Most Important & Most Neglected Way to Improve Your Legal Website’s Search Engine Standings |
By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2004 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved.
You paid big bucks for the professional design of your firm's website and it looks great. It’s easy to navigate, loads fast, has coordinated, pleasing colors, and lots of informative and useful content. Your Web designer has shown you how to go to search engines and type in the firm’s name and your site comes 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 start, 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 out dated (and often detrimental) optimization efforts.
Now on to our two important steps:
#1. Go to a major search engine like Yahoo or MSN and type in a city specific, legal key word phrase. Actually, you 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). 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 worthless, as your potential clients will not search beyond about thirty returned sites.
Now, do the same for a city specific & practice specific key word term like Houston labor 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 were on page one, big deal! How many potential (especially 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 for these two searches for our Houston legal directory (we added an additional phrase):
Houston lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #3
Houston attorneys Page #1 Position #1 & #2
Houston labor lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #5
Houston lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #3
Houston attorneys Page #1 Position #1 & #2
Houston labor 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 well.
#2. Go to a major search engine like Yahoo or MSN and type in the search box the word “site:’ followed by a semicolon 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 pointing to your site) of the results. Below are the results summaries for our Houston legal directory on Yahoo and MSN:
Search Results
Results 1 - 10 of about 10,400 for site: www.houston-texas-lawyers-attorneys-directory.com - 0.44 sec.
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 despair 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.
Building up quality links is the most overlooked way to improve your site’s search engine rankings. Plus, these links will direct traffic from other sites to yours!
The procedure can be done manually. I recommend specific software made just for securing and setting up reciprocal links pages on your site. With the 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.
If you would like to have a way to get 15 high quality legal links pointing to your site, please review and submit your site to our legal directories.
Copyright 2004 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
We have a great FREE program for 15 legal high traffic reciprocal links pointing to your website....just CLICK HERE! View our latest stats for: