AI Law Guy

WordPress Security Issues for Lawyers

Site Security /

Is your website secure? Odds are No! WordPress is great in many ways BUT it also can leave you open to a lot of security issues. Its really important to keep your version of wordpress updated to the latest version because usually the reason they update the version of wordpress is because they find a a security hole they must fix. You also must update your wordpress plugins. This is because a lot of times plugins can have security issues and that’s why they create a new version of the plugin. Yet if you don’t update it, you might be leaving yourself open to a hacker.   So the bottom line is that your site can get hacked and be infected with malware. Then Google can pick up on this and possibly blacklist your site. Another bad thing can be when your site has a warning message next to it in the Google search results.  This is a really bad thing and most people would not even click on your site and might not want to visit it if they think they might get a virus. Then if your site is infected with malware and it has been hacked, then you have to get it fixed. SO a better idea is take the needed steps to make sure your wont get hacked.  There are a lot of different things you can do and I will go over these in more detail in upcoming posts. Think People Aren’t trying to Hack your site RIGHT NOW? It seems like they very well might be. Below are some really disturbing stats from a security scan I ran on a site, it shows all attempted logins in real time and it showed about 30 different attempts, in 1 day of people trying to login and guess the password…. These are from different people in different countries and what happens is that if you have a site that has older software and outdated plugins, you are more likely to get hacked and there are a lot of people out there trying to hack you right now! Here are just a few listing of failed login attempts.  Anaheim, United States attempted a failed login as “admin”. IP: 74.50.8.235  [block] Hostname: taras.lunarservers.com 1 hour 32 mins ago  Europe attempted a failed login as “Admin”. IP: 185.6.93.31  [block] Hostname: 185.6.93-31.rev.sewan.fr 2 hours 22 mins ago  Europe attempted a failed login as “Admin”. IP: 185.6.93.31  [block] Hostname: 185.6.93-31.rev.sewan.fr 2 hours 22 mins ago  Europe attempted a failed login as “Admin”. IP: 185.6.93.31  [block] Hostname: 185.6.93-31.rev.sewan.fr 2 hours 22 mins ago  Huntsville, United States attempted a failed login as “admin”. IP: 199.124.61.3  [block] Hostname: gnax-ds32.simplehelix.com 3 hours 24 mins ago  Scottsdale, United States attempted a failed login as “admin”. IP: 184.168.109.23  [block] Hostname: ip-184-168-109-23.ip.secureserver.net 3 hours 35 mins ago Its important to make sure your site is updated with the latest versions of wordpress. Yet it also makes sense to monitor your site on a regular basis to make sure that the hackers cant take over your site or infect it with malware.  Its important to keep on top of this because its very possible for your site to get hacked and you wont know about it for weeks until its to late and you now are banned from Google because your site is infected with malware. Contact us today if you would like assistance with protecting your law firm site. [si-contact-form form=’1′]

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WordPress Plugins: Q2W3 Fixed Widget

Wordpress Plugins /

WordPress Plugins for Lawyers Q2W3 Fixed Widget (Sticky Widget) Fixes positioning of the selected widgets, when the page is scrolled down. This is a very simple plugin that can be used to make sure one or more widgets from your sidebar are always displayed on the page. This plugin is extremely useful for ensuring that important plugins are always in the eyeline of your readers.   An excellent example of this plugin being used could be to ensure that a widget to sign up for your newsletter is always at the top of the screen, regardless of how far down the page a reader scrolls. Alternatively, freelancers or companies could use the plugin to ensure a widget that contains details on hiring them is always displayed. Download this plugin from WordPress

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The N.A.P. Citation

Citations /

LOCAL SEO MARKETING FOR LAWYERS What Is A Citation? A citation is when you have your business name, address, or phone number listed online. Any of your business information is considered a citation and does not need to link to your website. The “NAP” Citation The most common way local business citations are presented are in the NAP format, which stands for Name, Address, and Phone. It is really important that your information be consistent across the web. Although search engines are getting better at understanding that “st” is the same as “street” in an address. You should strive to make sure your address is exactly the same across the web. Why Are Citations Important For Local Businesses? These citations are important for helping search engines like Google & Bing find and rank businesses online. Citations are one of the major local ranking factors for businesses the more quality citations you have the better. There are several factors that go into a quality citation. Citations VS Links Citations = When your business information is referenced online. Links = When someone links from their website to yours. Common Citation Problems Their are several ways that a citation can be incorrect. The most common citation problems you will find are: Old addresses and phone numbers being indexed Typos or incorrect names Duplicate directory listings If your law firm had old office locations, then you might have an issue that your current location is not being recognized because of the older addresses.  You might have to go through and change certain info so that it all matches up.  Now if you have never moved, then this shoudlnt be an issue, yet a lot of lawyers move around and have multiple offices, so this can become a real issue and might be why your law firm isnt better ranked in the local Google map results.

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Citation Building Strategies for Lawyers

Citations, Local Search Marketing /

LOCAL SEO FOR LAWYERS When looking at the Local Search Ranking Factors, citation are one of the most important factors for local businesses to rank and be found online. There are a lot of  lists of citation directories and tools to help you find citations (WhiteSpark  is an amazing tool). All lawyers should find ways to get citations.  What is a citation you ask? A citation is when you have your business name, address, or phone number listed online. Any of your business information is considered a citation and does not need to link to your website.  SO these are not links we are talking about, its just your business info, your NAP….. Name…. Address ….. Phone #…. These should all be the same on all citations and can help improve your local SEO rankings. Citation Building Strategies Ways to get Citations for Lawyers Sponsorship Citations It is common for businesses to support and sponsor events, charities, and local organizations. The following are sponsorship ideas that will work for any industry. Sponsor Charity Websites There are a lot of great charities out there that could use business support. To find the right charity for your business check out Charity Navigator. You can use the advanced search to find specific type of charities within your zipcode.Be sure to check out the charities websites to see if they cite their business sponsors, some of them do not.Resource: Charity Navigator Charity Event Profile Along with sponsoring charities, if you have anyone in your company supporting a charity doing any kind of fund raising, be it for a 5K, bike race, etc. Check to see if they have a “help me raise money” page. If the fundraising domain allows you or your employee to drop in a citation why not give it a try? Sponsor A Student Creating a scholarship is a great way to help students in your community & can gain your business citations from high schools & colleges. There is no set amount of what the scholarship has to be, but in my experience colleges do not really share scholarship opportunities that are less than $500. Look For Sponsorship Opportunities There are literally hundreds of different sponsorship opportunities available in every community. A few to get you started: Examples: Sponsor a little league team Sponsor a pet shelter Sponsor a food kitchen Online Mentions You likely have relationships that you don’t even know about. Find people who have mentioned or talked about your business and find ways to work with them. Examples: Google Search – “Company Name” -site:yourdomain.com Check reference visits in your analytics Ahrefs – finds sites that are linking or recently mentioned your website. Associations & Organizations Are you apart of any local or industry legal organizations? Do these organizations have websites that list their members? Double check these sites to make sure you are listed. Law Firm Employees Your own employees can be a great way to gain citations for your business. Ask if they would include the business in their online bios. Examples: Social network profiles (Linkedin, Facebook, Google+) Organizations they support or work for Speaking at events Connect with the media Local newspapers, media, and news sites are always looking for news especially from people within the community. Research your local media reporters and connect with them to see what they are looking for. Often times you can find & connect with reporters on Twitter. Give Quotes Reporters across the nation are always looking for experts to quote and cite in their articles. Answer their questions to get a great citation is a win/win. Here are a couple of ways to find reporters looking for:1) HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is a website where reporters send out requests for expert sources. Sign up for a free account and get emailed when someone is looking for an expert in your field.2) Watch Reporter Hashtags on Twitter – As mentioned earlier a lot of reporters are on Twitter and use it to find sources for articles to cite. Some of the popular hash tags to follow are: #URGHARO – HARO hashtag #journorequest – Journalist request #prrequest – PR Request Hiring New Legal Help? If you are looking to hire new employees there are a lot of citation opportunities. Job Board sites There are a lot of online job boards! Depending on your budget and the position you are trying to fill you might want to use national job board sites or industry specific job boards. Resources: Job Board Site – CareerBuilder, Indeed, SimplyHired There are many other ways to get citations and for a complete list visit Local Stampede for a great article.

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Creating New Legal Blogs for your Legal Practice

New Legal Blogs, New Legal Web Design /

Creating Practice Specific Legal Blogs When doing Internet Marketing and SEO for your legal practice, you want to focus on getting ranked for as many keywords as possible. If you have multiple geographic locations and multiple practice areas, then its going to be hard to be ranked for all possible keywords with one site. One solution is creating multiple legal sites and/or legal blogs that focus on a specific niche practice area and location. This way you can focus the entire site on that one group of keywords, instead of trying to focus on many groups of keywords.  Yet this site must be unique and have different content then your other sites. Latest Legal Blog Design – Pasco Drunk Driving Lawyer An example of this is for a Florida Criminal Lawyer who has multiple offices and has many different kinds of criminal matters he handles.  We have helped him create a new website for a geographic location (Pasco County, Florida) and practice specific (DUI) blog. PASCO DUI LAWYERS Sandefer Law Firm 4625 East Bay Drive Suite 203 Clearwater, FL 33764 Toll Free:   866-786-5297 (LAWS) Clearwater   727-726-5297 (LAWS)   ** Visit Pasco DUI Attorneys This new blog has content all related to drunk driving and the Pasco County area. It also has pages of content related to the law firm, as well as links to main site and videos. The new blog also has other features such as  *  Free Consultation contact forms *  Attention Grabber pop up asking user to fill out form *  Social Media Icons setup on left side of all pages *  Videos on firm from YouTube *  Custom Twitter account setup with auto posting from blog *  Full Search Engine Optimization Setup  (Site is ranked in top 3 for most keywords)   Upgrading Your Lawyer Website It’s a good idea to upgrade your website every once in awhile. Sometimes you want to upgrade the design and graphics so it has a more appealing look.  Then other times you might want to upgrade so that you can have your site setup in a Content Management System (CMS) so that you can easily make edits to your site and post to the blog. NEW LAWYER WEB DESIGN We can help your law firm create a new legal web design or upgrade an existing site.  We can also assist you with Attorney SEO marketing, pay per click marketing, YouTube Video marketing and Social Media Marketing for Lawyers. Contact Lawyers Court at 630-393-0460 for a free Lawyer website Evaluation.  

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Top WordPress Plugins for Lawyers: Google XML Sitemaps

Wordpress Plugins, XML Sitemap /

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google, Bing and other search engines about web pages, images and video content on your site that they may otherwise not discover. It’s important to have a XML sitemap file created and if your using wordpress, you can setup a plugin that will automatically alert Google and Bing every time your site changes. Google XML Sitemap / Image Sitemap / Video Sitemap XML Sitemaps are a way to tell Google, Bing and other search engines about web pages, images and video content on your site that they may otherwise not discover. These plugins will generate a sitemap for your WordPress blog with all the URLs that are attached to your blog posts and WordPress pages. Google XML Sitemaps Google XML Sitemap for Images Google XML Sitemap for Mobile Google XML Sitemap for Videos The Video Sitemap plugin will generate an XML Sitemap for your WordPress blog using all YouTube videos that you may have embedded in your blog posts. Your Video Sitemap will includes web pages which embed videos from YouTube or which links to videos on YouTube. If a YouTube video that you have in your blog has been removed from YouTube, the record in the Sitemap file will be ignored by Googlebot. WORDPRESS SITES FOR LAWYERS If your a lawyer that has an older site, it might be a good idea to upgrade to a new WordPress site. Get a new design, layout and enhance your site with multiple plugins.  You can also improve your organic SEO rankings by setting up different plugins.  Contact us for assistance. We have a special deal going on with a low down payment and low monthly payments. [si-contact-form form=’1′]

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WordPress Plugins For Lawyers: Increasing Page Loadtimes

Website Speed, Wordpress Plugins /

WordPress allows you to further enhance your site by adding plugins. Most plugins are free and some are no brainers to add to your site. Page Speed Plugins Google and other search engines are obsessed with speed. A faster internet means better user experience. According to several reports that are widely available on the internet, user no longer have the patience to wait for a long time for a page to render.  This means “seconds”, and any site that takes more than 10 seconds (that’s a lot already) to load is nearing the borderline of loosing traffic. WP Super Cache / W3Total Cache – These plugins are highly recommended as they reduce page speed load time by serving cached version of your files. Essentially, these plugins generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve those file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. This improves the user experience (UX) of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times. Better UX, good for SEO. They really help a great deal but you have to make sure that they dont interfere with any other plugins. I find sometimes they can cause other plugins to not work correctly, so you have to sometimes test things out but usually they work fine and do make a difference. A faster loading website can not only provide a better experience for the user that is visiting your site, but it can sometimes make a difference in getting better organic SEO rankings for your lawyer site. Contact us today at 630-393-0460 or fill out contact form below for a FREE Web Site Analysis and Proposal. [si-contact-form form=’1′]

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Google Launches Webmaster Help For Hacked Sites

General Search Engine News, Google Webmaster Tools, Hacked Sites /

Has your lawyer site been hacked or compromised? If you are in doubt about the chances of your site getting compromised, the recent release of Google’s webmaster help for hacked sites should be a good indicator on just how widespread this problem is. If you have a website, be advised that it does not matter if it is big or small, your site stands an equal chance of being compromised. Perhaps, the more popular ones are more prone to attacks, but then again, those popular sites are likely to have increased “defenses” and proper “recovery plans” in place, in case something happens. How about your site? Google knows that this is not a small risk to site owners and in lieu of the ever increasing threats out there, has created a whole new section on how to tackle matters if your site has sadly been compromised. Start by reading these articles on how to increase your websites security, specially in you are on WordPress… WordPress Security Plugins, Protect Your Online Business WordPress Security For Blogs and Small Business, Why care? Create A Strong And Unique Password (oldie but still works) Password Management Guide (downloadable for free) The articles (and guides) above, if you have read and implemented some of the suggestions, will not guarantee 100% security. Nonetheless, it will help to increase your websites security and prevent as much as possible attempts to hack your site. Now, in the likelihood that those suggestion have failed to avoid your site from being compromised, this is where you may want to head over Google’s Hacked site help section for further information on how to deal with the problem. WATCH VIDEO FROM GOOGLE ON HACKED SITES Following the discovery that your site has been compromised, follow through the next steps, as provided on Google’s help for hacked sites. 1 Watch the overview (completed – you just watched it, right) Beginner 2 Contact your hoster and build a support team Beginner 3 Quarantine your site Intermediate 4 Touch base with Webmaster Tools Intermediate 5 Assess the damage (hacked with spam) or Assess the damage (hacked with malware) Advanced 6 Identify the vulnerability Advanced 7 Clean and maintain your site Advanced 8 Request a review Intermediate If you need assistance with your lawyer site that has been hacked or compromised, contact us today. [si-contact-form form=’1′]

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Google Plus Changes its Look

Google Plus, Google+, Legal Internet Marketing /

Google plus is Google’s answer to facebook and every Attorney should have a personal Google plus profile setup for starters. Then you also should have a page setup for your law firm. Google plus has made some big updates to the design of the pages and a number of other updates. It looks like these updates are to the Google plus pages and also to Google+ local pages. From Sara McKinley at Google: We spend lots of time listening to your feedback, and today we’re launching some profile and page updates that you’ve been asking for. These include: – A new tab for your Local reviews. In addition to your photos, +1’s and YouTube videos, there’s now a place for all your Local reviews. Highlight your favorite restaurants, or hide the tab completely via settings — it’s completely up to you. – An easier way to edit your info. The ‘About’ tab now consists of separate cards (like Story, Places, and Links) — each with its own prominent edit link. As always: you can share specific fields with specific circles, or keep them just for you. – Bigger cover photos, with a better aspect ratio. Cover photos are much larger than before (up to 2120px by 1192px), and they display in 16×9 when fully expanded. This way more images can be used as cover photos, and there’s more room for your selection to shine. I think this looks pretty good and lawyers needs to make sure they setup a Google+ Profle ASAP.  Contact us and we can assist you with this. [si-contact-form form=’1′]  

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