He then continues to explain how social networks are like cocktail parties which is where this week’s metaphor begins. When attending a social event, you always find different people, but they can be classified in similar categories.

Can’t Hold Their Liquor

This classification of party patron can be interpreted online as the online users that talk too much about too little. This is a parallel to the users who post comments on twitter keeping you up-to-date from getting out of bed, to morning cup of coffee, to shower, to mouthwash, to driveway, through morning traffic, and into the office. Generally, these people provide little to any value to the internet as content is currency on the web.

The Attention Grabber

We have all seen this person. They scream “me” at the top of their lungs with the way they dress, their just-slayed-the-world’s-most-dangerous-dragon smile, but when you finally get a chance to speak to them you find that their conversation is little more than a regurgitation of their autobiography and many great accomplishments, proven or imagined. They have no interest in why you are talking to them only that you are, thus giving them an audience for the many great things they think about themselves throughout the day.

An Informative Presence Is All They Need

Now we tie this into your law firm marketing strategy. The last person in the cyber cocktail party is who your law firm needs to be. This is the person whom everyone goes to because they have the answers. Real answers. They give a brief bio of their history and qualifications, but the preponderance of your conversation with them is about you. You have questions and this confident but warm person has helpful answers. Your law firm needs to position itself on the web.

Your law firm’s news releases, website content, and social media marketing need to focus on your clients. What problems are they facing? What solutions can you offer? Who else are they talking to? There is a chance that prior to talking to your law firm, they have had a disappointing conversation with the “look at me lawyer” who provided an impressive resume with no solutions to their problem. They have also ignored the attorney on TV who is filmed in a boxing ring and on his boat doing things that have nothing to do with their legal needs.

Your firm needs to be about solutions. If your website and marketing content talks about solutions with just a brief bio of your expertise, your law firm will become the presence in the room that gathers an unsolicited audience which ultimately means new cases.

If you haven’t already, I recommend reading Scott’s book as it will help transform your view of online marketing as being more than just search engine rankings but rather a combined marketing effort with many different solutions coming together to achieve one goal: making your law firm grow.

Recommended Reading

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

Among the most popular techniques is a website being ranked on the first page of Google and other search engines when those needing legal services search for an attorney in their region. This is very effective and at the center of our legal marketing strategy.

However, the journey to the goal can yield as great of a return as the actual achieved goal itself. There is no such thing as one absolute item that must be on a site to get it properly optimized; search engine optimization is made up of many services.

Optimizing the content of a website is at the very beginning of the list and must be done correctly for other techniques to be effective. However, onsite optimization is not the focus of this week’s piece.

Links. Websites linking to your law firm’s website are what makes or breaks your SEO strategy. In getting third party links to your site, we discover great ways to get traffic, get phone calls, and get new cases long before your website is on the first page of Google search results.

News. Cheesy gimmicks, partisan reporting, and bloggers doing more investigative journalism than major news outlets have caused many news organizations to lose viewers. While the major news organizations are losing viewers, America’s thirst for news is growing unquenchable. Many people have replaced the daily paper with multiple visits to Google News throughout the day, and that is where you need to be.

Getting news about your firm to potential clients will reach your audience directly through the only news medium that is rapidly gaining larger audiences: the Internet. If your firm is involved in a major case, sending a news release to reporters is not going to get the exposure you need. Sending that release through the internet is going to allow your firm to:

1) Control your message. News releases can go out directly to potential clients without going through an editorial process at a paper. This means, you control 100% of what is said about your firm.

2) Reach a targeted audience. A local newspaper article about a change in your state’s legislation regarding family law, civil rights, bankruptcy, immigration, corporate law, new regulations, etc., may get your law firm’s name out to the paper’s subscribers, but it won’t get targeted to the potential clients. Using keyphrase and targeted distribution outlets, a new release can accomplish a greater return and open your message up to a wider audience.

3) Get Links. When your news release goes out online, it will be picked up by a variety of websites who are related to the release. It may get published on blogs, aggregate news sources, and other websites. Most of these sources will keep your news release in its original form which means the links in your release will be syndicated along with the news article.

Search engine optimization is more than a high ranking, it’s about reaching your audience through all the mediums possible on the internet. Effective content sent out through targeted channels equals new cases.

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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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

The way to improve this is to put a short contact form on every page. Regardless of the page the visitor lands on first on your site, they have immediate access to an easy way to contact you via a short contact form. Otherwise, they may just pass your “contact us” button, read some information then leave without contacting your firm.

Adding a short contact form to every page of your website is probably one of the easiest ways to improve conversion on your attorney website.

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

In the last couple of months, we have seen a lot of fluctuation in rankings which is a pretty good sign that the upgrade is well underway. But one of things we are also seeing is that Google is looking for a new third element, social networks.

It appears that the world’s largest search engine is paying attention to how often a website is linking with popular social networks as a way to gage popularity. Some experts even speculate that they monitor Tweets and Re-Tweets.

The clear message to take from this is that you need a social networking strategy to compete online. It’s that simple. If you are currently working with a marketing company that is not implementing a social network strategy then it’s time to change quickly to catch up with the new Google search.

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

To fully utilize Twitter, you must first get familiar with a URL shortener. You will need this to stay within Twitters 140 character limit. Bit.ly is one of easiest to use and it’s free. Just go to http://bit.ly/ and paste your long URL in the box. It generates a new one that looks like this, http://bit.ly/9CaPNn and takes up less space in your tweet.

Write a blog entry on your website’s blog or social network blog. For example, a family law attorney can write a blog entry outlining some common hurdles in the adoption process. Copy the URL of the published blog entry, go to Bit.ly, and paste it in the long box at the top of the home page. Then, go to Twitter.com and log in to your account. Write a tweet that goes something like this “Common hurdles and delays to expect when adopting – (paste bit.ly shortened url).”

This gives a teaser and a link to your blog post thus driving traffic.

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

Due to hectic schedules, most lawyers do not have the time to fully handle their online marketing efforts, but we have a few tips and tools that can easily be squeezed into a heavy schedule.

Social Networking

Social networks are quickly becoming the backbone of search engine optimization. It’s theorized that search engines are looking at links being posted through social networks to gage popularity. But aside from that, social networks have an audience. If you post content on a blog on your website (which should be done) you will be reaching out to the audience of people who find it on Google blog search or are already visiting your page.

However, running a blog on a social network immediately gives you an audience. Currently, the SEOLawFirm.com Law Firm Network is being tested by a few firms and we invite you to sign up and try it out. The blog will be set up for you at sign-up. Like other social networks, we have our blog feeds syndicated to different blog directories and search engines so that members of our community get immediate traffic to their Law Firm Network blog.

This attorney centered network is also helpful for firms that market themselves to other firms; those that practice in similar areas of law but in states in which you are unable to work. Connecting with these attorneys can open up a referral network 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

When you go to a store, most major retail outlets have sensors at the doorway. You probably overlook them, but they are certainly watching you. Every time someone walks in and out, a system tracks the activity to see how popular the branch is. Consultants are often brought in to monitor shopping habits from the cameras in the ceiling to figure out new ways to attract shoppers to high profit items.

Fortunately, getting statistics about your website is a little easier but certainly no less valuable. What keywords or referring sites are getting people to come to your website? When they get there, are they staying? Where do they go? Your blog? Your ‘about’ page? How long do they stay? What percentage is filling out your contact form and of that percentage, which traffic source is driving your highest conversion?

Of course you probably don’t know this off the top of your head, but do you at least know how to get your website’s statistics?

Knowing what is happening on your law firm’s website is extremely important. Without statistics, you are flying blindly up (or down) the search engine optimization ladder.

A good place to start is with Google Analytics. If you already have a Gmail account, Adwords account, or other Google Account, you can point your browser to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign up. Your webmaster will have to place code in the footer of your site on every page you want to track.

While other statistics applications and services are available that compete with Google Analytics, we have found that Google Analytics is widely supported and fairly accurate when compared to server logs.

Statistics play such an important role in the success of our law firm marketing projects that last year, SEOLawFirm.com’s parent company bought all of their SEO staff members the Apple iPod Touch and tied in the Analytics data for every client that member manages. We also believe that clients should have access to their data and know how to access and read it.

If you currently do not use a statistics package, integrate Google Analytics into your website and see what you have been missing.

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

In our Tampa office, we have a constant arm wrestling tournament between the designers and the search engine optimization and writing team. The designers want clean designs, a few crisp images, and “Apple like” simplicity. The search engine optimization group is also a big fan of simplicity, but not so much with images; they want text.

The result is always a clean design with adequate room for plain text to be optimized, though text placement is something done by the designers with an almost querulous tone. Ultimately both sides are pleased and the client is always happy with the end product.

Does it have to be a battle between the designers and word warriors? Not really because people and search engines both want to see the same thing. When you are searching for something, you want easy-to-read text on a white background. You want a navigation menu that is direct and to the point. You also don’t want to interpret clever slogans.

Clever slogans? That’s our next stop on the simplicity highway.

We were talking to a semi-competitor that specializes in imagination. They’re a consulting group that helps companies come up with completely out-of-the-box methods of getting the word out regarding their products and services. They could not figure out why they were getting so much traffic, yet very few contact requests.

When a visitor would land on their well-designed website, they would see a lot of information, examples, and everything was pretty much in line with web layout and design standards. However, rather than having an intuitive button that said, “Get a Quote” or “Contact Us,” they had a button that read “Imagine!”

Clearly, people going to their website were not in the mood to learn somebody’s corporate culture lingo, so visitors interested in getting a quote were even less interested in using their imagination.

The moral of this week’s article is that simplicity can work for everybody. Branding can play nicely with design. Designers and search engine optimization specialists can work together to present SEO friendly text in the center of a crisp website, and the end user can clearly navigate the website to discover the exact information for which they are looking.

That translates into a professional image for your law firm and, most importantly, new cases on your desk.

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