Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘General Search Engine News’ Category

I have celebrated my 11th anniversary of being in the business of creating and marketing websites for lawyers!

The time has gone by super quick and its been a blast! Its easy when you love what you do and dont feel like your actually doing a job.  Thank you to all my great clients for all the support over the years, we look forward to helping more lawyers succeed on the Internet!

Its a wise idea to make sure you have all possible combinations of your firms practice and location covered in your domain names.  Obviously you want to have your firm name as your domain name if possible, but you also want to make sure to cover other variations of your name (Smith Law/Smith Group/Chicago Smith Law Group), also might not be a bad idea to pick up the other domain name extensions such as .net, .org and even maybe .biz in some cases.

Also its a good idea to cover your bases and get names that are related to your geographic location and practice area. So if your a Chicago Tax Lawyer, you would want to try and find any available combinations starting with Chicago Tax Lawyer.com, if thats taken, which it is, then try Tax Lawyers Chicago or Tax Law Illinois.com, get creative.   The reason you want to grab these types of domain names, is that you should think of creating a site or a blog around those names.

Creating a narrow focus can be a benefit because the goal is to get organic SEO rankings for terms that you might not be achieveing on your main site, because your focus is to broad.   So if your a personal injury lawyer, creating a site specifically on just auto accidents can be a good idea, as long as you have unique content and evne better, create a blog around and create content just focused on the auto accidents part of your practice.   This then could result in you having multiple sites come up in the search engines or you can come up now for keywords you cant get ranked on with your main site.

BUY NEW LEGAL DOMAIN NAMES

It might be time to revisit your domain name stategy and bulk up your domain name arsenal.  If your a firm that has more then 5 practice areas and more then one location, you should have at least 20 domain names in your portfolio, if not more.   Get them now because they are only $10 per year, even less if you join the Godaddy Domain discount club (Then they are $7.49 each).

Most Americans give high marks to Internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing and don’t think the government needs to regulate their responses.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 77% of Adults say there is no need for government regulation of the way that search engines select the recommendations they provide in response to search inquiries. Just 11% believe such regulation is necessary, while just as many (12%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here).

The most frequent Internet users are the least likely to think regulation is needed for search engine recommendations.

Some critics complain that the search engines favor some sites over others when returning recommendations.

But then just 21% of voters think the Federal Communications Commission should regulate the Internet like it does radio and television. Most voters worry that regulation would be used to push a political agenda.

The survey of 740 Adult Internet users nationwide was conducted on January 4-5, 2011 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence.

Opposition to government regulation of search engine responses runs high across virtually all demographic groups, although older Americans, among those least likely to go online regularly, register more indecision about the question than those who are younger.

Interestingly, despite frequently heard complaints about inappropriate Internet content, married Americans and those with children in the home are more strongly opposed to regulation than unmarrieds and those without children living with them.

Government workers are nearly three times as likely to see a need for a regulation of search engine responses than are those who work in the private sector.

Most adults (70%) say the bigger problem when using search engines is that their query generates too much irrelevant data, while just 13% say the problem is that they can’t find what they need. Most also feel search engines are generally fast enough.

However, they do worry about the privacy of their searches online.

But 70% of adults are concerned that Americans have become too dependent on computers and electronic devices. Two-thirds of adults (66%) now say they instinctively turn to the Internet to answer routine questions.

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Getting links to your website from other websites is one of the most important and one of the most difficult tasks that you have to do if you want to get high organic rankings on Google.

If you want to improve the rankings on your website on Google, getting links is the key but it is often much easier to improve your existing backlinks.  The first thing that you have to do is check your backlinks and what sites are linking to your site.

Here are a few tips to improve your sites existing backlinks

#1-Correct links that point to your old domain names

If you changed your domain name in the past, chances are that some people still link to your old domain name.

The links to your old domain name should redirect to your new domain with a 301 redirect to make sure that the links and the visitors that come through these links aren’t lost.

Unfortunately, backlinks through 301 redirects do not pass the full link power to your website.

For that reason, contact the webmasters who link to your old domain name and ask them to link to your new domain. This will increase the effect of the links on your website rankings.

#2-    Improve the Anchor Text of your Existing Links

When contacting the webmasters about any broken links, if possible, request that the anchor text be changed to whatever keywords your trying to be ranked for.  The anchor text is the text that is used when describing the link, so if your a Chicago tax firm, you want your anchor text to be Chicago Tax Lawyers, NOT Click Here or the firms name.

#3-     Check the links on your own web sites

If you want to see certain pages of your website in Google’s search results, these pages should also be linked from your own website pages. If a web page is hidden in the navigation of your website then it’s less likely that this page will get a good position in Google’s results.

Your website should have a clear and logical navigation that emphasizes the pages that you want to see in Google’s search results.  So make sure that you link all of your pages and use keyword rich anchor text where possible, also make sure to have a sitemap.

Clever Tweet is a wordpress plugin that will display your twitter feed in a sidebar widget and it has a cool scrolling effect.  This is just another way to include your twitter feeds in the sidebar but I like how its setup and easy to use.   You can see this action on the right sidebar…

Clever Tweet will give you the following features:

• Customizable amount of tweets to display
• Onmouseover stops animation
• Option to show retweets (RT)
• Option to show mentions (@username)
• Customizable jQuery animation interval
• Clickable hashtags
• Clickable urls
• Cache for faster loading and less requests to Twitter
• Integrates well with all different templates.

You can download Clever tweet at WordPress

Sometimes you might create a lot of subpages within your wordpress site and as a result, your dropdown navigation menu can get pretty messy. Also theres times you might create a page and not want it to automatically be added to your navigation menu.   There is an easy solution if your site is built in WordPress.

Its called the Exclude Pages plugin and this plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).

Download the plugin here

As some of you might have noticed already, when you do a search at Google, the results change every letter you type in.  This is the new Google Instant and another example of Google being ahead of the game.  Not everyone is liking it so far and you can easily turn it off by clicking on the Instant is on box located to the right of the search box.

From the GOOGLE INSTANT page:

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

Benefits

Faster Searches: By predicting your search and showing results before you finish typing, Google Instant can save 2-5 seconds per search.

Smarter Predictions: Even when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, predictions help guide your search. The top prediction is shown in grey text directly in the search box, so you can stop typing as soon as you see what you need.

Instant Results: Start typing and results appear right before your eyes. Until now, you had to type a full search term, hit return, and hope for the right results. Now results appear instantly as you type, helping you see where you’re headed, every step of the way.

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There are a lot of different things that come up here related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Google adwords Pay Per Click marketing.  One thing is that your search rankings wont change at all because of this. Some people are saying that this is not good for SEO but that doesnt really seem to be the case at all and Matt Cutts has some comments on that question on his Google blog.

FROM MATT CUTTS BLOG:

Q: Will Google Instant change search engine optimization?
A: I think over time it might. The search results will remain the same for a query, but it’s possible that people will learn to search differently over time. For example, I was recently researching a congressperson. With Google Instant, it was more visible to me that this congressperson had proposed an energy plan, so I refined my search to learn more, and quickly found myself reading a post on the congressperson’s blog that had been on page 2 of the search results.

Ben Gomes mentioned this during the Q&A, but with Google Instant I find myself digging into a query more. Take a query like [roth ira v]. That brings up Autocomplete suggestions like [roth ira vs traditional ira], [roth ira vanguard], and [roth ira vs 401k]. Suddenly I’m able to explore those queries more just by pressing the up/down arrow key. I can get a preview of what the results will be, add or subtract words to modify my query, and hit enter at any time. The ability to explore the query space and find out new things will inevitably lead to changes for SEO. When I was in grad school, I had a professor who mentioned that peoples’ information need often change over the course of a search session. Google Instant makes that process even easier: people can dig into a topic and find out new areas to explore with very little work.

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The first thing is that this will change how people do searches and you might have a lot of people who don’t finish typing the whole search they were going to type. Instead of typing the full phrase of  Chicago Tax Lawyers, they might stop at Chicago tax and click on one of the results.  Yet some people might not even notice and just  type in the whole search and a lot of people might just turn it off.  So its hard to say how much of an impact this will have.  

The bottom line though is that if your site is not optimized for the organic or local results, then your not going to appear on Google Instant or Google regular for any keywords related to your geographic location and practice areas.

Contact us today if we can help your law firm with creating a new legal site, redesigning an existing site or using your site to get new clients via Internet Marketing.

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.