Fresno California lawyers - attorneys legal directory
The Most Valuable & Most Neglected Way to Improve Your Legal Website’s Search Engine Standings
By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2007 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved.
You paid an arm and a leg for the professional design of your firm's website and
it looks very attractive. It’s easy to navigate, loads fast, has harmonized,
satisfying 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 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 essential 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 terms of optimization is the very
basic meta-tag inclusion and perhaps some out-dated (and often unfavorable)
optimization efforts.
Now on to our two main steps:#1. Go to a major search engine (like Google or
MSN) and type in a city-specific, legal keyword phrase. Actually, you would do
better 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). Ignore 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 will normally not search beyond about
thirty returned sites.
Now, do the same for a city-specific & practice-specific keyword term like
"Houston
corporate lawyers". Did you see 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, 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 of our two searches for our Houston legal
directory (we added one more 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 corporate
lawyers Page #1 Position #3 & #8
Ok, now you know where 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 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 stress out 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 excessive
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 neglected 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 manually. 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 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 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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