The Most Essential & 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 big bucks for the professional design of your firm's website and it
looks amazing. It’s easy to navigate, loads fast, has harmonized, pleasing
colors, and lots of informative and useful content. Your Web designer has also
informed you how to go to the search engines, type in your firm’s name or key
phrases, and see your site come up on the first page 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 critical 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 way of optimization is the very
basic meta-tag inclusion and perhaps some obsolete (and often damaging)
optimization efforts.
Now on to our two critical steps:#1. Go to a major search engine
(such as Yahoo
or MSN) and type in a legal keyword phrase that specifies a city. Actually, you
should probably 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). Disregard 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 a waste of time,
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 find 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 happened to be 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 from the 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 divorce 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 how your site ranks. Our step two examples may be the reason
your site is not ranking great.
#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 wrap-up (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:
Yahoo Search Results
Results 1 - 10 of about 10,400 for site:
www.houston-texas-lawyers-attorneys-directory.com - 0.44 sec.
MSN
Results 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 huge 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 neglected way to improve your site’s search
engine rankings. Plus, these links will point traffic from other sites to yours!
The procedure can be done on your own. 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 set
up in just a few 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 pointing to your site? Take a 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
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