Las Vegas lawyers - attorneys legal directory
The Most Crucial & Most Neglected Way to Enhance 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 great. It’s easy to navigate, loads fast, has harmonized,
pleasurable 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 view 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 chief 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 area of optimization is
the very basic meta-tag inclusion and perhaps some old-fashioned (and often
unfavorable) 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 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). Look past
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 are very unlikely to search beyond about
thirty returned sites.
Now, do the same for a city-specific & practice-specific keyword term like
"Houston divorce 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 were on page one, big deal! 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):
MSNHouston lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #3
Houston attorneys Page #1 Position #1 & #2
Houston DUI lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #5
YAHOO Houston lawyers Page #1 Position #1 & #3
Houston attorneys Page #1 Position #1 & #2
Houston divorce lawyers Page #1 Position #3 & #8
Ok, now you know where your site places. 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 pointing 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 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 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 on your own. I suggest 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
completed 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 directing 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
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