Legal Internet Marketing

DOES SEO (Search Engine Optimization) WORK FOR LAWYERS?  YES, BIGTIME! In todays age, your law firm better have a good website that is easy to navigate and has useful content regarding your firms practice.  In addition its a really good idea if your site is optimized for the search engines so that your main practice areas and geographic locations come up when someone does a search at Google, Yahoo or Bing. Optimizing and promoting your legal web site with the search engines is by far the best way to drive a steady stream of potential new clients to your site. Getting visitors to your site via the search engines comes from natural or organic search listings or paid or sponsored listings at the the different pay per click programs. Optimizing your site doesnt mean your going to do something tricky or sneaky to try and get better rankings. It just means that your going to make your site easy for the search engines to find and index.   A big part of it is just having a lot of good solid content and then knowing what your main keywords are that people are searching on and creating the content around those keywords.  The bottom line is that when you have a good website that is fully optimized, usually you have a steady flow of traffic from potential clients who will find your site when searching for what you do.  They will never find you if your site isn't setup right and not coming up in the search engine listings top 10. We have helped many lawyers optimize their websites and achieve top rankings at the search engines.  We have most recently helped the houston divorce lawyers at the law offices of Dennis Slate get their legal website optimized.  The site had zero presence at the search engines but after only one week, its already coming up for a # of terms in the top 10 at Google. Most law firms never take the time to optimize their websites, not even for partner names.  Yet it can be a good idea to organize your content and optimize the pages for keywords related to what you do, its pretty simple really.   The results can be awesome and getting new clients from the Internet is a really great thing! If your law firm needs assistance with any Lawyer SEO Marketing, contact Lawyers Court for a free website SEO analysis.

"ORGANIC" SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION VS. PAY PER CLICKIts important to know the difference between organic SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. Organic SEO is the process of getting your site listed in Google’s and other search engine’s main search index and coming up in the free or organic Search Engine results, located on the left side of the screen. Pay Per Click is basically buying the rankings for keywords and bidding to rank higher then other sites, these PPC results come up usually on the right side of the screen under "sponsored listings". Anyone can get their site listed in the PPC’s by simply paying for it, but getting organic listings takes time and effort. Most studies show that people prefer to click organic listings because they are more trustworthy, plus the nice thing about them is that you don’t have to pay a per click fee, which can sometimes be over $10 per click. BENEFITS OF ORGANIC SEOSEO can help place your web site among the top search engine results for a particular search, which will lead users looking for your firm’s practice area to your web site. This is a good way to establish your web presence and gain a solid flow of traffic to your site,  which can lead to new clients. Each search engine has a different set of rules as to how they rank web sites. Among other things, SEO involves Keyword Research to find all the possible key phrases people might use to locate your legal web site. Then its a matter of creating the optimized code for each page within the site and optimizing other key elements of the web site to make the site search engine friendly and ready. Once the site is optimized, then its a matter of submitting the site to the top search engines and directories.  Obtaining links from other quality web sites is the key to building your site’s Link Popularity score, which is a VERY important factor when search engines such as Google rank your web site. A combination of all these things will get your site listed at the search engines and get people visiting your site. See some of the results we have had in the organic search engine listings for some of our legal clients.

Its important that you have other websites that links to your legal site. Yet it’s not the number of links you get but the quality of the links.  Getting one link from a high ranking well ranked site is much better then getting a 100 links from link farms, sites that have nothing to do with your site or sites that have no existing search engine rankings. Getting links from established directories can be very valuable and are considered high quality valuablelinks. Links from the Yahoo directory, the Open Directory, .EDU sites and other business and legal directories can be very valuable in your overall search engine marketing plan.  Contact us today for more information.

Article from ClickZ about a lawsuit involving how far trademark infringement can go when applied to a subdomain. A lawsuit that had the potential to define how far trademark infringement can go when applied to subdomains has been settled out of court. The lawsuit was filed by California non-profit religious organization Jews for Jesus against Google in response to a blogger who set up a blog critical of the group at jewsforjesus.blogspot.com. According to attorney and Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, the case could have set some precedent about third-level subdomains (like the "blog" part of http://blog.clickz.com). While trademark law has been shown to apply to a regular domain name, it has not yet been applied to third-level ones, and it’s not clear that it would apply, he said. It would also help define Google’s responsibility in what subdomains it allows to be registered. The case was settled by Jews for Jesus and the blogger, who transferred the site over to them. Since the issues were never decided by a judge, the world will have to wait for the next lawsuit to find the answers to those questions.