Legal Search Marketing

WordPress is an excellent system to use for your legal website, yet its very key that you keep your wordpress software updated to the latest version.  Sometimes its not that big of a deal unless its been a long time since you have updated.  The reason its important to keep your wodpress software updates is for security reasons. Sometimes hackers can exploit an older version of wordpress and inject malware of do other bad things.   So its key to make sure you update not only your wordpress software but also your wordpress plugins.

BACKUP WORDPRESS BEFORE UPDATING

Its important to backup your wordpress files on a regular basis and if your going to upgrade, make sure you backup your database files first.    This way if something goes wrong after teh upgrade, you can always go back and restore the previous version.

Also sometimes when you upgrade wordpress, certain plugins might not work properly unless they are also upgraded.  If something doesnt seem to work after you upgrade, try and disabling some of your plugins.  If you install a plugin and something goes wrong, especially if you see a white screen, then you need to rename the plugin you just installed.

LATEST WORDPRESS VERSION

The latest stable release of WordPress is Version 3.2.1. You can download it here.  They are working on version 3.3 now and it will be released soon.

YouTube always seems to group their major announcements in little bunches. Hot on the heels of the brand new site-wide redesign, they’ve just announced another big change for YouTube creators. Today they announced a new YouTube Video Manager that has a new look, some new features, and an overall streamlined approach.

Highlights of the new Video Manager are:

• Simplified top and left navigation bars to help you get to the tools you need more quickly
• Icons to indicate privacy status, if monetization is enabled and scheduled publish status
• Badges to indicate whether videos are HD, Creative Commons and/or captioned
• A new look that’s consistent with our fresh coat of digital paint

If your a lawyer, its a good idea to have a YouTube video account where you can store all of your videos. Then you can easily embed the videos into any posts or pages you create on your website.  YouTube is a very popular site and another reason to have your videos setup at YouTube is that Google will at times use some YouTube video results in its universal search results.

If you are a personal injury lawyer, you know how tough the competition is online!  Both for organic SEO and also Pay per click marketing.   If you want to achieve good organic SEO rankings, you need to have good content and links from other quality trusted web sites.

Getting links is not an easy process, one way to get quality links is to get a listing in either search directories such as Yahoo, Best of the Web, Joe Ant or others.

Another option is getting a link from a legal directory and if your a personal injury lawyer, getting a link from a specific personal injury site could make a big difference.

PERSONAL INJURY ACCIDENT LAWYER DIRECTORY

The personal injury attorney directory has listings of the top personal injury lawyers from around the United States.  List your personal injury, auto accident, truck accident, wrongful death or other kind of personal injury related site in the directory today.

The directory has 3 different types of listings starting at $250 per year. This includes a listing on multiple pages using the link text you would like.  This is a Follow directory, which means the links do count. Some directories are “No Follow”, meaning even if you get a link from the site, it doesnt really count as far as potentially improving your organic search engine marketing efforts.

We have created another WordPress CMS legal mini site/blog for a personal injury law firm in Bellevue, Washington.

This site has content related to personal injury and motor vehicle accidents in the Bellevue, WA area.  We have created pages for each of the firms motor vehicle accident areas, as well as creating a Personal injury resources page that has personal injury sites, Washington Rules of the Road, Car Accident FAQ’s and personal injury related articles.  We have also created a blog for the site, posting unique content relevant to the Bellevue area.

Visit the Bellevue Auto Accident Lawyers to view site.

Yelp is off the hook, again. A judge has thrown out a class action lawsuit filed against Yelp that alleged the company tried to extort small businesses by promising to remove negative reviews in exchange for money.

When the suit was first filed in February 2010, the plaintiffs — which included a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, California — claimed that Yelp’s sales team said it would remove a “false and defamatory review” only if the vet bought advertising at about $300 per month. As CNET points out, that original suit was dismissed earlier this year and the plaintiffs were given a month to refile, which they did.

Now it’s been dismissed again.

In a blog post today, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman called the lawsuits “misguided” and said he’s “pleased” that the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice today, meaning it can’t be refiled.

While we were confident that Yelp would ultimately prevail because we knew the allegations were false, it is helpful to have the matter resolved early so we can put these allegations behind us.

This isn’t the first time Yelp has been hit with accusations of wrongdoing. (And may not be the last.) From reading numerous articles over the years, anecdotal evidence suggests that Yelp’s sales staff can be overly aggressive in courting small business owners, while also unable to explain to small business owners why certain reviews remain on their Yelp business listing and others are filtered out — not a good combination for communicating with many SMBs. Adding to the confusion was that Yelp used to offer advertisers the ability to promote positive reviews on their profile pages — a feature that Yelp finally killed in April 2010, just a couple months after this class action lawsuit was originally filed.

Yelp better have a good Class Action Attorney!

Duane Forrester announced on the Bing Search blog a major upgrade to Bing Webmaster Tools. He said this is their biggest update since the Honey Badger update from June.

The key updates and changes include:

• Expanded Crawl Details: This includes showing inbound links for any URL including 300, 400 & 500 codes. Plus URLs listed in Robots.txt and Malware headings.
• Improving Email Alerts: This include malware alerts, crawl increase requests, and more.
• URL Normalization Suggestions: Bing will offer URL normalization tips but turn them off by default. Also they have increased the number of query string parameters from 25 items to 50 items per site.
• Deeper Data In Index Explorer: So with this, please expect Traffic Data appearing within the Index Explorer tool.
• DNS verification: You can now verify your website via DNS for domains in your account.
• adCenter Data Integration: Avg CPC column will now show up in the Traffic data.

Getting visitors to your website from the Internet is done in a variety of ways including legal directories such as AVVO, Lawyers.com, Law Firm Directory and a variety of other free and paid lawyer directories.

LAWYER DIRECTORIES

There are many different types of lawyer directories including AVVO, Lawyers.com, Law Firm Directory and many other.  Some offer free listings and others offer paid listings.  Some work better then others, meaning some drive more focused and qualified traffic to your site on a consistent basis. Some listings are free, others are very expensive.  We make sure you get the most value for your dollar by listing your site in the directories that will drive the most focused and qualified traffic to your web site.

Getting links from any other site that has a similar theme to your site can be valuable for organic search engine purposes if the linking site is also well linked and ranked. Some directories provide a good link, while others don’t provide any value at all. Sometimes the value a link provides is worth the listing fee alone because it can help your legal site’s link popularity score. Then if your site is also optimized, it can lead to better overall search engine listings. If it also can drive traffic to your site from the directory, then it really is a good value. We will list your web site in our legal directory and a number of other top free legal directories. We then will devise a legal directory strategy for the client and take care of listing the site with premium legal directories in the appropriate legal categories.

Contact us to learn more about our Internet Marketing services including legal directories.

NEW LEGAL WEB SITE DESIGN – California DUI Lawyer

Here is a site redesign for a Riverside, CA DUI Attorney. We upgraded the site from a basic HTML site to a wordpress CMS site so the lawyers can easily make edits to the site.

We added additional pages to the site, created new content, created a new firm logo, added new legal images and setup a DUI legal blog.

Visit Riverside DUI Lawyers to view legal web site.

I have updated my Lawyers Court site and have new Legal Web Design packages available for lawyers who just need a new web site created.

Below are the 3 different packages we have available for lawyers.

- SOLO Design Package – This package is geared towards the solo attorney who just needs a web presence.

- SMALL Firm Design Package – This package is for smaller law firms who need a 15 page plus site with more features.

- BIG Firm Design Package – This Package is for small to large law firms who need a 40 page plus site with more advanced features.

Having your website done in WordPress is great for a number of reasons including all of the plugins that you can add to your site to make it better.  There is a plugin for just about everything these days. Some are better then others and some like WP Super Cache are must haves.

WP SUPER CACHE

Sometimes having a lot of graphics and items on your site can make them load slower. This WordPress plugin makes your pages load way faster and since it stores static versions of your site, it requires much less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself.

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by the legacy caching engine. Static files are served to:

1. Users who are not logged in.
2. Users who have not left a comment on your blog.
3. Or users who have not viewed a password protected post.

99% of your visitors will be served static html files. Those users who don’t see the static files will still benefit because they will see different cached files that aren’t quite as efficient but still better than uncached. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.

Visit WP Super Cache wordpress site to download