Legal Search Marketing

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Google and AOL are up while Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com are down from November in Nielsen's December 2009 search rankings. But let's face it, AOL is fueled by Google, so pretty much all of the gains belong to Google.

NOV. 2009 STATS:

The bottom line is that as always Google gets the lions share of the traffic.  Yet both Yahoo and Bing get a fair share of traffic and can't be totally overlooked.   Yet if want to promote your site, Google is the key, both organically and using their pay per click Adwords program.

source

Many in the West reacted negatively when Google kowtowed to the
Chinese government's demands to censor its Chinese search engine Google.cn. At the time Google said that it would monitor conditions in the country and make adjustments in policy as necessary.

Looks like that time has come.

Agents who may have been working on behalf of the the Chinese
government have apparently attempted a coordinated hacking attack
against Google and over a dozen other major corporations. In Google's
case it seems like the purpose was to access email accounts of
suspected anti-government activists.

In light of this situation Google has chosen to stop self-censoring
its search engine results, and may very well have to shut down it's
China operations.

Read the official Google press release here.

Here is the weird Bing comment for the day. Brett Yount, the Program
Manager at Bing Webmaster Center, told webmasters to submit their site
to Digg or Yahoo Buzz to help get their pages indexed.

A Bing Forums thread has Brett saying, and I quote:

If your site pages have good content, submit them to buzz and digg. Both have a high chance of getting your page indexed.

Of course this makes sense. Get a link from a popular site and a
search engine will find that link and hopefully index your site/pages
afterwards. But I just find it weird that a search representative would
specifically name Digg and/or Buzz. I mean, why not mention something
else or just talk about the concept in general. Brett could have said,
to get your pages indexed quicker, make sure to get links from sites we
crawl on a frequent basis.

This is strange for him to say that but a good tip for everyone.

Source: SEO Roundtable

Having a website for your law firm is obvious now but sometimes you have to upgrade your site in order to keep up with the ever changing Internet.  Many times lawyers will create sites but never really update them, so after a few years, the content is somewhat outdated.  Its always a good idea to add new practice areas if you can and any articles anyone in the firm has done, more content can lead to better organic SEO results.  Then sometimes you want to add Video or a translation feature that allows your site to be read in different languages and then sometimes you just want a better looking site. 

This is a Seattle Personal Injury law firm that we have helped upgrade to a newer more
professional looking site and we also have added many new features
including multiple videos describing what the law firm does and
testimonials from satisfied clients.  Then we also added a Spanish
translation feature that allows the site to be read on Spanish. We also updated the content, added new personal injury FAQ's and then further optimized the site for SEO purposes.

If your law firm needs a website upgrade, contact the Legal web design and SEO marketing professionals at Lawyers Court today for further information.

Happy New Year to everyone and I hope we all have a great 2010!!  Internet marketing for lawyers is more important then ever before. Just having a website isnt enough, you must market it and take advantage of the many different ways to have potential clients find your legal website.

Social media marketing, local SEO and Video SEO are some of the big things law firms should be doing in 2010.  Creating videos that describe your firm and each practice area is a very good idea and then promoting those videos with Youtube and other video search engines can pay off in the long run.

Is anyone still wondering if search is important for video?  

In
November of last year, YouTube surpassed Yahoo for the first time in
total U.S. search queries, making it the 2nd largest search engine in
the U.S. next to only its owner, Google.  Ever since then, YouTube has
continued to dominate the search space when you look at the total
number of search queries.

Now, when you think about the fact that all of the searches on
Youtube are users looking for video content in particular, there is no
doubt that YouTube is THE largest video search/discovery destination.

This past month, October, 2009, there were a total of more than 3.7
Billion search queries on YouTube as measured by comScore.  This
represents and increase of more than 31 percent year over year (vs 2,580,000.000 queries in Oct. 2008) and an increase of 7% over just last month.  Yahoo, although still the 3rd largest search engine, has now fallen more than 1 billion queries/mo behind YouTube.

This is just another reason for lawyers to not only create videos but promote them on video search engines such as YouTube.

After announcements from Google and Bing
about incorporating Twitter into their search results, Yahoo! is hopping on the real-time results news bandwagon.

Yahoo!'s
Twitter integration is part of a new update when the News Shortcut is
implemented in the search results. Yahoo! is also recognizing when there's breaking news and indicating as such on the News Shortcut. 

These 5 basic tips for video SEO are a good starting point for marketers looking to improve the “searchability” of their videos.

1. Optimize with keywords.
Just like any type of text-based content, video SEO involves optimizing with target relevant keywords — both for search engines and for user experience. Use keywords in:

• File name
• Title
• Tags
• URL
• Link text

Beyond that, include a paragraph of optimized text that provides a
brief description of the video. Again, the benefits are twofold: You’ll
improve the user experience and your search rankings.

2. Distribute videos on video-sharing sites.
In addition to posting videos on your own site, video-sharing
sites are effective tools for gaining visibility and additional links.
Remember these few points to maximize results:

• Don’t forget that videos hosted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites should be optimized for keywords
• YouTube channel pages — and those of other video-sharing sites — should be optimized, as well
• Use a video distribution service like TubeMogul to deploy your videos to the top sharing sites

3. Implement a linking strategy.
Video is judged by the same linking standards as all other
forms of digital content. So building both internal and external links
is crucial for video SEO. Ideas for a linking strategy include:

• Cross-linking to other videos
• Linking to videos from relevant web pages
• Linking to videos in blog posts
• Tweeting the video
• Linking to videos from social media pages
• Bookmarking the video

4. Encourage viewers to share your videos.
First thing is first — if you want users to share your videos, you must
create content worth sharing. If your video isn’t interesting,
relevant, entertaining or informative, users aren’t likely to share it,
let alone view it. From there:

• Allow and encourage users to comment on the video
• Make it easy for users to share your video on You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace
• Offer video content in multiple formats so users can choose the one that best suited to their platform and connectivity speed

5. Re-purpose your videos.
As with text content, the more optimized video, the better. Get creative in order to re-purpose videos across the web:

• Embed videos in blog posts
• Break up long videos and create multiple shorter ones
• Use transcriptions of videos to create blog posts or content for web pages
• Take screen shots from videos and post them to Flickr and other image-sharing sites
• Turn offline content, such as training videos or videos of a
  conference keynote speech, into optimized digital assets for your
  website

source

All of these are good tips to get your video more exposure in the video search engines.

comScore Video Metrix
announced that more than 168 million U.S. Internet users watched nearly
26 billion videos online during September 2009 — an average of 154
videos per viewer.

YouTube accounted for close to 40 percent of the 26 billiion videos
viewed during September, to remain the market leader by a wide margin.

According to comScore,
– 84.8 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in September.
– The average online video viewer watched 9.8 hours of video that month.
– The duration of the average online video was 3.8 minutes.
– 125.5 million viewers watched nearly 10.3 billion videos on YouTube.com — which is 82.4 videos per viewer.
– 45.6 million viewers watched 424 million videos on MySpace.com — which is 9.3 videos per viewer.

Now, let's compare these numbers to ones that search marketers should know by heart.

According to comScore qSearch, Americans conducted 13.8 billion core
searches in September 2009. They watched nearly 26 billion videos
online that month. This means Americans are watching almost twice as
many videos as they conducting searches at the five major search
engines.

So, is your video marketing budget twice as large as your search
marketing budget? Hmmm. Maybe that's why the news was buried on a
Friday afternoon.

Let's drill down a little deeper.

There were almost 9 billion core searches conducted on Google in
September. There were 10.3 billion videos viewed on YouTube that month.
That's right, Americans are watching more videos on YouTube than then
are conducting searches on Google.

According to comScore qSearch, there were 21.3 billion expanded
search queries conducted in September. This counts searches for
mapping, local directory, and user-generated video sites as well as
searches at the major search engines.

Who were the leaders in expanded search?

Google was #1 with 9.4 billion expanded search queries.
YouTube was #2 with 3.5 billion.
Yahoo! as #3 with 2.7 billion.
Bing was #4 with 1.2 billion.

This shows the importance of having videos and every lawyer should have at least one video about the firms practice and then promote that video with the video search engines for starters.

Google has indeed removed the PageRank statistics from Google Webmaster Tools.

Susan Moskwa from the Google Webmaster Central team explained it was
removed because Google keeps telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t
focus on PageRank so much.” They felt it was “silly” to keep telling
webmasters that, and at the same time show it in Webmaster Tools. So
Google removed it from Webmaster Tools.

This is a good thing and a lot of people do seem to focus on the sites pagerank score but its been obvious for awhile that the pagerank score is misleading and not that important.  Your better off worrying about your sites content and the number of links you have from other well establish legal related sites.