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

Today, more people are replacing their newspaper with online news sources and this means your law firm can more easily connect with its audience.

By drafting news releases to communicate with your target audience, your firm gets to write interesting stories that can spark interest in the people and businesses your firm wants to attract. You can use masked case examples and really engage with your audience.

The old days of being dependent on a journalist picking up your story and giving your firm a favorable tone in the final article are long gone. By writing news releases and using online media, you can engage with your target clientele and completely control your message.

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

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That is generally sound advice but as a lawyer, you are in a unique predicament. Through all the bickering, fear mongering, and partisan wiles, politics comes down to the formation and interpretation of your product… the law.

Over the years, we have monitored the performance of the blogs that our law firm marketing clients contribute – and what we found was a little surprising. There is value in political commentary. This was true from both sides of the aisle.

In traditionally left-leaning areas of the law (personal injury and immigration), we found that blog entries that took on a political undertone related to their respective area of the law had higher levels of syndication, more direct inbound links to the blog entries, and higher levels of sharing across social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg.

On the other side of the aisle, we looked at traditionally conservative areas of law (corporate, securities, and tax). Blog entries that spoke out for or against state and federal legislation (bills and laws) not only had greater amounts of sharing across social networks, more syndication, and more readership, law firms in conservative genres had more direct requests for republishing the politically charged article in newsletters, magazines, and journals.

Its safe to say, based on this review, that politics in your law firm’s blog is a great way to charge some interest in your firm’s website. However, you have to keep the focus on the legal aspects.

If you start getting venomous in your political writing and talk more against the individual politicians and not so much the legislation they back or oppose, you may isolate yourself from potential clients that do not fit in the stereotypical political box.

Just as attorneys in those practice areas may not fit the profile, conservative individuals often need personal injury representation and some liberal voters also own large corporations and get involved in periodic tax disputes, so you cannot assume your target clientele share in the comprehensive party beliefs. So keep the focus on what the politicians are doing, how it will affect the interests you represent, and throw in some of your own commentary. This will yield great interest in your firm through your law firm’s message.

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

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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.

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1) Descriptive titles – It all starts at the top. By clearly describing your law firm, region, and practice area in your website’s title tag, you are giving the search engines a clear description of your type of website. Before you copy and paste the same title tag on every page, keep in mind that every sub page on your website needs a unique descriptive title tag.

2) Blogs – Blogging is the most effective form of search engine marketing. By posting brief updates to your blog, you keep your law firm’s website fresh, relevant, and ever-growing. It also helps drive traffic to your law firm’s website by getting the blog feed listed in Google Blog Search and the ABA Journal’s Blawg Directory.

3) Design to Convert – What good is a high ranking if nobody is clicking or calling? A well designed website with conversion elements in place will help your law firm succeed. Placing a short contact form on every page will help increase the number of contacts you get from your visitors. The average lawyer website gets 1.8 pageviews per visitor. If you don’t have a contact form on the first page the visitor sees, your chances of conversion are drastically decreased.

4) Start Spreading the News – Utilizing news releases is the fastest way to get traffic to your website. In fact, with the right strategy in place, news releases can drive web traffic and clients to your firm long before your website is ranked on the first page of Google and other search engines.

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

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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.

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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.

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If you are paying a monthly service fee, shouldn’t you receive monthly services? The journey to the top of page one is not a matter of frequent attorney website tweaks or getting listed in a couple directories. You have to hit the Web aggressively and hard.

A monthly line of news releases, articles, blog entries, and links back to your site from social networks, social bookmarks, and syndicated news is how the major law firms compete on the Web. If you are waiting for a quarterly service provider to accomplish something new with your monthly fee, it may be time to explore new options.

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

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Google in particular loves content. In their webmaster guidelines, they write advice like, “Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.” In their “do not” list they say, “Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.”

In fact, they even broke off a section of their guidelines just dedicated to the dangers of “Little to No Original Content.”

So it’s pretty well established, Google wants your attorney website to have content, quality content, and lots of it.

As a law firm, you are able to fulfill their wishes by simply expounding upon your practice areas. If you are a family law attorney, don’t list your areas of practice as:

Divorce
Custody
Paternity
Alimony
Adoption
Prenuptial Agreements

Make a separate sub-page of your website for all of those practice areas that are related to divorce and family law. The same applies to all areas of practice. The more you can talk about your practice areas, the more pages your legal website will have, and subsequently the more secondary keyphrases for which your attorney website will rank highly.

By having a separate page for “child custody,” for example, you are more likely to rank on the first page for those terms “child custody.”

Do not make the mistake of having just one practice area page and itemizing your different areas. Write a separate page for each and make your law firm’s website a resource.

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

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SEOLawFirm.com offers full text syndication rights in their RSS library.

Legal marketing company, SEOLawFirm.com, will be modifying its publisher agreement making its content freely available. The change of license comes after a series of plagiarism incidents stemming from the growing popularity of the SEOLawFirm.com Legal Newsroom.

What started as a way to keep lawyers up-to-date and attract a wider audience to SEOLawFirm.com has turned into a popular legal news resource. In March of this year, Adviatech’s law firm marketing holding, SEOLawFirm.com, started the legal newsroom which publishes stories related to the U.S. Supreme Court, Politics, Technology cases, and other legal practice areas.

The newsroom has covered a variety of controversial topics from the U.S. Supreme Court’s take on gay marriage, a seller’s right to sue over negative feedback on eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY, rights of suspects to use profanity directed at law enforcement officers, the immigration bill in Arizona, and other stories based on current events.

SEOLawFirm.com’s newsroom stories are published in Google News and other popular news aggregates. Comments from readers have been very positive. Some readers who were inflamed over the topics have used the newsroom to further express their support or outrage over particular issues. When covering the Catholic Church lawsuits, one of the newsroom’s journalists wrote a moderate piece discussing both sides of the issue which earned him a response of, “You have betrayed your brothers and sisters in need, and for that, you are damned.”

A mix of controversy, good stories, and a fresh take on current events has given the newsroom a loyal reader base, frequent comments, many shared stories across Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, other networks, and a growing threat of plagiarism.

In May of this year, Adviatech aggressively pursued four blatant acts of plagiarism where newsroom articles and other content on SEOLawFirm.com were copied and published without source or author credit. One of those disputes ended in an abrupt acquisition of the at-fault company’s website for the sole purpose of shutting it down.

Adviatech’s SEOLawFirm.com Manage, Jason Bland, released a statement saying, “It is our goal and the ambitions of our writers to get these stories out to the masses. We like seeing syndication and our license permits it. However, linked credits and author credits must be present or the user is in violation of the license of which we grant.”

The company has decided to battle plagiarism by opening its RSS feeds to allow full text syndication. Webmasters and bloggers who wish to publish the newsroom and blog articles on SEOLawFirm.com can subscribe to individual categories and receive the full stories via SEOLawFirm.com’s RSS feed library.

The license also covers the company’s two popular podcasts, SEOLawFirm.com’s Legal News Podcast and the SEOLawFirm.com Law Firm Marketing Podcast which are available on iTunes.

Bland continued his statement by saying, “In order to maintain the integrity of our brand and the value of our news resource, we have to protect our content and rights. We want people who enjoy the content to be able to syndicate it and by opening our RSS license, we can now do that by insuring that credits and author references are present.”

To subscribe to SEOLawFirm.com’s content, visit http://www.seolawfirm.com/subscribe/.

Also published in:

http://www.kazor.com/news/seolawfirmcom-licenses-free-legal-content/

http://www.onlineprnews.com/news/40638-1276272089-seolawfirmcom-gives-free-license-to-legal-content-and-news.html

http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com/pressrelease.cfm?PRID=42250

http://www.i-newswire.com/seolawfirm-com-gives-away-free/35661

http://www.topix.com/com/ebay/2010/06/free-legal-content-now-available-from-seolawfirm-com

http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/legal-news-and-law-firm-marketing-content-now-open-public-seolawfirmcom

For example, if you are a business attorney in Colorado, a press release sent to the local media discussing how the right contract can avoid future litigation would probably not get picked up. However, an online news release titled, “Attorney John Smith Talks About How Contracts Help Corporations Avoid Litigation,” would reach your direct audience.

While many law firm marketing companies stick to traditional search engine optimization tactics, we often have to explain in detail how news releases are effective. During this process, attorneys often are concerned that what they do is not newsworthy.

Whether you think so or not, your law firm is newsworthy. What you do, who your clients are – all of that is important. A news release about something you’re doing, a case you are involved with (if you can discuss it publicly) or even something that is just good advice, can be spun into a news article that gets distributed in Google News and other outlets that will drive targeted traffic to your attorney website.

We have seen traffic increase for our clients time and time again by making their law firms newsworthy online. It will work for your firm as well.

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

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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.

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Of course when compiling a database of a quarter of a million listings, some people will slip through the cracks; this is why you should locate your listing and claim it for free to make sure we are displaying the most accurate contact information for you and your firm. You can do this at the Free Listing Claim page. No payments or billing information is required to claim a listing.

If you do not find a listing for you or your firm, you may create one free of charge.

The directory is still fairly new but already over 10,000 people seeking attorneys visit the SEOLawFirm.com directory each month. Providing the most accurate contact information helps improve the quality of our directory and helps send new clients to your firm.

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

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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.

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Here at Adviatech’s SEOLawFirm.com, we love finding new ways to improve the way lawyers market themselves online. While your search engine ranking is important, massive traffic can come from other sources. It is this focus that brings us to one of our additions… first, we want to tell you how we tested it.

In February, SEOLawFirm.com launched a new look, a new lawyer directory, a new social network, and the most controversial, a newsroom.

We embraced the journalistic backgrounds of four of our staff members and set them free to produce legal news articles based on current events under the watchful eye of our editor. We even granted license to (in a professional manner) slant the articles based on their perspective even if we as a company disagreed with their ideals and politics. After all, news is about the reader. We also made a commitment not to censor legitimate comments even if they disagreed with the writer.

Shortly after launching the newsroom, we were accepted by Google News as a contributor. To date, our news articles have been linked on The Huffington Post, syndicated to Current.com, and picked up by a long list of smaller online publications.

One of our news articles was read 1,500 times in 9 hours. It was syndicated, commented on, and generated a lot of traffic to the SEOLawFirm.com Newsroom.

Aside from our usual readership and being Google News contributors, a lot of traffic comes from social bookmarks. We have included bookmark icons at the top of all of our news articles and blog entries. This allows readers to plug our content on Digg, Google Buzz, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and other networks located at the bottom of our blog entries.

With these buttons on your law firm’s blog entry, you open your blog to the readers that are on these various networks. One newsroom article was shared by a reader on their Facebook profile. That link has since been shared 375 times in the Facebook network.

That is why we are integrating these buttons on all of our existing client websites and will include them on all future client (that’s you) websites.

These five icons may very well be the tunnel that sends valuable visitors to your law firm’s website.

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.

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Most lawyers practice multiple areas of law. A family law attorney may also provide bankruptcy representation and occasionally help accident and injury victims. A corporate lawyer may also take high profile personal bankruptcy cases and so on.

When putting together your online law firm marketing strategy, you should think about the types of cases you really want to pursue. Do you want to increase your bankruptcy business or tap into more accident and personal injury cases?

If you want to build up a particular practice area, your website will convert better if you narrow your primary focus on one or two of those practice areas you want to improve.

Of course you can still list your other practice areas on your website and provide valuable content around those areas, but keep your home page and link building efforts focused on the primary practice areas.

Optimizing for the right practice area is one aspect of your legal marketing that is not about algorithms or technical implementation. Instead, it is centered around how you would like to see your law firm grow.

From that point, your search engine optimization specialists are responsible for discovering the most popular keyphrases for your primary practice areas.

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

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