When designing your website, your designer should take into consideration the style, color schemes, and feeling that your brand instills. However, the market downturn and slow recovery are tightening the budgets of many law firms and some are making the mistake of putting off their online marketing goals.

Your law firm must be online and the website must be professional. Even if you predominately do traditional marketing, you have to have a website that converts those visitors into new cases. But now, you don’t have to spend a lot of money.

In direct response to the changing economic environment, SEOLawFirm.com has created the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website, a complete website solution for $2,500.00.

Unlike other “template” solutions, the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website offers small law firms 14 unique designs (and growing). These designs are then customized by SEOLawFirm.com’s design team to match your law firm’s brand. Once completed, no two Semi-Custom websites look exactly the same, thus giving your firm a unique and professional online presence.

Content writing and search engine optimization services are available as supplemental services and hosting starts at $12.95/month. However, if you provide your own web content, the total cost of the Semi-Custom Lawyer Website including design customization, easy to use content management system, onsite blog capable of handling unlimited blog entries, sitemaps, initial page building (up to 20), social networking icons, and statistics will not cost a penny more than $2,500.00 (for a limited time – $2,700.00 after promotional period).

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Unlike some search engine optimization techniques, this one is not up for interpretation. Some lawyers, acting under the advice of misinformed “SEO Specialists,” have long lists of keywords in their website’s footer that are in the same font color as their background, thus making it invisible. Such a practice will negatively effect your legal marketing goals.

The problem is so irritating to Google that they not only mention it but built a whole section on hidden links and hidden text in their webmaster guidelines center.

Google is pretty direct in the language they use to explain the consequence of hiding keyphrases:

“If your site is perceived to contain hidden text and links that are deceptive in intent, your site may be removed from the Google index, and will not appear in search results pages.”

To check your website for hidden text, go to your web browsers top menu and click on “Edit” then “Select All.” This will highlight your entire web page and display any hidden text that your webmaster or “SEO Specialist” may have inserted.

If you find invisible words on the page, you should first demand that your webmaster remove them immediately. A termination of your agreement with them should probably come shortly thereafter as this negligible action will hinder your ability to be ranked highly in Google, and possibly hinder your ability to be ranked at all.

We recently reviewed a lawyer website that had over 100 hidden words in the footer. The attorney informed us that he had paid someone to develop the website in February of this year (2010); thus, acting as a reminder that unethical search engine optimization practices are still lurking.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Actually, that time never existed. The web has always been dynamic and quick to change, but in recent years it has been placed on turbo and is changing second by second. What does this mean for your law firm marketing efforts? You should be blogging.

Put a Blog on Your Attorney Website

It has been our experience that secondary websites just for your legal blog are not as effective as placing a blog directly on your law firm’s website. By having a blog on your site in a “/blog/” directory, you can keep your number of pages growing, build links to your blog via social bookmarks, and syndicate your blog feed into Google Blog Search, the ABAJournal’s Blawg Directory, and many others.

This syndicates your blog’s content, brings readers into your website and with the proper design, can convert visitors to new cases. It all starts with an active blog existing directly within your website, filled with relevant practice area content that is valuable and optimized.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that your website being up and without returning “not found” errors is an important aspect of getting and achieving a high ranking.

As Google visits your attorney website to index your new content, they look for “not found” errors caused by dead links. If your website’s server is timing out, this can cause an error and make an existing page seem non-existent. If Google gets a lot of these errors, their bot may in fact lose patience with your website which will affect your ranking.

Check on your website periodically, and make sure your law firm hosting company is working with a reliable data center that has 24/7 performance monitoring. Some downtime will always occur with hosting for server reboots, upgrade installs, etc., but frequent downtime can only be explained by poor server management.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

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Google wants to see content and they respect websites that bring it to their search engine. That is why most searches for information, celebrities, and political figures bring up Wikipedia articles… because there is content. There are also many popular terms that often bring up newspaper articles, because the news websites have massive amounts of content.

But before you go plugging away and writing hundreds of pages worth of keyword rich content, stop for a moment and ask yourself, “Is this content worth linking to?”

It is true, Google wants to see large amounts of content, but if the content is not providing any valuable information, third parties are not going to link to it. Imagine for a moment that you write on your law firm’s blog a legal position on pending legislation in your state House or Senate. A local reporter then writes a news article and cites a statement from your blog. Most reporters link to their sources in the web publication, thus giving your site a valuable inbound link.

A lot of content is great, and valuable content is better. When focusing on the size and value of your law firm’s website, you can show Google that you are a valuable resource while showing others that you are worth linking to.

So think of your website as more than a business card splash page and make it a legal resource.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/seolawfirm

Recently in our law firm marketing podcast, we talked about the best ways to communicate with your target clientele through color and branding.

The podcast episode was based on a two part series that we did some time ago then updated for the podcast. In listening to Sierra Winter describe the different things that attorneys do right and wrong, it reminded me of the importance of color when marketing a website.

One of the easiest ways to turn somebody off on a subconscious level is by using the wrong colors on your law firm’s website. Sometimes, you can take some risks and make a website bold but for the most part, you should keep your brand and color scheme consistent with your market. For example, softer colors for sensitive matters like personal injury and divorce. Stronger colors are acceptable for criminal defense and business law.

If you haven’t heard it already, you should listen to the first podcast here, subscribe on iTunes, or subscribe with Feedburner. The second part of the series is coming out next week.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

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How the times have changed. As content management systems like Wordpress and Drupal evolved, the open source programming community took over and now content management systems are actually more SEO friendly than static HTML. I’m sure many in the SEO community are still shaking their heads, so next week we will cover how not using a content management system may hinder your attorney search engine optimization.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

But we know that what keeps our clients renewing year after year is partially their high ranking but primarily conversion. How many new cases and contacts are coming from their website… that is what truly matters.

A great factor in conversion is the design of the website. The key to conversion is simplicity and fewer steps. The goal of the design is to instill confidence in a user then make it as easy as possible to contact the law firm.

Keeping It Simple

The best way to increase conversion is to add a simple contact form on every page of the website. The form should request only the necessary information like name, email and phone number. It should be clearly visible and accessible on the home page and every sub page within the website.

Secondly, you should encourage the reader of your website and blog to contact your firm and link to the contact page. It is helpful to place contact links within the content of your site.

Implementing a couple simple techniques may improve leads and your return on investment with your online marketing dollars.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

When deciding how to best search engine optimize an attorney website, we look at competition in a different way. Online, competition is not always made up of lawyers in your city. It often comes from more powerful sources.

When building an online legal marketing strategy, we have to first determine the most popular keyphrase for your practice area. Popular keywords are going to give you the greatest return, since they provide the most exposure. While (for example) “Dallas Texas Criminal Defense and DUI Lawyer” may yield a quick page one ranking, it’s unlikely that the 5 individuals that search for that full keyphrase each month will cover your expenses. However, shorten that to “Dallas Criminal Defense Attorney” and you open yourself up to at least 1,600 monthly searches.

Let’s assume you have a keyphrase that is very popular and very competitive like “New York bankruptcy.” With 50,000 monthly searches, this is certainly a keyphrase worth investing in. However, when you search for “New York bankruptcy” in Google, you see that the competition for your search engine ranking is not always other lawyers.

Below the sponsored listings, the first result for this keyphrase is the website for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court Southern District of New York (nysb.uscourts.gov). Being a government website (.gov), it is going to carry a lot of prominence in the search engines. It’s also now your competitor.

The second ranking is a directory of bankruptcy lawyers in New York. This is somewhat like a competitor in that, should someone click on it, they will be exposed to competing bankruptcy lawyers. The third ranking is the Northern District of New York, another government website. When reviewing the whole page of listings, we find 4 government (.gov) websites. That means that 40% of the results page is dominated by search engine heavyweights.

When thinking about the competition for your keyphrases, your online law firm marketing company must take into consideration that everything on the first search results page is a competitor. This can be Wikipedia, a government website, a video on YouTube, or a news story on CBSNews.com. Knowing who you are really competing against will help your law firm achieve prominent rankings for the keyphrases that get search traffic, which ultimately means new cases for your firm.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Attorney

The office of a law firm used to be ultimate in luxury. Marble floors, imported furniture, and expensive art were the norm for many high profile firms.

Things have changed in recent years. As lawyers see their client base come from the Internet more so than via traditional media advertising, many are investing in a luxurious website rather than an office fit for a king. Attorney website design and legal marketing company, SEOLawFirm.com has seen many firms paying closer attention to the custom feel of their site and the old “just want something up” attitude is a thing of the past.

An elite look and feel provides a great first impression, but that alone will not bring in traffic. Only consistent search engine optimization with inbound linking and social networking can make that happen. To improve the ability of SEOLawFirm.com’s clients to interact on social networks, they are offering several optional upgrades for their clientele.

The most popular of the newly available features is an application that sends a tweet to Twitter every time the attorney posts a blog entry. One of the most valuable features of Twitter is its ability to drive traffic to websites. A few tweets by themselves may not accomplish a lot, but link to a blog post and suddenly, Twitter is driving potential clients to the law firm’s website.

Another feature now available to SEOLawFirm.com website owners is connectivity with their social network accounts. A couple weeks ago, the company announced their law firm social network. Now, attorneys can syndicate their blog postings onto their SEOLawFirm.com Network profile.

SEOLawFirm.com continues to develop multiple plans for various website needs, and future upgrades will focus on better connecting legal websites with social networking.

To learn more, visit http://www.seolawfirm.com/web-design/.

A common mistake made by many law firms is pushing their website and online legal marketing strategies to the back of their priorities. By doing this, the law firm loses a lot of exposure and potential clients.

Everyday, people and businesses go online – not to the phone book – to look for a lawyer. In every major city and in every practice area, thousands of searches flock to Google and other searches engines to seek legal counsel.

To show you how important it is to begin quickly, we ran a search count in several major metro areas in different corners of the United States. The number represents the number of searches Google received for that keyphrase each month. It’s an approximation provided by Google.

Miami divorce attorney – 1,600

Seattle personal injury – 6,600

Boston bankruptcy lawyer – 1,700

Houston criminal defense – 12,000

Los Angeles immigration lawyer – 3,600

As you can see, the traffic is out there and if your website can’t be found or if it doesn’t look its best, your firm is missing out on new cases.

Keep in mind, search engine optimization does not happen overnight so beginning a strong online law firm marketing campaign soon is imperative to the success of your firm in 2010.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer | Law Firm Social Network

Here are a few frequently propagated myths:

One Link Theory

The one link theory suggests that your website only needs one very high quality website linking to it, to get credibility in Google Search and other search engines. Online law firm marketing takes slightly more work. This theory goes against the very core of the PageRank algorithm which uses multiple links from third party websites to determine quality and relevance.

The one link theory is often pushed by legal marketing companies that only have a directory linking to their clients’ sites and do not offer monthly services like writing, distribution, link building from third party sites, social networking and blogging.

Domain Name Is King

While a healthy domain name is helpful, it does not make or break search engine optimization success. Some believe if your domain name contains all of your keyphrases, then it will naturally rank high on the first page. In reality, you still need valuable content and multiple quality inbound links. We have firsthand experience that proves that a domain name can spell out anything and still achieve a high page one ranking.

Keypages or Doorway Pages

If you hear an SEO company talk about keypages, you should quickly run away, as Google openly prohibits this practice in their Webmaster Guidelines. Basically, you build a bunch of low quality keyword rich sites in hopes of appearing most relevant to the term. It may get your website banned, thus this is not an ethical SEO practice. Here is what Google has to say about Doorway pages:

“Doorway pages are typically large sets of poor-quality pages where each page is optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. In many cases, doorway pages are written to rank for a particular phrase and then funnel users to a single destination.

Whether deployed across many domains or established within one domain, doorway pages tend to frustrate users, and are in violation of our webmaster guidelines.”

You can’t really argue with that. So when searching for an online law firm marketing company, seek out a firm that offers an all inclusive method of SEO that consists of link building by custom unique content, quality website development practices, social networking and blogging.

If a proposed service is centered around one magic bullet, it’s probably not going to be successful.

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

Other Resources: Find a Lawyer