Legal Search Marketing

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Good post from the Justia blog listing many different websites and resources related to Hurricane Katrina including the following charities.

Charities

• American Red Cross. The American Red Cross is one of the organizations leading relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina victims. You can make an online donation from their web site. The Red Cross also features an RSS Feed of current news and press releases.
• Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund. Established by former Presidents Bush and Clinton to provide relief and rebuilding resources to help the victims of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.
• GuideStar.org. Provides a database of nonprofit organizations, including program descriptions and income tax returns. Free registration required.
• Habitat for Humanity. Raising funds to help low-income families recover and rebuild.
• The Salvation Army. The Salvation Army is providing services to storm survivors and first responders in the Gulf Coast states and is also accepting online donations online.
• Second Harvest. Distributes food and grocery products. Online donation available.
• Mississippi Hurricane Recovery Fund. Serves as the state’s central clearinghouse for corporations, organizations, and individuals to donate money, equipment, goods, services, volunteers, and time to Mississippians recovering and rebuilding from Hurricane Katrina.

Law firm marketing guru Larry Bodine had a good post last week with tips from top blogging expert, Kevin O’Keefe about getting more traffic to your legal web site. 

I would say I agree with most everyone of these tips and suggestions from Kevin and have listed them below with some comments. These are great ideas for any law firm interested in Internet Marketing, search engine optimization or legal blogs, which should be every law firm!

-  People don’t trust sponsored links.  Those are the paid ads at the side and top of Google search results.

:: (I think to some point this is true and I know personally I will always check the organic results before the sponsored results but they can work for some law firms and they will produce more traffic overall and can no doubt result in more clients. The key though is that you should be most concerned about your law firms organic or free listings at Google and the other search engines.

Getting your current legal web site optimized for the search engines or creating a new legal blog are the best ways to long term organic success at Google, MSN and Yahoo.)

-  A site map will help raise your search engine results, because it’s a page of links to your site.

:: (This is very true and its key to have a site map on any web site because it serves a dual purpose by giving the search engine spider a place to index all of the pages in your site, and it also gives the visitor an easy way to find things within your site.)

-  Nobody reads your calendar on your blog.  You might as well get rid of it, because people will search your blog by topic but not by the date you posted something.

:: (I never thought of that and its true, people would usually not click on a date, they would click on either a recent post or a category within your blog. I’m taking all calendars off my blogs, thanks Kevin!) – two paragraphs and two sentences each, maximum.  No one will read anything longer. (I guess I violated this rule right here!)

-  A blog post should be short

:: (I tend to violate that as well as I’m doing now but I think it usually makes sense to just have a short post with a link to further information.)

-  Just quote and refer other blogs and you can get huge traffic to your own blog.  That’s what Kevin does, and his blog has a Google ranking of 8 out of 10 (this is very high). Kevin says he does no original writing on his own blog, and instead has created a clearing house for information from others. "You get the viral marketing buzz by quoting other bloggers," he said.

-  Put content in the <title> tags on your site.  Most home page title tags say "Welcome to our site," when they should instead describe the services of the firm instead, improving search engine results.  Most lawyer bio pages are titled "lawyer bio," which is a mistake.  Instead, each bio title tag should have the lawyer’s name, industries and skills.

:: (This is VERY key for any law firm web site. The TITLE tag is the most important part of search engine optimization. If you don’t have unique titles on each of the different pages, your not going to get as good of exposure and will never be ranked in the top 10 for your firms main geographic and/or practice area keywords.)

-  Start using RSS.  This method of syndication will be built into the next version of Windows, known as "Vista."  RSS will be built into Internet Explorer, Word and Outlook.

:: (RSS is very important and creating a weblog or BLOG for your law firm will give you an RSS feed, which others can then use and subscribe to your blog and see your posts.)

-  Kevin uses Netnewswire to follow 200 news feeds.  He sees the title, sources and when the post went online.  He organizes them by category and decides which to put on his own blog.

-  He uses Newsgator to search for certain words, like "marketing," his own name and his company name.

-  Major law firms are launching blogs, including Davis Wright Tremaine’s Telecom Law Blog, Sheppard Mullin’s Antitrust Law Blog — one of 7 blogs the firm publishes in place of its newsletters and PDF files — and Preston Gates & Ellis’s Electronic Discovery Blog.

:: (This is no surprise and it would make sense that all law firms develop some kind of blog presence in the future. They can do very well in the search engines and can be a very good complement to your existing legal web site.)

If your law firm needs any assistance with your existing legal web site or have any questions on creating a legal blog, contact me.

Article from the Search Engine Journal about google updating its pagerank in the google toolbar.

For those of you not yet aware, Google is currently updating the PageRank they are displaying in their toolbar. Each update causes a stir among the SEO community and webmasters trying to get their websites to the top of the Google Rankings.

What Is PageRank? Without getting into too much detail, PageRank is essentially a score out of ten as to the “value” of your site in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two primary factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website.

I personally think pagerank is way overrated and it doesn’t really seem to have that big of an influence on the actual rankings. Ive seen a lot of sites that have a page rank of 3 come up much higher for pertinent key phrases then sites with higher page ranks.  Pagerank alone will not guarantee success and I wouldn’t worry much about it fluctuating.

Chicago Crime.org is a pretty cool web site that has a freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago. It breaks it down by date, by address, by type of crime.   You can view by street and for example, you can see how many crimes were commited in each block of lake shore drive.

Daniel Sieberg, CNN technology reporter, did a video piece on chicagocrime.org this week. Watch the video.

Good post from The Wall Street Journal on how blogging is becoming a corporate job. A growing number of businesses are hiring people to write blogs, otherwise known as Web logs.

Companies are looking for candidates who can write in a conversational style about timely topics that would appeal to customers, clients and potential recruits.

Blogging as a job has emerged as companies of all stripes increasingly see the Web as an important communications venue. Blogs allow firms to assume a natural tone rather than the public-relations speak typical of some static Web pages, and readers are often invited to post comments. While some companies are hiring full-time bloggers, others are adding blogging duties to existing marketing or Web-editing positions.

Currently only 4% of major U.S. corporations have blogs available to the public, according to a recent survey by eMarketer, a New York research company. But ads for blogging jobs are popping up on online job boards in recent months. "Blogging jobs are growing in popularity," says Jennifer Sullivan, spokeswoman for CareerBuilder Inc.’s CareerBuilder.com, based in Chicago.

Google recently announced an upcoming change to the Adwords program, which will allow advertisers to target contextual advertising on specific web sites.

Good article from Sitepoint.com about the new Google program.

Google’s ingenious model for selecting ads to display (maximizing revenue per impression) allows them to perform the ‘apples to oranges’ comparison with ease, and allow advertisers to bid on the same inventory in whichever terms they find more comfortable.

The biggest improvement, though, is that advertisers will be able to run separate site-targeted campaigns.

Story from Yahoo news about Lexis Nexis reporting that identity thieves have stolen information on 310,000 US Citizens from its computer systems, 10 times more then its initial estimate, thats not good.

Thieves have used stolen passwords to lift Social Security numbers and other information from LexisNexis databases 59 times over the past two years, the company said.

Several similar incidents recently have prompted calls for greater regulation of companies that can create comprehensive profiles of nearly every adult in the United States.

"When a company like LexisNexis so badly underestimates its own ID theft breaches, it is clear that things are totally out of hand," said New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer.

Intelliseek, a marketing intelligence firm specializing in real-time analysis of online buzz and consumer-generated media, today announced a major upgrade to its popular BlogPulse.com portal (http://www.blogpulse.com), including a boost in coverage to 9.3 million blogs.

BlogPulse 2.0 provides faster data retrieval, a six-month index of blog posts and data, a  daily count of blog activity and analysis, and the ability to create customized graphs that track themes and issues appearing in the Blogosphere.

New York Times story about Garrett M. Graff, who writes a blog about the news media in Washington may be the first blogger in the short history of the medium to be granted a daily White House pass for the specific purpose of writing a blog, or Web log.

A White House spokesman said yesterday that he believed Mr. Graff was the first blogger to be given credentials.

Washburn University of Law has a great legal resource site called Washlaw Web. They have every states legislative info, historical documents, court information, rules of the courts and a whole lot more. Its very well organized and they also have a good legal directory that all law firms should be listed in.