The Most Important & Most Neglected Way to Build Up
Your Legal Website’s Search Engine Standings
By Bob
Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2007 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved.
You paid a lot of money for the professional design of your firm's
website and it looks very attractive. It’s easy to navigate, loads fast,
has matched, pleasurable colors, and lots of informative and useful
content. Your Web designer has also shown you how to go to the search
engines, type in your firm’s name or key phrases, and watch your site
come up on page one of the results. It seems like you have done
everything right, yet, after over a year, you're not getting any new
clients that can be attributed to your firm’s site!
There are two important steps you should take to determine where the
problem lies. Before we begin, keep in mind that almost without
exception, website design firms are NOT SEO (search engine optimization)
firms. Actually, the most you can expect from your web design firm in
the arena of optimization is the very basic meta-tag inclusion and
perhaps some old-fashioned (and often detrimental) optimization efforts.
Now on to our two important steps:#1. Go to a major search engine {such
as Google or MSN) and type in a legal keyword phrase that specifies a
city. Actually, you will want to try this on at least two terms. The
first term should be a general city-specific term like Houston lawyers
(in our examples we will use our Houston Texas legal directory -
www.houston-texas-lawyers-attorneys-directory.com as an example). Don't
mind the paid, sponsored listings, and see if your firm’s site shows up
on the first three returned pages of results. Looking beyond page three
is useless, as your potential clients most likely won't search beyond
about thirty returned sites.
Now, do the same for a city-specific & practice-specific keyword term
like "Houston divorce lawyers". Did you locate your site in these two
searches? If not, this is the reason you are not generating new clients!
Even if you firm’s name search results actually ranked on page one, it
probably wouldn't matter. How many potential (particularly out of town)
clients are going to search on your firm’s name? Do they actually know
your firm’s name?
As an example, here are the results of our two searches for our Houston
legal directory (we added an additional phrase):
MSN Houston lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #3
Houston attorneys Page #1 Position #1 & #2
Houston labor lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #5
YAHOO Houston lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #3
Houston attorneys Page #1 Position #1 & #2
Houston family lawyers Page #1 Position #3 & #8
Ok, now you know where your site stands. Our step two examples may be
the reason your site is not ranking well.
#2. Go to a major search engine (like Yahoo or MSN) and type in the
search box the word "site:" followed by a colon and your site’s URL. For
our Houston legal directory, we would type in:
site:www.houston-texas-lawyers-attorneys-directory.com
At the top of the first page of returned results you’ll see a summary
(these results are other sites that have links directing to your site)
of the results. Below are the results summaries for our Houston legal
directory on Yahoo and MSN:
YahooSearch ResultsResults 1 - 10 of about 10,400 for site:
www.houston-texas-lawyers-attorneys-directory.com - 0.44 sec.MSNResults
1-15 of about 7645 containing "site:
www.houston-texas-lawyers-attorneys-directory.com"
Note that our Houston lawyer’s site had about 10,400 links on Yahoo and
about 7645 links on MSN.
Don’t worry if you don’t have thousands of links pointing to your site.
It takes time to build up quality links. Plus, you really don’t need
giant numbers here. However, unless you have at least a hundred or so
quality links, your site will never rank as well as it could.
Increasing quality links is the most overlooked way to improve your
site’s search engine rankings. Plus, these links will guide traffic from
other sites to yours!
The procedure can be done by you. I recommend specific software made
just for securing and setting up reciprocal links pages on your site.
With this software, a high school or freshman college student could have
your site all fixed up in just a couple hours per week for three or four
weeks. I recommend you download a free trial version of Arelis.
Want to have 15 high-quality legal links leading to your site? Take a {minute|moment}}
to review and submit your site to one of our legal directories.
Copyright 2007 Promotions Unlimited. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited http://www.websitetrafficbuilders.com
an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas) publisher and search
engine placement technology analyst. You can contact Bob via e-mail at
seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego legal directory at:
www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com
