How SEO can Catapult your Legal Website from Anonymity into Popularity
A well-planned and well-executed SEO campaign can work really well for niche markets as they tend to give excellent search results in specific areas. That’s why, as a law firm if you want to grab the moment and catapult yourself from an anonymous online existence to one of popularity, search engine optimization is what you need to consider.
Always seek the services of only an established and credible Internet marketing firm to deliver quality services…
Using Organic SEO techniques may take some time to start delivering the results, but once the results start to come in, there will be no stopping you from being perched atop the SERPs (search engine result pages) of mega search engines such as Google, MSN Live, and Yahoo!. While we assume that by now a lawyer like you would already know something about SEO, here are a quick few tops to further improve your legal websites organic search ranking for the keywords you are working with.
On-Site optimization - Your website should include your major keywords, your city and terms such as Lawyer, Attorney and law firm within your meta taks, content and title tags in order to rank high. Also including keywords in your page URL's is an added benefit to improving your search engine rankings.
Permalinks - short for permanent links, these point to a particular blog/forum comment once it has been archived after being displayed on front pages. You can only benefit from permalinks if you ensure that default links use your title rather than point to your blog site/forum. Select permalinks carry value if they do not have NoFollow attributes and come from authority sites.
Blog Tags – these tags give information to search robots so that your blog or webpage is displayed in search results. In order for visitors to find your law related site you must use only relevant and common tags within your websites blog.
Authority Links - Obtaining links from popular legal websites online may cost an annual fee, however the authority that comes with those links is incredibly powerful and should be utilized for your benefit. Sites like HG and others are extremely useful in improving organic (natural) search engine results.
Related Links – URLs from other websites that point to your website, this allows the search engines to understand the authority since the search engines use a system that is similar to a voting system. The more relevant and high quality websites that link to your website the better. Obtaining related links are about 80% of the battle when trying to obtain top rankings for your niche practice area and location.
Link building – as the owner of a legal website, you must ensure that your Internet marketing team obtains links from sites with authority. This will help establish trust between you and the search engines besides giving your website credibility. If you obtain a large number of low quality links, your credibility is tarnished and this can have a negative affect.
No Broken URLs/Pages – Because all search engines, especially Google, dislike broken URLs or pages, prevent your website from being punished by preventing this trick.
Fresh content – Update the content of your website on a monthly or bi-monthly basis so that the content remains fresh. One of the basic fundamentals of Internet marketing is that content is relevant and up to date. Also, adding more information pertaining to your practice area will increase your relevance and improve your rankings.
ALT Tags – Even a legal website can have images. So if your legal site has images, use ALT tags. ALT tags are tags given to images and show up over mouse over, these tags can be read by search engines and help with SEO.
H1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 Tags – It’s a good idea to use header tags in content to characterize different areas of your website text and content. Breaking down content with keyword rich header tags helps your rankings significantly. Each header tag should outline what information is beneath it. Your most important keywords should be included in H1 tags, and the less important the keywords the higher the header tag number. Header tags are H1 to H6. We recommend starting with H1 at the top of your page and then moving to h2, h3 and so on.
Improvise & strategize – Finally, constantly work with your law firm Internet marketing team to improvise, strategize and keep up with the latest trends to get the best results for your search engine optimization campaign.
Make sure to get references, testimonials and proof that your vendor is providing quality results before engaging in any long term agreement with a legal search engine optimization firm.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joel McLaughlin
Joel McLaughlin is the founder of Dataflurry law firm Internet marketing. Helping lawyers and attorneys with search engine optimization and marketing strategies.
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Disclaimer: While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this publication, it is not intended to provide legal advice as individual situations will differ and should be discussed with an expert and/or lawyer.For specific technical or legal advice on the information provided and related topics, please contact the author.