directories provide a good link, while others don’t provide any value at all. Sometimes the value a link provides is worth the listing fee alone because it can help your legal site’s link popularity score. Then if your site is also optimized, it can lead to better overall search engine listings. If it also can drive traffic to your site from the directory, then it really is a good value. We will list your web site in our legal directory and a number of other top free legal directories. We then will devise a legal directory strategy for the client and take care of listing the site with premium legal directories in the appropriate legal categories.

Contact us to learn more about our Internet Marketing services including legal directories.

Here is a site redesign for a Riverside, CA DUI Attorney. We upgraded the site from a basic HTML site to a wordpress CMS site so the lawyers can easily make edits to the site.

We added additional pages to the site, created new content, created a new firm logo, added new legal images and setup a DUI legal blog.

Visit Riverside DUI Lawyers to view legal web site.

Below are the 3 different packages we have available for lawyers.

- SOLO Design Package – This package is geared towards the solo attorney who just needs a web presence.

- SMALL Firm Design Package – This package is for smaller law firms who need a 15 page plus site with more features.

- BIG Firm Design Package – This Package is for small to large law firms who need a 40 page plus site with more advanced features.