In this era of Internet Marketing, everybody knows the importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It is the buzzword in today's market. The one thing you need to promote your law firm online. Without a doubt, you need an online presence to run a law practice in today’s market. A foolproof way to reach new clients is through high positioning in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). Simply put, your well-optimized web site is your door to prospective clients. This article is an introduction to Search Engine Optimization methods, briefly explaining effective ways to attract traffic to your web site.
There are two types of SEO techniques: White Hat and Black Hat. White Hat techniques are effective steps recommended by the Search Engines. Black Hats techniques may seem effective, but are deceptive and offer short-term benefits. In other words, you should follow White Hat methods to optimize your site. You should never even think about frowned-upon schemes like link farming, spamdexing, or any other dishonest methods.
How They See Your Pages
Search engines use automatic indexers to crawl and scan web pages. The other names of these programs are bots, web spiders, and web crawlers. They view site contents in a way different from how a normal person does. Search engine companies are working on making the web crawlers perceive the sites like a human being, thus making them appreciate the actual merit of a web site. Programmers are continually working on refining the crawlers. Consequently web crawlers will become "ultra brilliant" and will process a web site's contents with intelligence analogous to that of a human being.
Often when you try a search string, what you may find are pages packed with advertisements and a "bunch" of keywords, without any actual use to you. The site's name may also look very familiar. For instance, you might technoarti.com. The average internet user is a fast typist and may make the mistake of typing "arti" in place of "rati." This typo will land them on the fake site, rather then the popular blog review site. These sites have a nickname in the industry - MFA or Made for Adsense - due to the popularity of the Google's AdSense program.
If you are serious about your online presence, you should not create an MFA site, as it will only help remove your site permanently from the search engine indexes as soon as the search engines determine the "value" of your site.
Get Indexed
You have to make your sites look the best to yourself and to potential clients. You have to view your content through the eyes of a client that comes to your page actually looking for your services. Create the content with that perception.
The first step is to do keyword research. Keyword research helps you determine what phrases potential clients are likely to type into a search engine when they are looking for a firm such as yours. You can do this by brainstorming and trying various phrases in the search box. See if those phrases return similar law firms. At Juris Design, we us a combination of brainstorming, our years of experience and third party tools, such as those provided by Google and WordTracker. The best keywords are focused and are phrases 3-5 words long. Armed with this list, we determine the themes and navigation of the site
Having the keyword list, content creation now begins. At the same time, our designer begins creating your design. Google and other search engines will index good content. Good positioning in the search engines will bring visitors. The design and quality of the content will turn visitors into clients.
To jumpstart indexing, we will submit sitemaps of your site to the major search engines. Sitemaps are specially formatted files that suggest to the search engines how best to index your site.
Directory Listings
Once your site appears on the search engines, we encourage you to get listed in the major directories, such as the Open Directory Project, Yahoo!, and Business.com. We would also guide you to select certain high quality second-tier directory. Directory submission is done in order to obtain some initial high quality incoming links, which are very important.
It is wise not to pay attention to Paid to Click or Paid to Read schemes. They can offer you nothing more than "empty traffic.". This traffic is primarily third-world mercenaries, who just look for some extra income offered by the PTC sites. Also, please note that many of the PTC and PTR schemes are fraudulent. If you advertise through one of these sites, it is possible for your site to be blacklisted, because the search engines are blacklisting so many of the PTC sites. The danger is that they can permanently remove your web site from the indexes. Similarly, you should also not "blast" advertisements through e-mail spamming.
What you want instead is genuine traffic that finds and evaluates the merit of your content. Effective, ethical SEO techniques will spread your merit to the Internet masses. Repeat visits from interested clients will gradually improving your worth, or authority, in the search engine's eyes.
SEO and Webpage Structure
Page organization and HTML structure can affect your page ranking by hundreds. You are to maintain a site with great organization, HTML structure, and ease of use for the visitors. The site has to conform to the rules of HTML or any other scripting language used in it. You need not be a web programmer to know whether your site conforms to the script rules, just get a web-based utility that checks the web pages for errors. Google search for “Web site Validation,” will locate one such utility for you. The best web site validation tool is none other than Google Webmaster Tools, accessible from your Google account. If you find errors in your pages, you are trying to optimize, correct them by hiring a web programmer. Most of the SEO companies do this as part of their job.
After validating your web site source code, check for the general page organization and “viewability,” which are a very important metrics in calculating Page Rank (PR). You should have a web site that is easily viewable to the users.
