Title tags are key for lawyer blog and Web site

Title tags are the most important tag for a law blog or Web site as far as the site being found in the search engines. Forget most all that other junk you hear about meta tags.

What are title tags?

The title tags define the title of a Web page. You will see the title in the title bar, that’s the silver area (not the url address box) at the top of the browser window. If you click to the home page of my blog, you will see the title at the top reading: “Real Lawyers :: Have Blogs : Law blog design for lawyer, attorney and law firm Internet marketing.”

Most of the search engines use the title tag as the title of a listing as well as the link to a page in the search engine. It’s the first line of a listing you see in the search results, usually in darker blue. For example, do a search at Google for – find a lawyer – and the first link is to lawyers.com’s home page with the title beginning “Find A Lawyer or Law Firm, Get Legal Assistance….” The title tags for lawyers.com begins with this same phrase.

Title tags are huge for search engines

Searchbots (robots from the search engines that grab Web pages and read the information on them) read the title tags and the use this information to know what the page is about. If your lawyer blog or Web site has a keyword defining your law firm in the title tags that competing law firm blogs or Web sites do not have, then you have a good chance of getting near the top of search engines.

For example if a law firm uses the keywords – St. Louis employment lawyers and attorneys for 25 years, Smith & Jones – in the title tags, that’s what the search engines define the blog or Web page to be about. (so long as their is content in the page referring to St. Louis employment lawyers and attorneys)

Even though these title tags are one of the most important factors for search engine optimization, law firms waste them. Lawyer blogs and Web sites rarely have keywords describing their practice in the title tags.

I searched at Google for intitle:welcome law firm to find out how many law firms had welcome and law firm in their title tags. I found 45,700 law firm sites. I did a search for intitle:home law firm to find out how many had law firm and home and found 61,800 sites. Could you imagine a more waste of space than using the words “welcome” or “home” in the title tags – the most important tags on the blog or Web site.

Use keywords in the title tags

You can help the search engines find your lawyer blog or Web site and achieve high ranking by useing the title tags to tell the searchbots what the content on the site is about.

Here are some tips Peter Kent summed up in his Search Engine Optimization for Dummies:

• Place the title tags just below the tag at the top of your blog or Web site template
• Place 40 to 60 characters (Google will display up to 60) between the opening and closing
• Put the keyword phrase you want to focus on at the very beginning of this title phrase
• If you want, you may repeat the primary keywords once
• Limit the number of two letter words and very common words such as as, the and a, because the search engines ignore them.

Knowing what you know now, you would have to agree the above title phrase: “St. Louis Employment Lawyers and Attorneys for 25 years, Smith & Jones” does a much better job of describing a blog or Web site than “Smith and Jones, Welcome to our law firm” or “Smith & Jones Home Page.” Don’t laugh, the vast majority of law firm blog and Web sites use title tags like the latter two.

Start to use these title tags effectively in your law blog or law firm Web site and you will be ahead of 99% of law firms. That can easily mean the difference between you growing your business or not.