Social media more powerful than SEO for drawing traffic to law blog?

I'm coming to believe that social media performance is more important in drawing traffic to your law blog than any search engine optimization (SEO) you may do. Traffic drawn via social media is also better traffic for you.

Two reasons. One, you draw more traffic to your law blog through the effective use of social media than SEO. Two, traffic drawn to your blog through social media is more preferrable.

I've been blogging less than the mad 2 or 3 posts I've done in the past. However, traffic to my blog for this month is the highest ever.

Why? Because of social media. By social media I mean people passing on to others what I say via a blog post or something I say on Twitter. Plus I've been more active on Twitter.

When I tweet about a blog post of mine, I share word of the post on Twitter. People following me on Twitter, retweet word of my blog post. Through this network I wouldn't be surprised if within an hour of my tweeting about a blog post 25,000 or 30,000 people receive word of my post through Twitter. That's a powerful network.

Without even linking to a blog post of mine, my using Twitter in general draws traffic to my blog. I'm a notorious sharer of news via Twitter. I'll share links to news and blog posts offering my brief commentary. I'll retweet what someone I'm following may have tweeted - so long as it's of interest to my followers. I'll also offer brief commentary without a link or a retweet on various subjects of interest to my followers.

In each case, whether it be a follower of mine on Twitter or a follower of someone who has retweeted what I've said, people look at my Twitter profile. That profile includes a link to my blog. And a lot of people click on that link to find out more about me.

Traffic to a law blog drawn via social media brings higher quality traffic than SEO. Good lawyers get their best work via word of mouth and people doing research on the lawyer. Doesn't matter whether the word of mouth is generated or the research is done offline or online.

Social media traffic drawn to your blog comes because someone else, more likely than not a thought leader in your field, blogged about what you've blogged about or retweeted about something you said or shared on Twitter.

Someone else sharing what you've said is a tacit endorsement of you as an authority. Why else would someone share what you've said with their friends and followers unless they thought enough about you or what you said? People are drawn to look up more about you when you have received a tacit endorsement. Those people end up at your blog.

Take it a step further and realize that these people who see your content via social media and then look you up are more apt to have a keen interest in what you're saying, what you do or about you personally. They're also a tad more advanced than someone, who previously went to the yellow pages, who goes to the Internet and keys in New York City bankruptcy lawyer. You want that kind of traffic to your blog.

Speaking in Toronto yesterday to law firm management professionals with medium and large law firms, I felt very comfortable telling them that social media through blogging was more important than any sort of search engine optimization of their law firms' websites or blogs.

Sure, you want your blog and website optimized by having the right title tags. You also want to have incoming links to your blog and website from other relevant sites. Social media and blogging will get you all the links you need.

But at the end of the day, I just wonder if social media, which includes effective blogging, is not a more powerful way to draw traffic to your blog than search engine optimization?

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Lawyer SEO junkies like crack cocaine addicts

LexBlog's VP of Client Development, Kevin McKeown, asked me this morning how I bring lawyers down from their SEO fixation. Thought I'd share with you what I shot to McKeown.

Lawyers addicted to SEO are like crack cocaine addicts who need to get their fix. Don't care how, from whom, or at what price. Just give my fix. As a result they get hooked up with crack cocaine dealers dressed up as SEO consultants - not a good crowd.

Effective blogging on a legal niche propels a lawyer to the top of the Google search results. And not just on what they do and their location, ie, Palm Springs Estate Planning Lawyer, but also for terms on which thousands of people search, ie, living will, estate tax etc. No question, effective blogging gets you found on Google.

But at the end of the day, the search engines are one big yellow pages directory. If you advertised heavily in the yellow pages and your good clients came primarily from the yellow pages, by all means, pour all your marketing and business development time and money into search results. Getting to the top of Google results is like having the first 2 full page spread in the yellow pages.

But if your best clients came by word of mouth, as opposed to the yellow pages, Google is not the be all and end all. You need an effective online presence so that your prospective clients and those who influence them see you as a reliable and trusted authority in your niche. A link from the top of the search results to a web page proclaiming your accolades is not going to do it.

I'm speaking from experience. I was a plaintiff's trial lawyer for 17 years. We spent heavily on advertising. TV, radio, yellow pages. You name it, we did it. But at the end of the year, the largest fees were generated on cases we received by word of mouth.

When I started answering injury law related questions on AOL's message boards in 1996, there were no search engines. But injury victims and their family members saw what I was doing and spread the word across the Internet. Thousands of people, including many from my state of Wisconsin, came to my website where I archived the questions and answers. Work and notoriety as a trusted authority followed - in spades.

Don't get me wrong. Google matters. And good blogging gets you to the top. But Google results is not the leading way the best lawyers get their best clients.

  • The best lawyers get their best work by word of mouth. Period.
  • Word of mouth is generated by being recognized as a reliable and trusted authority in one's practice area. Offline that takes a decade or more for a good lawyer. With effective blogging, a good lawyer can do it in a year or two.
  • Forgo this and you're acknowledging that you'll be on the never ending rat race chasing the top results on search engines, which is like chasing the largest ad in the yellow pages.
  • Better clients come from being an authority and by word of mouth, not from search engines. Good clients are evaluating a lawyers skill, acumen, and passion as well as who is citing that lawyer on line (other bloggers & reporters).
  • An effective Internet presence through effective blogging and the innovative use of social media is achieved by very few lawyers. 99% of lawyers don't know how to do it or are too lazy to learn how. That's far less competition for you. Chasing SEO is something everyone of your competitors is doing.

Better clients. Less competition. Less Cost. Long lasting. What's not to like?

Back to weaning lawyers off their fix. ;)

Blawg bleakness : 'Blog' generates 25 times more Google searches than 'Blawg'

Many lawyers seem hell bent on calling their 'legal blog' or 'law blog' a 'blawg.'

That's okay if your blog is being used as an academic experience, but not if your blog is being used to generate business, part of which is generated through search engines.

I just did a quick check of blog versus blawg in the number of Google searches for the month of August. 12,285 searches for 'blog'. 474 for 'blawg.' If you care about click through rates on sponsored links on those terms, it's also bleak for 'blawg.' Blog gets a 1.6% click through rate. 'Blawg' does a .21%.

What does this tell us? Well, admittedly more people search for the term 'blog' than 'blawg' by a 25 to 1 margin. Sure there are other types of blogs than law blogs so that number is going to be skewed higher. And more people find law blogs by just searching for a lawyer or doing research on a relevant subject than when searching for 'blog' or 'blawg.'

But these findings ought to concern any lawyer thinking about following the crowd that think it's cute to use legaleze to call their blog a 'blawg.' Do you really think the public knows what a 'blawg' is?

I know if people ask what your 'blawg' is, you can just tell them. Confusion cleared up in a second. You can use the phrase 'pro tempre' too. Just tell folks who ask it means temporary. Confusion cleared up in a second.

This great 'blawg debate' brings out the best in all of us. It's kind like arguing over religion. But I'll not be advising lawyers anytime soon to call their blog a 'blawg.'

FindLaw Linkgate : Former FindLaw sales rep blows whistle

FindLaw selling links SEOThings are getting interesting in what's best called the 'FindLaw selling links scandal' or Linkgate that's been widely discussed across the net - in legal and SEO blog posts, comments on blogs, on Twitter and now reported in the the Wall Street Journal.

FindLaw's been reportedly selling a service to lawyers whereby FindLaw gets high search engine results for the law firms. FindLaw calls this product SEM (Search Engine Marketing) Advantage.

The problem is that a key element to FindLaw's methods for getting high search engine results for the firms is the placing of links around FindLaw property websites, not links for users to click on, but links in tiny text below footers on webpages. They're called 'spam links' and in violation of Google's guidelines.

FindLaw got caught by Google a couple weeks ago for allegedly selling links. FindLaw started changing the 'spam links' so that the links no longer provided 'Google Juice' to the lawyers' websites. Doesn't appear FindLaw has told the lawyers who paid upwards of $2,500 per month for this SEM Advantage product that FindLaw got caught by Google nor that FindLaw took away a significant part of the lawyers' 'Google Juice.'

FindLaw will not respond to bloggers but did respond to the Wall Street Journal saying 'We don't not sell links to law firms.' I am also informed from a reliable source that talking points given to FindLaw employees in order to respond to blogged reports of FindLaw misconduct includes the same 'We don't not sell links to law firms.'

FindLaw did say they may have sold links to corporations, but never law firms. And that the sale of such links has stopped and the money has been refunded to those corporations.

Now we have an informed source known to be a former FindLaw Sales Representative blowing the whistle on FindLaw's misconduct. What started as simply misconduct is appearing to me to be every bit a coverup - Linkgate.

Here's a comment from the source on a leading SEO blog.

FindLaw SEO selling links

And another comment on the same blog from the same source.

FindLaw selling links for SEO

And yet another comment from the same source.

FindLaw selling links SEO

Readers, please keep that information on Linkgate coming. If need be, set up an alias email address at GMail to send me information and documents. I'll do my best to share what I can.

Related posts:

FindLaw selling links update : Dow Jones reporting FindLaw misconduct and lawyers questioning what FindLaw sold them

FindLaw selling links SEOIn comments on this blog and throughout the blogosphere FindLaw cronies have been denying misconduct in the FindLaw selling links debacle. When the cronies realize they're on the short end of the argument, they just fall back on 'you're just bloggers, you spread rumors, this is why few bloggers are trusted, there's no proof...'

Well the mud just got a little deeper for FindLaw today. Dow Jones' Nat Worden reported this afternoon that FindLaw has been slapped by Google for shady SEO tactics and that lawyers are now questioning the SEO marketing product FindLaw sold them.

Worden explained that FindLaw came up with a 'SEM Advantage' product which cost some lawyers $2,000 per month.

Billed as a "high-octane" way to double or even triple traffic on his site, Newell [FindLaw lawyer customer] and others like him understood FindLaw's SEM Advantage product to be a package of well-placed links designed to lift a Web site's standing in a Google search. But now they're wondering if they're still getting their money's worth.

Worden reports FindLaw may have pulled the wool out from under these lawyers.

Late last month, FindLaw quietly made changes to a link on one of its Web sites leading to Newell's site, which he had received as part of SEM Advantage. It also changed at least 99 other links to the Web sites of law-firm clients after it ran afoul of Google Inc. (GOOG) in the search giant's ongoing efforts to crack down on a practice known as selling "link juice," or Web links designed to boost a Web site's page rankings in a search engine. With the link juice trade springing up as a cottage industry across the entire spectrum of online marketing, Google views it as threatening the quality of its search engine, an asset that has made Google a dominant force in media.

Read on in Worden's article and you'll see that FindLaw made the changes adversely effecting lawyers like Newell because FindLaw had been caught by Google for selling links in violation of Google's guidelines. Something in my opinion, FindLaw knew or should have known it was going to get caught doing.

Worden concludes with what is most alarming, and perhaps why FindLaw is not owning up to its misconduct.

The controversy comes at a difficult time for FindLaw's parent company, Thomson-Reuters, which publishes a news service that competes directly with Dow Jones Newswires and is delivered on the same terminals. Its stock price is down about 20% over the last year amid concerns that the U.S. financial crisis will quash growth in its financial markets division. Investors are counting on its professional division to pick up the slack, and its legal services business, for which Findlaw is a small but important growth engine, made up 66% of that division's revenue in the first half.

Imagine if FindLaw confessed to duping lawyers for millions of dollars (not saying they did, just looks to me like they did). Imagine having to refund millions of dollars. Imagine having to refund these monies after paying millions of dollars in sales commissions on the sale of this 'high-octane SEM Advantage Product.' Imagine how investors would view Thomson Reuter's stock then.

Scary stuff for FindLaw and their parent Thomson Reuters. Scary stuff for lawyers relying on FindLaw going forward.

Related posts:

FindLaw SEO misconduct : Suggested course of conduct

FindLaw SEOThere's little question in my mind that FindLaw's selling links to law firms in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines was a big mistake.

Not only may FindLaw be liable to law firms for the millions of dollars paid by law firms to FindLaw for these spam links, but FindLaw and its parent company, Thomson Reuters, has damaged its reputation and brand in the eyes of lawyers and the search community, including Google, for years to come.

Dad always said there's a right way and a wrong way to handle everything. FindLaw needs to do the right thing and to do it now.

Here's the right thing to do:

  1. Acknowledge immediately to your lawyer customers who bought the spam links and the legal community as a whole that 'FindLaw, a Thomson Reuters business,' acted wrongly and in violation of Google's webmaster rules.
  2. Apologize immediately to the law firms and the legal community for FindLaw's course of conduct.
  3. Announce immediately that FindLaw will refund within 30 days all the money paid by the law firms for these links.
  4. Perform an immediate accounting of all monies paid for the links by the respective law firms. (Appears to be in the hundreds, possibly thousands of law firms and for all I know could be $3 to $5 million).
  5. Report the results of the accounting publicly.
  6. Hold the FindLaw people who authorized the sale of links, who had to know it was improper, personally responsible. That includes senior management who very likely knew.
  7. Establish an in-house ethics review committee and ethical standards protocol to prevent future improper conduct.

Tuesday will be the 7th day since the news of FindLaw's selling links was reported on the net as well as 7 days from when Google's Matt Cutts became aware of the violation. And at least the 4th day since FindLaw was penalized by having its website PageRank dropped from a 7 to a 5.

FindLaw has chosen not to respond - to the public, to its customers, or to bloggers. This is rather surprising in these days of corporate damage control and where word spreads like wildfire on the net.

I worked as a VP of Business Development for LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell - lawyers.com, FindLaw's largest competitor, following the acquisition of my prior company. I may never have agreed with everything Martindale did, and God knows I am a vocal critic of Martindale here, but Martindale always looked at itself as having a reputation to uphold because of its history and its role in the legal community as a whole.

I can't believe Martindale senior management would have ever allowed this sort of thing, no matter the pressure for incremental revenue. But if Martindale did get itself in trouble, I have to believe it would have held itself accountable to its lawyer customers and the legal profession.

FindLaw needs to act accordingly if it wants to seriously compete with Martindale and lawyers.com, reduce the damage to the Thomson Reuters FindLaw name, and to attempt to reestablish itself as a respected member of our legal community.

The legal community looks forward to FindLaw's response in the next day or two.

Update: Based on an inquiry from a sales rep I want to make myself clear. In no way did I mean to imply that Martindale ever sold spam links - Martindale, to my knowledge, has not ever sold links like FindLaw did. My point was that the Martindale senior management I knew while serving as a VP of Martindale would never have even thought of doing something like FindLaw did.

Related posts:

Growing use of Internet search engines represents golden opportunity for law blogs

Per survey results released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project earlier this month, American's use of search engines continues to increase.

The percentage of internet users who use search engines on a typical day has been steadily rising from about one-third of all users in 2002, to a new high of just under one-half (49%). With this increase, the number of those using a search engine on a typical day is pulling ever closer to the 60% of internet users who use email, arguably the internet's all-time killer app, on a typical day.

One reason for the increase in search use is the quality of information available on topic specific sites. People can find a site-specific search engine on "just about every content-rich website that is worth its salt."

With a growing mass of web content from blogs, news sites, image and video archives, personal websites, and more, internet users have an option to turn not only to the major search engines, but also to search engines on individual sites, as vehicles to reach the information they are looking for.

Can you say niche law blog with a clearly displayed search feature retrieving highly relevant searches in a hundredth of a second?

Perhaps of interest to law firms is the demographic makeup of those using Internet search.

  • More likely to be socially upscale
  • At least some college education
  • Incomes over $50,000 per year
  • More likely to be internet users with at least six years of online experience
  • Younger internet users are more likely than older users to search

Also of interest is how search use compares to other Internet daily activities.

pew study internet use

Note the increasing use of the net for news (39%) and social networking (13%). Both represent opportunities for savvy lawyer PR/marketing and networking through news syndication (blogs, Twitter) and social networking (LinkedIn, Martindale's Legal Connection, Legal OnRamp etc).

Click here for a copy of the study. (pdf)

Google adds search tool to measure searches on particular phrases

Google InsightsAlways happy to share the fruits of their inside work, Google has launched a real helpful tool for focusing your SEO and Web copy efforts. It's called Google Insights for Search.

Per Google, here's how it works.

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you've entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.
.....
On the results page, you'll also see a list of the top searches, top rising searches, and a world heat map graphically displaying the search volume index with regions, subregions, and cities.

Google goes on to explain how Insights will be helpful.

Whether you're an advertising agency, a small business owner, a multinational corporation, or an academic researcher, Insights for Search can help you gauge interest in pertinent search terms.
.....
Insights can help you determine which messages resonate best. For example, an automobile manufacturer may be unsure of whether it should highlight fuel efficiency, safety, or engine performance to market a new car model.

I ran a search on blogs to measure the increased interest over the last 4 years and here's what I got.

blogs
And a search on 'law blogs' gave me the regional interest in law blogs (LexBlog ought to open branch client development offices in DC and New York)
law blogs

as well as search terms and rising searches related to 'law blogs.'

law blogs search

It's not going to work for every keyword or phrase term as some search terms may not receive enough traffic for Insights to generate a report. But on my first look, and based on the comments from bloggers at Google Blog Search, Insights looks to be pretty cool.

FindLaw gaming Google, and possibly scamming lawyer customers?

FindLaw selling sponsored linksFindLaw appears to have been caught gaming Google by selling links to lawyer websites and, in the words of one blogger, possibly scamming their lawyer customers. And, as of Friday evening, it appears Google has already taken steps to penalize FindLaw.

Though there's not much coverage yet on the legal blogosphere, FindLaw's conduct has sure generated emails and phone calls to me. I suspect we'll see blog discussion in the coming days, along with FindLaw's response.

SEO basics to understand the severity of FindLaw conduct

One of the ways Google determines where a given site will rank for a specific search is the number and quality of inbound links to a website. The theory is that very interesting pages will be linked to by many other websites and blogs. A page or website with a lot of links therefore has a lot of authority (Google measures authority on a 1-10 logarithmic scale called PageRank).

Taking it one step further, a link from a high PageRank site (like CNN or FindLaw) is more valuable than a link from a low PageRank site. The more links to your website from sites with a high PageRank, especially from relevant subject sites (links from FindLaw to lawyer websites), the higher your website may appear in Google search results.

Now from Google's webmaster guidelines as to websites and SEO consultants selling links to website owners trying to achieve search rankings.

Google and most other search engines use links to determine reputation. A site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to it. Link-based analysis is an extremely useful way of measuring a site's value, and has greatly improved the quality of web search. Both the quantity and, more importantly, the quality of links count towards this rating.

However, some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results. (emphasis added)

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

  • Adding a rel="nofollow" attribute to the < a > tag
  • Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

Google works hard to ensure that it fully discounts links intended to manipulate search engine results, such excessive link exchanges and purchased links that pass PageRank. If you see a site that is buying or selling links that pass PageRank, let us know. We'll use your information to improve our algorithmic detection of such links.

It's text links, as opposed to advertising or directory listings, in website copy being sold to game higher search engine rankings that's the clearly outlawed conduct. Throughout the SEO community the practice is called link spam or search engine spam.

Google takes link spam serious enough to have a designated group to prevent such conduct and penalize those who participate in the proscribed conduct. Headed by Matt Cutts, the Search Quality group at Google and Cutts are widely known across the Internet and the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam.

What did FindLaw do?

The best summary is provided by Todd Friesen in a post entitled 'Shame Shame Shame Findlaw.' Friesen's been doing SEO since 1998 and is currently the Director of SEO for Range Online Media which performs work for such clients as Sharper Image, Nike, Neiman Marcus and Accor Hotels North America.

As Friesen outlines:

  • FindLaw sent unsolicited emails to lawyers and SEO experts selling a search engine marketing (SEM) program service.
  • FindLaw's service sells a law firm up to 3 hard coded links to be placed on editorially relevant pages of content for $12,000 ($1,000 per month for a 12 month contract).
  • FindLaw's service educates lawyers how to write the best text for their links (anchor text) so as to achieve higher search results for the lawyer's website.
  • A law firm is 'allowed to submit up to 5 articles to be placed' in relevant areas of the FindLaw, with 5 additional links.

FindLaw may contend that the links in any articles submitted are not link spam, but the article submission is optional and the selling of links otherwise appears to be a clear violation of Google's guidelines.

Friesen and the SEO experts who commented to his post sure think FindLaw is guilty of link spam. Friesen goes so far to say, 'It's been nice knowing you Findlaw.'

Matt Cutts acknowledged in a comment on Friesen's blog last Wednesday that he had been forwarded copies of FindLaw's emails selling links. Cutts also posted at Twitter the same day that he enjoyed that post of Friesen's.

Though I don't monitor the PageRank of websites, I'm told FindLaw had a PageRank of 7 as little as a week ago. By Friday night, FindLaw's PageRank was a 5, and remains so today.

A PageRank move is more than just a proportionate thing, it's geometric in nature ala the Richter scale for an earthquake. A drop of 2 on PageRank is a very significant move, something that significantly diminishes the value of links from FindLaw to lawyer websites.

One email I received highlights FindLaw's dilemma:

The most juicy insight that no one seems to have picked up on, however, comes from FindLaw's own letter: "As you may or may not know, FindLaw has been providing SEM programs to law firms for the last four years. The product has been very successful at elevating the natural search results of law firms in all of the major search engines and has helped them generate more business from search engines." (Emphasis in bold). So it seems FindLaw has been doing this for a while and only got caught when it moved outside of the law firm market. This admission means there are already firms paying FindLaw for this program - and now that Cutts has presumably removed the value of the links - a bunch of firms are essentially paying for nothing. By now, FindLaw knows this result - and the ethical thing to do would be to publicize their mistake and refund money. So far, FindLaw hasn't done so.

Another problem for FindLaw is whether Google would penalize the websites which bought links. Imagine being a law firm paying FindLaw $12,000 per year for search engine optimization and having your website adversely effected in search results as a result doing so.

This is an unfortunate situation all around and one that law firm marketing companies, including LexBlog, as well as law firms should take notice of. Search Engine Optimization is something we all want to achieve, but there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything.

It's now up to FindLaw to do the right thing for its customers and the legal profession as a whole. FindLaw calls itself the leading online law destination. FindLaw now needs to act like it.

Related posts:

Blog spamming by lawyers giving profession a bad name

There's lawyers who don't care how they get the next client or case. Whether it comes via an ad above a urinal, a two page spread in the yellow pages, or a referral from someone who thought the lawyer was pretty good, they just don't care.

In fact some lawyers would rather see their name at the top of search results or on the back of a phone book than have a reputation as a trusted and reliable authority in a niche area of the law. Wonderful that these cads are in the same profession as you and I who went to law school to right a few wrongs and to take pride in what we do.

The latest comes from lawyers throwing money down a rat hole by paying unscrupulous SEO-Search Engine Optimization clowns to get spam links via comments on good law blogs.

Scott Greenfield explains how the spam comments on law blogs scheme works.

One of the latest [trends] that has hit Simple Justice fairly hard is the latest effort in advertising by desperate lawyers, who apparently pay someone else to post comments to a blawg (such as this) with a link to their website.

The name of the commenter is listed as 'Miami Lawyer' and the link is to some Miami lawyer's website.  One might think that the concept would be followed through with some further degree of thought, such as searching for posts that relate in some way to stories about Miami, so that people who read the comments to the story might have a better chance of being interested in Miami lawyers.  Not so.

In the course of a day, I get one individual posting a dozen comments to miscellaneous old posts without any apparent nexus to each other or the geographical or subject matter area of the lawyer.  Each will link back to this 'Miami Lawyer's' website.  But here's the rub:  The comment is written in broken English and fails to demonstrate any knowledge of the content of the post.

Example: Greet to the webmaster for this wonderful site.Keep up good work.

This is the actual comment left yesterday.  To the Miami Lawyer who paid someone to leave this comment and link to his website, this word of advice.  It makes you look like a blithering idiot.  Is that what you are trying to accomplish?

As Scott explains the comments usually say 'nice job on the blog' or something else complimentary. So lawyers new to blogging are apt to keep the comments up. Don't. You'll just be supporting the sleaze and lazy of our legal profession.

And for lawyers buying SEO from guys that sound and behave like crack cocaine dealers, follow Scott's advise.

...[A]s a public service to anyone foolish enough to pay good money to some advertising 'solutions' company that outsources its work to people who will make you look far more pathetic than you are, let me say this.  Don't do it.

You are wasting your money.  You are not going to get any cases from comments that make you look stupid.  You are going to have your comments deleted, and then I'm going to ban you from here.

If you're really trying to market yourself by establishing yourself as an authority in the legal blogsophere, do it the old fashioned way. By working at it.

Subscribe to blogs in your niche as well as keywords and key phrases via Google Blog Search and Google News. Comment on other blogs - both on your own blog and in the comment field on other law blogs.

And at all times, add value to the discussion. You went to law school. You have 7 years of college and graduate education. It is actually possible to offer insight and commentary, as opposed to looking for the next get rich/cut corners advertising scheme.

Working at blogging the old fashioned way will get you plenty of links - and others citing you and your content throughout the net. I know you may not care, but it will save you money and get you more legal work.