Archive for the ‘Web Site Tips’ Category

If you have a contact form on your lawyer web site or legal blog, then odds are you have gotten your share of spam contact form emails. If you dont have proper CAPTCHA Security, then you might get 1000′s of spammer contact form emails, which are really irritating. You can beat the spammers easily by making sure you have the latest wordpress contact form plugin with captcha security.

WHAT IS CAPTCHA?

A CAPTCHA is a program that protects websites against bots by generating and grading tests that humans can pass but current computer programs cannot. For example, humans can read distorted text as the one shown below, but current computer programs can’t:

The term CAPTCHA (for Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas Hopper and John Langford of Carnegie Mellon University.

So the bottom line is that you want to have the Captcha security feature on your contact form.

If you have a WordPress site, then it can be much easier to set this feature up.  Most of the contact form plugins today have some sort of Captcha security you can setup that forces the user who filles out the form, to have to put in the 4 digit code before hitting submit.

CONTACT FORM 7 – Download it here

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

This is a pretty simple form and one that Ive used in the past but sometimes I have found that if you dont update the plugin or the Captcha plugin, spam can sometimes still get through or an error message will come up on the captcha portion of the form.

SO I would now recommend using the contact form plugin below, the Fast Secure Contact Form.

FAST SECURE CONTACT FORM – Download it here

This plugin allows a webmaster to easily create and add contact forms to WordPress. The contact form will let the user send emails to a site’s admin. An administration panel is present, where the webmaster can create and preview unlimited forms.

Features a super easy admin panel, multi-form feature, autoresponder, no templates to mess with, and an option to redirect visitors to any URL after the message is sent. Includes CAPTCHA and Akismet support to block all common spammer tactics. Spam is no longer a problem.

This is a VERY GOOD contact form solution.  You can create multiple forms, you can add them to pages and to your sidebar easily as a widget.   You can setup a confirmation page that the user is taken to after filling out the form, this is a good idea for multiple reasons. Once this is setup, you can then setup a Google performance goal in Google analytics or a conversion in Google adwords.

If your site is not in WordPress, then there are other ways to add the Captcha security feature.  Don’t let the spammers win! Upgrade your site today, and as long as you have this form, you wont get many spams via the contact form, its a great solution.

It’s important to make sure your law firm’s location is included on your home page and all over your site. I have noticed a lot of attorney sites lately where they don’t indicate anywhere on the homepage what city or state they are in.  If I can’t find it, Google probably can’t either.  If I am a potential client looking to see if  your in my area and I can’t tell, I’m leaving.

If your a national firm that has many locations then it’s different but if your like most firms and are in one state, then your probably trying to get ranked for keywords related to your practice areas AND your location.   Most people will search  by city and keyword. So if I am looking for a Tax Lawyer in Chicago, Im probably going to type in Chicago Tax Lawyer vs. just Tax Lawyer.  So it can help if you have your location keywords on the page.

Also it’s a good idea to make sure anyone who come’s to your site, knows right away where your located. If someone has to hunt past the home page, they might just wind up leaving. So make it clear to potential clients where you are located and what your phone # is.

Its also key for your Google and other Local Business listings that your address is on  your web site, this can influence your local rankings.