SEO Before Legal Marketing

The online legal marketing process consists of two primary goals, search engine optimization that occurs on the law firm’s website and link building that takes place off the law firm website.

Often times, the term search engine optimization is used to explain all aspects of web marketing. Actually, search engine optimization only occurs on the website. The optimization process takes care of the following:

Tags – Your websites title tags, keyword meta tags, description meta tags, and image/alternate text tags should all use your keyphrases with consistency, but without overusing them to the extent they appear as spam. An image tag is a text tag that is associated with a picture. If you have a picture of a car, Google cannot see the car so you tell them what is in the picture by using alternate text. For optimization purposes, we include keyphrases to describe the image content.

Content – Using your keyphrases in the actual content of the website is also very important. Positioning keyphrases in key areas of paragraphs and pages, while making them sensible, will also make a great difference in your overall relevancy.

Navigation – Google needs to be able to find your website’s subpages. To make sure they can do that, navigation optimization is necessary. Basic techniques like textual sitemaps, XML sitemaps, and textual links to substitute image/flash/java buttons will allow Google, and other search engines, to easily crawl your law firm website.

So your website is optimized, but what happens next? That is when we begin legal marketing after search engine optimization, which we will explain next week.

To learn more about legal marketing, law firm marketing, and law firm web design, visit SEOLawFirm.com or call 1.800.728.5306.