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Basic SEO – search engine optimization – for your law blog

December 12, 2010

Law blogs, by their very nature, do well in search. But there are a few things all law bloggers ought to work on for search engine optimization. Title tags, incoming links, and listening to what clients and prospective clients are asking.

Title tags define how your content is indexed on Google. Think of Google as one giant card catalogue (I’m showing my age). Each item published (blog post, website bio, newspaper article, whatever) is stored on Google’s servers. In order for the content to be found, the content needs to be indexed.

Content is indexed per the title tag. The text in the title tag is the blue text you see in bold and underlined when you do a search on Google. Do a search for Seth Godin and you’ll the see the number one result reads ‘Seth Godin.’ That’s the title tag on Seth’s website.

Google does not decide how your content is indexed nor does Google decide what the titles are on its search results pages. Law blog publishers decide this with the title tags they provide for each piece of their content.

In a blog, publishers control the title tags of each blog post, the main page of their blog, the category pages, and the tag archive pages. There may be a few additional pages if your blog contains additional pages about you, your services, and contact information.

Keep the title tags relatively short and to the point. The point being how you’d expect people to search for your content. Google is only going to display about 64 characters and making them long so as to include words people wouldn’t search for only dilutes the keywords or key phrases people would use in a search. Plus the title tag will run on beyond the 64 characters.

I often find title tags on the main page for law blogs can be improved by adding the words lawyer and attorney as well as the lawyer’s location.

Your blog post titles, which automatically create the title tags for blog post pages, should also be worked on. Keep them short. Focus on the keywords that describe what you wrote about. And, to the extent you can, use those keywords in the beginning of your post titles – think card catalogue.

Once content is indexed, Google wants to know which content is most important. There’s going to be other content with similar title tags, but the content that Google views as most important is going to be placed higher in search results.

Importance is determined by incoming links coming into your blog. Think of incoming links as votes. Some votes are more important than others, those are links from other pages on the Internet which have garnered a lot of relevant links itself. Relevant being similar subject and locale. The more votes, especially more important votes, the higher ranking of your blog and its posts.

Links are the currency of discussion on the Internet. Blogs, being a discussion among people blogging on the same subject are going to be full of links. It’s how we bloggers reference each other and each other’s content.

In order to get links, you’ve got to give links. Not in a contrived fashion, but by naturally linking to other people, their blogs and their content.

That way others can see you (we monitor via Google News and Google Blog Search mentions of the url of our blog and website, our blog name, and our name).

When others writing on similar topics see that you mentioned them and their content, they’ll begin to follow your blog. They’ll then link to you and your blog content from time.

Think of the Internet as a big conversation. Links are a reference to others in the conversation and what they said. This is why bloggers which engage news reporters and other blogs do so well in search.

Finally, listen to the questions your clients and prospective clients are asking. Write the questions down. For every one person who asks a question, there will be a hundred others with a similar question.

Rather than guessing what your audience may be searching for on Google, answer the questions you’re getting in a blog post. Then craft a brief title for your blog post that clearly describes the subject.

Most people, especially the more sophisticated, are not searching the terms every other lawyer and legal marketing professional are chasing.

Rather than searching for a Philadelphia non-compete lawyer, a dentist looking to open their own practice may be searching by how long a dentist can be prevented from competing with a prior employer. That’s called searching the long tail.

Of course there are things professionals are going to do and advise that will help you achieve better SEO. A Google sitemap, Geo tags, strategic link building, and advise on blogging & blog strategy would be among them.

No question that SEO professionals, whether doing SEO alone or offering it as part of a turnkey solution, offer value.

To dismiss the value of a SEO professional out of hand, as some people do, is akin to dismissing the value of a lawyer because you can form a corporation or write a will on your own. The key is finding someone you can trust.

Any lawyer concerned about SEO and who likes to tinker would benefit from reading Search Engine Optimization for Dummies by Peter Kent.

Good luck on your SEO. And know that if you’re a good law blogger writing on an area you’re passionate about in an effort to serve others you’re already half way there.

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