Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘General Search Engine News’ Category

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.

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

Google has a market share of 73.32%, followed by Yahoo with 15.78%. Ask.com has 3.93%, MSN Search 3.52% and Live Search 2.11%.

Google is obviously still dominating here and Yahoo is doing a little better then they used to. Plus now MSN is now BING.com and they are doing a very aggressive marketing campaign and Im sure they will be moving up in these results soon.  Its key to have your web site optimized mainly for Google but you should also make sure it comes up at Yahoo and Bing. 

More than half of all search queries are at least three words long, and more than a third are four words or longer. That’s according to Hitwise data (PDF) released today:

As the chart shows, 1- and 2-word queries are becoming less common, while 4-, 5-, and all the way up to 8+ word queries are becoming more common. The numbers are very similar to what Hitwise shared at SMX West a couple weeks ago.

The takeaway point here is that the so-called long tail of search continues to get longer. As searchers get more sophisticated in how they use Google, Yahoo, Live Search, etc., it opens up more opportunities for webmasters and marketers to create content and/or ads that captures these longer search queries.

Also in the same Hitwise announcement: Google’s search share held steady at 72% in January. Yahoo also held steady at 17.8%. MSN/Live Search saw a slight drop from the month before, while Ask saw a slight increase.

source

This makes a lot of sense and is exactly what I am seeing in my legal site stat reports. Thats why its key to not focus that much on one single keyword or keyphrase, especially if it has a lot of competition. Your better off building new pages and content around a variety of keywords that you discover doing keyword research, in order to capture the most long tail keyword searches.  This is confusing and that's why your best off to just hire me!

At some point you may need to move your legal website to a new web host.  Sometimes you might just find a new webhost, sometimes you might be moving your site to a new web designer or maybe your current webhost either goes out of business or just provides horrible hosting service. 

In order to succesfully move your domain name to a new webhost, you must first have control of the domain name. This means you need to be the registered owner of the domain name and you must have login access to wherever the domain name was bought.  To switch to a new webhost, you must be able to change the DNS settings of the domain name.   

So the first thing to do is have the new webhost setup in advance. Then you need to transfer all the site files to the new webserver so they are in place. Then if you have existing email accounts, its a good idea to setup the email accounts with the new webhost in advance and have the new settings ready to enter into any of your machines that have email for that domain name.

We just helped a Chicago Lawyer move their main website from an older more expensive web host to a more reliable less expensive host.  Then we are in the process of helping an Ohio Law Firm with moving three sites that they have with an existing company and not only setting up new webhosting, but we are also creating new legal websites for Ohio Tax Lawyers, Ohio Family Attorneys & Ohio Bankruptcy Law.

If you need any assistace or have any questions about moving your law firms website to a new webhost, please contact us.