5 Attorney Website Design SEO Mistakes

1. Targeting the Wrong Keywords - When you write your website content, remember how people search. Legalese is the language of lawyers, not of the people who need them. No one gets online and searches “plaintiff’s claim for damages against a tortfeasor”. “Car accident injury attorney” is probably a more realistic search string, and that is what you should concentrate on including in your web content.

2. Ignoring Title Tags - Title tags are the titles that appear at the top of an internet browser. Most attorneys just label their titles “Home” or “About Us” or “Contact Us” or just leave them empty. Title tags (believe it or not) are one of the most important parts of your search engine optimization. Title tags on legal websites should include some of your most important keywords. For example – Change “Home” to “Car Accident Attorney Sommer Stephens Luther’s Homepage” and “About” to “About Car Accident Attorney Sommer Stephens Luther”. Getting the hang of it? Title tags should be no more than 11 words. They should be grammatically correct. They should not say “Car accident attorney lawyer injury auto sue”.

3. Having a Flash Website without HTML – Websites designed in Flash are nice….and some Flash applications are really neat BUT they are not really that great for attorneys hoping to use their legal websites to attract new clients. Search engines catalog websites based on their content…..and that content is discovered and collected through the text that appears in a websites HTML. If a legal website is designed in Flash, with very little HTML available to search engines, it is not going to be ranked very high in search returns. This is because search engines just don’t have a very good idea of what is contained in a Flash website. If you are using Flash, make sure it is not the bulk of your design. Include as much HTML as possible…..and make sure that HTML is appropriately filled with relevant keywords and search strings.

4. JavaScript Menus – Using JavaScript for navigation is fine as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript. You need to build your web pages accordingly. If you have JavaScript menus make sure you also have html links within the body of your index.html text AND a HTML and XML sitemap.

5. Lack of Dynamic Content – “Dynamic” means changing. Search engines rate your website based on its relevance. If it is not being updated, chances are it is not relevant. Have there been no changes in the law over the last 5 years? Are you practicing in any new areas? One way to keep content dynamic and fresh is to attach a law blog (now referred to as a blawg) to your website. Update the blawg once or twice a month. Do this by posting information about a case you recently settled or comment on a news story related to the areas of your practice.

Law Father is a leader and innovator in Attorney Website Design. Law Father uses the latest and most complete search engine optimization techniques to improve the search return rankings of attorney websites. Visit Law Father online at http://www.lawfather.net, email us at info@lawfather.net or call (800) 325-7715.

Metadata and Metatags got you Down? Don’t Worry About it!

If a SEO salesperson spends a lot of time telling you about the importance of metadata nowadays, he/she is probably not spending a lot of time learning about the new and quickly evolving SEO tools. The only thing that should have careful attention paid to in the metadata is the title tag and the page description. Search engines today rely more on content than metadata and give very little relevance to it anymore. This is because spammers started to cram irrelevant metadata and metatag keywords into their web pages in hopes of driving more traffic to them. Search engines now crawl a lot faster than they used to, which means your updated content is usually re-indexed pretty quickly. Through my own tests I have seen updated content appear within 2 days with no additional SEO or site submissions.

Law Father is a leader and innovator in Attorney Website Design. Law Father uses the latest and most complete search engine optimization techniques to improve the search return rankings of attorney websites. Visit Law Father online at http://www.lawfather.net, email us at info@lawfather.net or call (800) 325-7715.

Headings with Pictures instead of Text – Remember the Alt Tags

Picture graphics of html text headings can make a website look really nice, especially if you are dead set on a font that does not work well in html. Just remember that search engines can’t read the content of your pictures. If images are the only way you want to go, remember to include a “alt tag”. An alt tag is a tag attached to an image that tells the search engine what your image is and why it should be cataloged. For example, if you have a picture of an attorney, and you are a divorce attorney, make an alt tag that says “Divorce Attorney Dave Smith”. This alt tag now contains a keyword relevant to your site that the search engine can index, giving more weight to the term “divorce attorney”. But just keep in mind that whenever possible, and appropriate, use your H1, H2, H3, etc heading tags for text headings.

Law Father is a leader and innovator in Attorney Website Design. Law Father uses the latest and most complete search engine optimization techniques to improve the search return rankings of attorney websites. Visit Law Father online at http://www.lawfather.net, email us at info@lawfather.net or call (800) 325-7715.

The www.myname.com Problem

A keyword relevant URL should be an important part of your legal website marketing strategy. Many law firms register their names when registering a URL. They end up with www.RossPearsonLaw.com or www.TomLutherLaw.com. Your URL should contain keywords that are descriptive to your business, not your name. People looking for a tax attorney do not type “Tom Luther” in to a Google search bar. They would type “Denver Tax Attorney” (or wherever they may be). When you register your first domain name (or a new one), search out a domain that is available that contains your keywords. If you can’t find the exact URL you are looking for, like www.denvertaxattorney.com, try www.denvertaxattorney.net or www.denver-tax-attorney.com. Google does not recognize dashes or underscores as anything other than a space. Once you have that keyword rich domain name registered, you can choose a domain name for your business cards and stationary, such as www.RossPearsonLaw.com. That name domain can be forwarded to your website for people who already know who you are. So when people search Google for “Denver tax attorney” they find your tax attorney URL, and people who already know you can use a URL that reflects your firm’s name.

Law Father is a leader and innovator in Attorney Website Design. Law Father uses the latest and most complete search engine optimization techniques to improve the search return rankings of attorney websites. Visit Law Father online at http://www.lawfather.net, email us at info@lawfather.net or call (800) 325-7715.

Beware of Paying for Backlinks….

Backlinks are any hyperlinks coming from outside websites into your website. Search engines put heavy ranking weight on backlinks. This is because it is assumed that if a lot of other websites are linking to yours, then your content must be very important. What has happened is that “link brokers” (those companies who sell links) have made arrangements with website owners to lease space on those websites strictly for inserting backlinks to their clients. This is called link spamming. There are a lot of politics and emotions surrounding what link broker’s call good marketing and what search engines call spam. Link brokers insist that search engines such as Google should not be able to dictate what kind of advertising space online marketers can buy. Google insists that this practice does not allow for the natural pagerank of a website based on the importance of its content. Both sides have some interesting arguments, but for now I side with Google. For Google to maintain its search integrity, it has to make sure it gives search returns that are truly relevant to what you are looking for, and not more spam. I won’t speak for Google’s official stance, but the overall consensus is that if you are going to buy backlinks, buy them on sites that are relevant to your topic, such as topics related to law. I have seen attorney purchased backlinks on websites related to baseball and SAT prep advice. Our strategy is to grow your backlinks organically by providing valuable information about your law firm on many websites related to your practice, such as blogs and open forums.

Law Father is a leader and innovator in Attorney Website Design. Law Father uses the latest and most complete search engine optimization techniques to improve the search return rankings of attorney websites. Visit Law Father online at http://www.lawfather.net, email us at info@lawfather.net or call (800) 325-7715.

Identify the Keywords for your Attorney Website Design

Identify your keywords by deciding what your law firm’s strengths really are. Use the 90/10 rule. Most law firms take up about 90 percent of their webpage space talking about practice areas they only work in 10 percent of the time. If you are a personal injury attorney who works mostly on car accident cases, get rid of that information related to aviation accidents and Vioxx! Develop content about car accidents. Come up with new and interesting angles and information. Make your website THE resource for people who have been injured in an auto accident. Once you understand what your firm’s real focus is you can incorporate all of your true expertise into your website. To be successful you have to become that website people are looking for when they need an attorney with your expertise.

Law Father is a leader and innovator in Attorney Website Design. Law Father uses the latest and most complete search engine optimization techniques to improve the search return rankings of attorney websites. Visit Law Father online at http://www.lawfather.net, email us at info@lawfather.net or call (800) 325-7715.