There are many things about the Google AdWords platform that I just don't understand - things that seem to make it harder for the advertiser to maximize the performance of his campaigns. One example of this is the way the AdWords program treats keywords with capital letters. The same keyword can be considered distinct if it is typed with different capitalization. Here is an example:

law firm marketing

Law Firm Marketing

These two words would be considered different keywords. This may not seem all that significant, but we have found that Google seems to favor keywords that are all lower case by awarding them with higher quality scores. So if you have two versions of the same keyword, you may be charged a higher click cost because of a lower quality score. Can I guarantee this will happen? Nope. But why take chances? Especially when you are dealing with an expensive advertising category like legal services.

Another problem with having multiple versions of the same keywords in your ad groups is that your AdWords account can become needlessly unmanageable. Accounts that are fine-tuned to the best (and smallest) set of keywords are much easier to manage.

This is just one example of how something that seems very insignificant can have an impact on your overall paid search account performance. It is important to pay attention to the details. The difference between a quality score of 5 and a quality score of 10 can represent a significant amount of money that could be used to acquire more leads for your law firm.

Got questions? Feel free to contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm keyword research, law firm marketing, law firm search engine marketing, legal marketing, paid search, ppc

This post is similar to one we posted on our main Work Media blog, but I thought I would focus it a bit more here on legal marketing.

Google recently posted in its Webmaster blog about spam links in blog comments, and how using these links will damage your positioning. This is a strategy that Work Media sometimes employs for the promotion of our law firm clients, so we wanted to address this subject.

To begin with, why is this a good strategy? Lawyers are creatures of information. They have information that those of us who are not lawyers need to know. A lawyer adding to or commenting on a blog post about a legal-related subject is not spam. That is a high value person adding high value content.

You also have to take Google's public statements with a grain of salt. Google likes to keep things secretive, and we believe it often does and says things just to create confusion about how its algorithm works. The Web is built on links. Without Web site hyperlinks, there would be no Google. Google uses links to find web sites and as a measure of a site's worth in assigning it a ranking. So, in general, you still have to get links to your site if you want high search engine rankings.

We also don't think it really makes sense to punish a web site for having links pointing to it. If Google is going to punish a web site for having links to it contained in blog comments, why wouldn't I use this against my competitors? What is to stop me from going around to blogs and submitting spammy comments with links to my competitors' web sites?

Google says this: "...it's useless to think of harming your competitor's ranking by spamming comments with their name, since it usually won't affect their ranking if their sites are complying with Google Webmaster Guidelines."

In other words, if you do things the right way, you will be fine. Here is our approach to blog commenting:

1. Use a keyword for the name field.
2. Type a URL in the appropriate field.
3. Type out a well-written, well-thought-out comment that relates directly to the content of the blog post.

If you use this strategy for law firm web site promotion, you should seek out blog posts that discuss a subject to which you can add information of value. Increase the value of the blog post. The difference between this approach and what Google is talking about is that we are making legitimate comments, while also taking advantage of the opportunity to get the link.

One more thing: don't rely solely on this or any other SEO strategy to get links. Mix it up. And be credible.

So what should you do? Don't worry about it. Do your blog commenting like we suggest above and you will be fine.

Labels: law firm blog marketing, law firm internet marketing, law firm link building, legal blogging, legal marketing, link building

I think word is getting out about the unethical practices of some of the bigger companies in the legal marketing industry. Part of it has to do with companies such as ourselves that do our best to try and educate legal professionals about this situation, and part of it is law firms finally realizing that they are not getting what they are paying for.

We have a client we are working with that has a site that was built by a large legal marketing firm, and we have been locked out from doing many of the things that we REALLY need to do. We also got contacted by another firm that knew of the first firm (this firm also has a site built by the same large company) and wanted to hire us as well. We turned the second firm down because it would have been in conflict with our first client (promoting the firms for the same markets and practice areas), but just the fact that the firm sought us out is evidence that the tide is turning.

It is almost 2010. Law firms are getting more savvy about what they are paying for in terms of Internet marketing. That bolds well for companies such as ours that operate in an ethical fashion and work like hell to get our clients' sites to the top of search engine rankings. The giants are falling...and for that, we can be thankful.

Everybody have a great Thanksgiving!

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, legal marketing

Work Media would like to welcome a couple of new legal clients into our family: Clark & Clark, criminal defense lawyers based in New Jersey, and USA Hurt, a personal injury firm based in Chicago.

Clark & Clark is also presently a client of the large company that provides Internet marketing for so much of the legal industry (initials "F.L."), and some of the things we have been told about the way the other company operates are ridiculous. I'll say this one more time: ask how many competing firms your SEO firm is representing! Do you really expect them to have you as a priority over their other clients in the same market?

USA Hurt is also a client of our friends at Joseph Media Group, who specialize in creating outstanding television commercials for law firms.

Work Media has a chart in our office with every metropolitan statistical area in the country. MSAs where we have a client are highlighted. It is our goal to have one client in every major market. Because when you are a Work Media client, you are our number one priority, and it is our intention to help you DOMINATE your market. Can your existing Internet marketing company say that? Call us today at 888-299-4837

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, legal marketing

Here is the question: how many other law firms are you promoting in my market?

This assumes that you have already established that the company has the experience to do the job.

One thing that perturbs me about this industry is law firms hiring a company for their search engine optimization that is already promoting many firms for the same market. SEO is war. How can an SEO firm fight like hell to get your website to the top of Google along with dozens of other firms? The math just doesn't work out.

It's not just that the SEO company is competing against itself…it' s competing against companies like mine. We don't have competing interests, and we don't lose. If your firm is promoted by a company like FindLaw, which is probably promoting a dozen or more other firms for the same market, you don't want to compete against a firm being promoted by us. It is highly unlikely you will come out a winner in that situation.

To reiterate: You only want to compete against firms that are represented by other SEO companies. Not your own.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, lawyer marketing, lawyer seo, legal marketing

Yesterday Twitter blew up. From what I understand, there was a "spamcloud" (whatever that means), and in response, Twitter suspended many thousands of accounts of innocent users (including mine).

It goes without saying that this is very poor policy on Twitter's part, and the kind of thing that could kill the app. I think Twitter needs to keep in mind that there will be competitors come along to try and knock it down, and this kind of policy is the kind of thing that will hasten its demise.

Here is an important rule of Internet marketing that this episode highlights:

You should spend your time and resources promoting properties that you control.

Twitter owns your Twitter account. Do you own your Facebook account? Nope. Your LinkedIn account is not yours. You are at the mercy of those sites to stay in business and keep your account live.

A simple solution is to point your own custom domain names to your social media pages. For instance, if you have a Facebook Pages page, then you could register a domain name that point to that page. If Facebook goes down or just decides that it doesn't like you any more, then you can just repoint the domain name somewhere else. If you have promoted a particular domain, rather than the default page name, then you have control. Facebook owns you if you have spent all of your time promoting the default Facebook URL.

So be proactive. Do not let yourself be a victim to the whims of whatever social media sites you like to use. Spend your time optimizing and promoting your own web site, and use custom domains for promoting your social media pages. Then maybe you can avoid the next meltdown such as what happened with Twitter this weekend.

As always, get in touch with me if you need some help implementing an aggressive Internet marketing campaign for your law firm. Contact 888-299-4837 or www.WorkMedia.net.

And I invite you to check out my favorite Twitter management tool for free at www.TryTweetLater.com.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, legal marketing, social media, twitter

With regards to search engine marketing, targeting the correct keywords is vitally important. One mistake that many businesses, including law firms, make is that they pick an arbitrary keyword or two that they think they should rank for and concentrate their efforts (or the efforts of people they hire) in ranking for that keyword. Don't make that mistake.

On the other end of the spectrum, some businesses or firms want their web site top-ranked for every possible relevant keyword. Don't do that, either.

So just what do you do? Let research guide your decisions, and pick keywords that meet three specific criteria.

For any potential keyword, judge its effectiveness based on the following three criteria:

1. Relevance. Relevance refers to how closely the keyword is related to the subject of a web site and the content on a particular page of the site. You want to target keywords with a high degree of relevance.

As an example, if a law firm in Miami has a page on its web site about maritime accidents, then a good keyword for that page might be "Miami maritime accident lawyer."

2. Search volume. The more search traffic there is for a particular keyword, the more potential traffic the keyword could drive to your web site.

3. Competition. Keywords that have fewer competing web sites offer the opportunity to get your site ranked quicker.

So the three major criteria for any keyword you are considering targeting is relevance, traffic and competition. You will have to use some judgment for the relevance component, but you know your business better than anyone - you know when something is not relevant. Google's external AdWords keyword tool, found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal, is one of the best sources of finding competitive data. The competition criterion can be based on a couple of things: either the number of results of a Google search for the keyword surrounded by quotes; or the number of results of an "allintitle:" search for the keyword in Google.

So to begin creating your target keyword list, start by using the AdWords external keyword tool referenced above, eliminating the ones that are not relevant, and then ranking them by search volume. Then highlight the ones that are not overly competitive (less than 1,000 competing sites is good). Your highlighted keywords at this point are your best bet for generating targeted organic search engine traffic in a reasonable amount of time. Your chance of ranking for those keywords, and thus generating visits to your web site, is excellent.

Check back here often for more law firm internet marketing strategies. If you need some help today, contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: keyword research, keywords, law firm internet marketing, law firm keyword research, law firm seo, legal keyword research, legal marketing

You must blog. If it is your intention to use the Internet to generate leads for your firm, one of the most basic components of an online lead generation campaign is a blog. Just a few reasons why you should be blogging include: the process creates lots of text content that can be indexed and ranked by search engines; your blog content can be used for many more purposes; and you can use use it to prove your expertise. So you or someone at your firm must blog.

Another reason for blogging is that blog content can be streamed to other web sites, such as a Facebook Page (note the capitalized "P" indicating we’re talking about a business page). As painful as it may seem, you might as well go ahead and set up a Facebook Page and put someone in your office in charge of that, too. Spend some time setting up your profile, telling who you are and what services you provide. Go ahead and tell all about your firm. If you have video or photo content that would make your Page more interesting, go ahead and add that. If you know other lawyers or business professionals who are on Facebook, go ahead and send them a friend request.

Once your account is set up, set up your blog to stream to your Page. The Facebook Notes application can be used to stream your blog to your business Page. Notes supplies the functionality to add your blog as an updating note. Your Facebook Page will then be automatically updated every time you post a new blog.

If you get a hang of blogging regularly and integrating your blog into your Facebook page, then you might want to explore some more advanced options such as using an application like Ping.fm to update your blog and multiple social media sites all at once. In this scenario, you would actually post your blog content to the Ping.fm interface, and the program would then update your blog as well as all your social media accounts.

However, when using Ping.fm, you have to be very careful about NOT updating blog style content and "update" style content all at once. You will end up with lots of very short blog posts with no titles. A blog post needs to be substantial and substantive, which requires far more characters than you are allowed in most social networking update boxes.

Labels: blogging, facebook, law firm blog marketing, law firm internet marketing, legal blogging, legal marketing

I was contacted a few weeks ago, along with lots of others, about helping pre-sell the new book, The Sticking Point Solution by Jay Abraham. Well, at the time I just didn't have any time to devote to it. But Jay's son, Troy, was kind enough to send me a copy, and I have to say this is one of the best marketing books I have ever read (and I've read quite a few).

Abraham may be the world's top marketing expert. He has worked with businesses in over 400 industries, and he is extremely well paid for helping businesses figure out how to make more money. But you don't have to pay Abraham $5 thousand per hour to work with you - just buy his book!

This book does a brilliant job of distilling and organizing Abraham's wealth of knowledge about marketing. If you read this book, do some deep thinking, and then create a marketing plan for your business based on the ideas contained in it, I would be highly surprised if you did not experience increased revenue.

Work Media is entering a transitional phrase, and this book has already sparked many ideas for how we need to build our business. This was the perfect book for me to read, right at the time when I am pondering where my business should go.

The book is out now and can be found on Amazon.com and on many other bookseller web sites. I advise you pick up a copy today.

Have you checked out my new Twitter blog yet?

Labels: jay abraham, law firm internet marketing, legal marketing, marketing

My partner and I have worked with quite a few law firms by this point, and we are still surprised at how many web sites we look at that have serious content or coding flaws. Some of these sites are not bad at all in terms of design, but design alone won’t get it done if you are seeking search engine visibility. Here is a checklist of items to make sure your web site meets the minimum level of optimization for search engine rankings.

1. Make sure your physical address is on the home page, in text. Pictures don't count. There needs to be some text on the page with your city and state.

2. Create a home page title that contains your geographic market as well as main area of practice. Ideally, your home page title will also be based on keyword research to make sure you are using the phrasing that more people use to search for law firms in your market.

3. Give every page of your web site its own specific page title. Again, it would be useful to do some research so that you can insert traffic-generating keywords in titles throughout your site.

4. Have some copy and text links on your home page. If your home page consists solely of Flash or some other non-text technology, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage right off the bat. You want to have lots of text for search engine robots to read.

5. Use text links to practice area pages that contain the practice area in the page name. For example, your home page might have a link that says "Divorce" to a page titled "Divorce Law."

6. Use your meta tags. Place a set of keywords in the keywords meta tag, and try to use those same keywords in your web page copy. Also give a good, keyword-rich description.

7. Use header (h1) tags to emphasize each page's primary keyword. For example, if your home page is meant to rank for the phrase "Memphis Personal Injury Lawyer," then it is helpful to have a header on the page with exactly that phrase.

So there you go. If your web page does not meet all seven of these criteria, then you are lacking some basic on-page optimization parameters that could definitely help improve your web site's search engine rankings. As always, I would be glad to talk to you if you need some help. You can email me at jwork@workmedia.net, or check out http://www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net for more tips and advice about promoting your law firm’s web site.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, lawyer seo, legal marketing, search engine optimization

I have been searching hard for the best tools for managing a Twitter account, and the single best one I have found is Tweet Later. I started using the free version a while ago, and I just upgraded to the professional (paid) version, and I love it!

With the free version, you can automatically follow back anyone who follows you and send the person a direct message. Just doing those two things help tremendously in building up a Twitter following.

If you are serious about using Twitter as a marketing tool, then it is well worth the money to upgrade to the professional version of Tweet Later. With the paid version, you can pre-configure a bunch of spinnable tweets to be posted at regular intervals. If you set it up right, this can save you a TON of time managing your account.

If you already have a lot of content to link to in your tweets, then this strategy is a little easier to implement. For instance, if you have been publishing a blog for a while, or doing article marketing, then you can set up a bunch of tweets that link to various blog posts or articles.

If you don't have any existing material to set up lots of tweets for, you can still make good use of the system. It just might take more work to come up with material for all of your pre-configured tweets.

I do VERY little affiliate marketing because most affiliate products are junk (not that stops me from buying many of them in the pursuit of new tools for my toolbox). But I am impressed enough by this product that I am officially promoting it to my readers. I officially recommend the professional version of Tweet Later. To learn more, visit this link:

http://www.tweetlater.com/86969.html

There is a one week free trial (no credit card required!), so I definitely recommend you try it out with all of its features.

Labels: blog marketing, blogging, law firm internet marketing, legal blogging, legal marketing, tweet later, tweeting, twitter

In Internet marketing, fast is the name of the game. Got an article? Don't just submit it to one article directory, submit it to a hundred. Don't do it manually, use software. Then turn it into a video and submit it to a bunch of video directories using video submission software.

And so it was with great excitement that I recently started trying out Article Video Robot. I absolutely LOVE the concept of this service. The idea is that you load a text articles into a web site that automatically reads portions of the text, which is then combined with animated static images to create a video from the article. You can even then mass distribute it from the same program. All in under three minutes! For busy professionals like lawyers who don't have much time to devote to Internet marketing, this is a fantastic strategy.

Great idea. It only it worked.

This is junk software for people creating junk content to try and make money on affiliate sales. For a business like a law firm, where reputation is very important, this software is to be avoided.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of creating videos by combining an audio voiceover with still images (it's a low tech technique that we use all the time), but transitions should be smooth, and the voiceover should sound somewhat professional. We found that a large amount of time was required to tweak the videos into respectability. Three minutes? Try three to six hours. The system is awkward to use, and in the end, it is quicker for us to just create videos manually, even using plain ol' Windows Movie Maker.

One of the main problems is that the computerized voice readings of article text tend to need a LOT of tweaking to sound reasonably human. The software gives you the option of recording your own voice for each “frame” (which corresponds to a paragraph of the text article) of the video. But by the time we do all that, it would have been just as fast to manually record an audio track and mix it with some still shots using our own software. Any video you create in three minutes using Article Video Robot will be trash.

The company claims to offer a trial period, but we were refused a refund even though we used the software less than two weeks. The stated reason is that we had done four video submissions (which was actually two videos, due to two failed attempts at using the system), which was too many for a refund. What I wonder is how we were supposed to thoroughly try the system out without actually creating and submitting videos.

I wish I had the time back that I spent trying to use this junk software. But a refund would have at least left me with the feeling that this is an honest company trying to create an honest product that just quite isn't there yet. Instead, I am left feeling like I got ripped off.

Article Video Robot is definitely not recommended for any law firm's use. If you want to use video distribution to promote your law firm, you should find another way to get it done. Or contact Work Media. We'll be glad to help out.

Labels: article distribution, article marketing, article video robot, law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, legal marketing, video distribution, video marketing

In a blog post I recently wrote, I talked about how important it is to integrate your legal marketing efforts; blog to web site, offline to online, etc. Everything should fit together. I think one important strategy is using RSS to stream your blog content into the static pages of your web site. Sometimes it can be tricky to work out the code to make it happen, but it's a beautiful effect when your entire web site gets updated every time you make a new blog post. This can be especially helpful for law firms, since the business lends itself to content creation and blogging.

While Twitter is a fairly new concept to me personally, I am warming up to it and am exploring the idea of using streaming Twitter content to update web pages as you would blog content. While the code for streaming blog content can be tricky, Twitter makes it fairly simple. The first step is to log onto Twitter and then look at the bottom menu, where you will click the Apps link. Then click the Widgets link and select the type appropriate for your site. From here you can create an HTML widget or a Flash-based widget. Since the goal of this experiment is to have the text streamed to your web site, I feel like the HTML widget makes more sense. When using the Flash widget, you also have a greater chance of excluding some users from seeing the content if they do not have the correct version of Flash.

Next, you can just copy and past the supplied code into the pages of your web site. If your site uses include files, then you can easily stream your Twitter data throughout your site by including the widget code in an include file. On www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net, for example, the following include file wraps up the side menu:

#include virtual="leftside.asp"

By doing this, it enables you to change one file to update your entire site, instead of having to manually update every single page.

You may need to do some in-line CSS styling if the widget does not look quite right. As an example, I was not happy with the look of the bulleted lists of posts after I installed the widget, so I used the following style to depress the bullet point: style="list-style-type:none;".

There are other Twitter apps that I will talk about in later blog posts, but I advise you to take a look at the Twitter widget for the purpose of integrating Twitter content into your mainstream law firm Web content.

Need some help with integrating your social networking with your other online marketing? Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, legal marketing, social media, social networking, twitter

Social networking is a complex area with a lot of moving parts:

• Blog posts
• Forum posts
• Updates
• Groups
• Content creation and article writing

Social networking is one of those things that tends to happen haphazardly, as time permits, whenever you think about it. This is especially the case when it is done by someone who is extremely busy, such as the typical lawyer. This can all be done much more effectively if you create a monthly social networking/content distribution schedule that tells you exactly when you should be doing things and what you should be doing.

In other words, you need a system.

I have been working on an Excel-based organization system that lets you input some data into some fields, after which a calendar of activities you need to perform for the given month is created. I will be giving this away for free, but also working on a more advanced, online, database-driven version for use by Work Media's clients and friends.

But it's something you can begin to do immediately, even if you are just writing notes out on a piece of paper. You gotta start somewhere.

I consider content distribution to be a major part of online social networking, so that is where your system should start. If you leave this part out, and just concentrate on meeting people online, then you are not taking advantage of the Web's ability to spread your name and marketing message. Writing blogs and articles and distributing that content gives you something to talk about in a social networking environment, and it accomplishes the more broad marketing goals of branding and name recognition. And that's not to mention the search engine optimization effect, which I'm not going to go into at this time.

To begin with, I suggest you create a simple calendar of when blog posts should be posted and articles written. Aim for eight blog posts and three articles per month. You can get away with only two articles, but the eight blog post minimum is written in stone.

When you lay out your blogging and article writing schedule, go ahead and write out an idea for each blog post in advance, and create groupings of two or three blog posts in a row that elaborate on the same general topic. Then for each of those topic groupings of blog posts, specify a date to write an article that combines the information from those blog posts.

For example, a lawyer who deals with a lot of automobile accident cases might write two or three blog posts about driving safely in various conditions, and then combine those blog posts into an article about the same thing. At the end of that blogging cycle, you would have three new blog posts, which search engines will index, as well as an article to mass distribute. You also have several items you can link to or mention in forum posts in social networking groups you belong to.

Just doing the above things will go a long way toward giving your content distribution efforts more focus. In later blog posts, we will continue talking about content scheduling and hit on some other functions that should be included in your social networking calendar.

Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email Info@WorkMedia.net if you need some help promoting your law firm online.

Labels: blogging, content distribution, law firm blog marketing, law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, legal blogging, legal marketing, legal writing

For most of the last week, I have had my head buried in a project that was inspired by some conversation on a LinkedIn group that I participate in. It was a programming-heavy project that required many hours of work. I had to pound on it until it was done.

But a funny thing happened during the six days (counting a weekend) that I spent working on it. I stopped promoting. I realized yesterday that I had not written a new blog post in several days...had not made a Twitter post in several days...I really had not done any promotion.

For a small business, promotion is existence. The business that doesn't promote itself, more often than not, is a business that goes out of business.

I am reminded of something said by one of my favorite marketing pros, Dan Kennedy. To paraphrase:

Do one thing every day to put business in your pipeline.

Every day, without exception, before you lay your head down for the night, do at least one thing to generate business. Send an email. Do a blog post. Post on a forum. Write a letter. Do something.

Have you done something today to generate business?

Need some help orchestrating your firm's internet marketing plan? We're here to help. Contact Work Media at info@workmedia.net or call 888-299-4837.

Labels: internet marketing, law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, legal marketing, marketing

Probably not many legal marketers reading this are actively using StumbleUpon, and that could be a mistake. The site displays random sites submitted by other users based on your interests. I doubt many legal marketers really have time to just sit and watch random web sites appear. However, where StumbleUpon becomes useful is in submitting web pages of your own into the StumbleUpon system to be seen by others. StumbleUpon is very popular and has the potential to put your web site in front of a lot of eyeballs.

There is one caveat: you must create the appearance of being an active user, and not just a marketer trying to get your site in front of people. Follow these rules and your "stumbling" will be more effective.

Make sure you set up a good profile with a nice photo. Failing to set up a good profile will emphasize that you are a marketer only looking to promote your own web site, rather than a part of the community.

Every time you submit a site, take the time to provide a well-written description and appropriate tags.

When another user recommends your site, send that person a personal message.

Only submitting your own web pages makes you look like a spamming marketer. Recommend enough other web sites that it is not clear that you are trying to promote a particular site of your own. Try to submit sites that you think other people would really be interested in.

For your pages to receive maximum exposure, they should be strong enough for other people to recommend. The pages you submit should therefore be light on fluff and heavy on value or usefulness. Pages that do nothing but try to sell your services will likely receive few recommendations. The more approval you get from people who see your site, the more visibility you will have in the StumbleUpon system.

StumbleUpon also has its own advertising platform that allows you to pay to have your site displayed to users in a particular category. There is a legal category. Impressions in StumbleUpon cost a nickel each. That may sound expensive, but it is actually a good value because an "impression" in StumbleUpon means someone is actually viewing your web site, rather than an ad for your web site.

I am currently working on a new book specifically about this type of thing, but in the meantime I recommend you check out The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book on Amazon.com for more Internet marketing strategies for law firms.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, law firm seo, legal marketing, stumbleupon

When you are working on building a catalog of links pointing to your web site, you need to remember to think deep. Deep linking is the act of linking to sub-pages of a web site, and not just the home page. You need to remember these two rules:

1. You should seek keyword links that point to web pages optimized for those same keywords.

2. You can really only optimize a single web page for a couple of keywords.

So if your web site has different pages optimized for different keywords (and if that is not the case, you need to call me today), then you need different keyword links pointing to each of those pages specifically. Here is an example. Let’s say you have a web site with pages covering the following practice areas: automobile accidents, maritime accidents, and aviation accidents. To help raise the search engine visibility of each of those pages, each one needs keyword links related to the subject of the page. The automobile accident page needs links such as “automobile accident attorney,” the maritime accidents page needs links such as “boating accident lawyer,” and the last page needs links like “airplane accident lawyer.”

What you have to keep in mind is that search engine optimization is a business of specificity. Specific pages are optimized for specific keywords, and those pages need specific keyword links.

You may be wondering how you go about getting links with specific keywords in it. If you rely on other web sites to hopefully link to you, then you are at the mercy of those other sites with regard to what keywords they use in the links, if any. Most of the time those types of links will just contain your web address, which is useful for the fact that it is a link, but not as useful as a link that uses a keyword.

One of my favorite strategies for creating links that contain the keywords I want is article marketing. Write an article related to some keywords, and then place a couple of keyword links in the article resource box to the pages you want to promote. Then distribute the article to lots of article directories. If you want to get more complex (and more effective), you can do something called article spinning, which will result in lots of technically unique articles being distributed rather than duplicate articles. Another way is by posting on others' blogs with a keyword as your name (but you will need to find blogs that allow "dofollow" links).

I invite you to check out my book, The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book, to learn more about this type of stuff. You can also contact me at Work Media if you would like some more in-depth help.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm link building, law firm seo, lawyer seo, legal marketing, link building, linking

The economy is lousy. Businesses of all types are laying people off or going out of business. Unless you are one of the luck recipients of a huge undeserved bonus, chances are you are not doing as well as you were a year ago. So now is no time to be spending your marketing funds on search engine optimization, right?

No way!

This is the time to INCREASE the amount of resources you devote to search engine marketing and optimization (SEO). There is always going to be some lag time (sometimes substantial) between the time that SEO is done and when you see results. So position yourself NOW to dominate in the future.

The economy will eventually improve. The percentage of the population (and thus your target market) that uses search engines to find businesses, including law firms, is going to continue to rise. The number of firms competing for the top spots is only going to increase. Do you want to be the aggressor, and increase your search engine visibility, or do you want to the be the firm that waits for a “better time,” only making it more difficult to catch up in the future?

So maybe you're already the top-ranked site in Google for a search of your market and services. You can just cruise along, right?

Hell no!

It is highly likely that there are firms being aggressive right now, optimizing their sites and generating impressive inbound link catalogs. If you stop, you will get passed. Avoid complacency. Keep building your link catalog. Keep blogging and distributing content. You can bet some of your competitors are.

Don't wait until you think you can afford to engage in a search engine optimization campaign. Time is not your friend here. Climbing the search engine rankings is often a very slow process. Start working on your search rankings today so that when economic conditions improve, your web site will be the one people find when searching for your type of services.

So...what are you going to do?

If you want to learn how to do this on your own, please check out my book The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm link building, law firm marketing, law firm seo, legal marketing

So you've got a web site but don't know how to drive traffic to it? Get in line. You're not alone. Improving search engine rankings is what I do all day every day, and my company employs many different strategies. We work hard at it, both servicing our clients as well as testing new strategies. The easiest way for you to accomplish getting your site ranked is to hire a company like mine.

However, maybe your resources are limited or you're just a glutton for punishment. If that is the case, I am going to give you a super quick technique for creating a blueprint you can use for getting your web site ranked for a particular keyword.

Step 1. Do a search in Google for your target keyword. Avoid overly generic or broad keywords like "attorney." Your keyword should be specific to your target market, such as "St. Louis criminal defense attorney."

Step 2. Click on the top listings that represent real competitors (i.e., competing law firms in your market, as opposed to law firm directories or portals). Look to see if the keyword is used in the title, how many times it is used in the body copy, and where else it is used.

Step 3. Tweak your front page to match the criteria discussed above. Optimize!

Step 4. Go to search.yahoo.com and do a "link:" search for the top sites for your keyword. Your search query will look something like "link:www.website.com." This will give you a good idea of the minimum number of links you need pointing to your site.

Step 5. Now get ready to do some work. Build a catalog of links to your web site as large or larger than your competitors.

Certainly, we've glossed over a lot of details. Anything you need to know is contained somewhere in print or online. If you are willing to put in the work, you can learn how to run a campaign like the one described here. Of course, you can always take easier route and hire a company like Work Media.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, lawyer marketing, lawyer seo, legal marketing

So how do you know what marketing strategies you should be using to promote your law firm? You have many options. You can do paid search and SEO (both of which I highly recommend), TV advertising, radio, newspaper, Yellow Pages, and the list goes on. You might start by finding out what marketing methods are working for other successful firms in your market.

One problem is that the strategies used by your competitors may not be the same that work for you. If you really want to find out what works, the only sure-fire way is to try different strategies and carefully track the results of each. You need to make a direct connection between the leads you generate and the marketing that generated those leads. You can measure performance by using a special URL with different advertising campaigns. For example, a print ad in a newspaper might display a URL like "www.myfirm.com/special". Then checking your web site stats for traffic to that URL will give you an idea of how effective the ad is.

There is one flaw in this technique. Some viewers of the ad will not use the full URL, instead just typing your root domain name. This is at least a starting point. Displaying a different phone number for each ad is a more accurate way to generate data. Then you can tell which ads are working by how many calls come in for different phone numbers. It's pretty cheap to do and there are quite a few companies that can provide the service. Just a couple to check out are callsource.com and capturethecall.com. Just search Google for "call tracking" to find more.

Yes, this is a lot of work. But finding the right marketing mix can mean the difference between success and failure for your marketing. And if you're going to promote, you might as well do it right.

To learn more about online marketing for law firms, check out my book The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book on Amazon.com.

Labels: analytics, call tracking, law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, lawyer advertising, lawyer marketing, lawyer seo, legal marketing

Print on demand (POD) is a technology that my firm has made heavy use of for self-promotion. It is a fantastic technology for use by publishing companies, as well as any independent business that wants to produce its own books. In this post, I want to discuss a concept related to POD that I call "trend hopping." The idea is to use print on demand technology to quickly create books or other products focused on very timely subjects - subjects related to your areas of practice.

POD allows you to quickly create products based on the public's interests at the moment. One example is mesothelioma from asbestos exposure, which is a hot subject in the legal industry. Your could write a book on this subject and make it freely available to anyone who visits your web site. The book could provide more information about what mesothelioma is and what a person's legal rights are.

Intuitively, it might seem like an expensive form of marketing, but it's really not. To order copies of your book yourself will probably cost you $2 or $3 per copy. If you use paid search to drive traffic to your web site, you might be paying $25 or $50 per visit. So in the general scheme of things, another couple of bucks is not much relative to the cost of getting traffic to your site, and it just might improve your chance at signing up a client.

Trends always change. Just because people are interested in something right now does not at all mean that they will be tomorrow. The kinds of cases you pursue today may be different tomorrow. Traditional printing does not deal with this situation very well because it requires the publisher to estimate the number of copies of a book that will sell (or that you want to give away). Predicting when a trend will end is difficult.

POD eliminates the risk completely. You don't have to worry about printing and storing books in advance. With POD, you will only print the number of books that you need and no more.

Contact Work Media, a Nashville-based search engine marketing firm, to learn more about using this and other strategies to promote your law firm.

Labels: book publishing, law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, lawyer marketing, legal marketing, pod, print on demand, publishing

My company uses a strategy that we call "staggered distribution of spun blog content." Sounds fancy, doesn't it? At Work Media, one of our specialties is making things sound scientific and complex. Despite the long name, it's really just a strategy for getting the most value out of your blogging efforts. I believe if you take the time to write something of value, you should get maximum value from it for your law firm promotion efforts. It's also related to something I blogged about previously, which is using multiple blogs to promote your web site and firm.

In my previous blog post, I stated that you should maintain up to ten blogs focused on your areas of practice. The idea is to use article spinning software to create multiple versions of a core blog post that are technically unique, and use those for updating your blogs. These blogs would be spread out among various blogging platforms and have many different names.

To carry this concept a step further, I also suggest you stagger your blog posts. In other words, rather than updating all of your blog posts on the same day with a similar spun blog post, make the posts over multiple days. Less time is required between updates the more blogs you maintain.

If you are careful, your spun blog posts will each qualify as unique content. However, there is still some risk in releasing many blog posts on the same day that are all very similar. Staggering your blog posts over time closer matches the idea of different humans updating different blogs. It sets off less of a signal.

For more advanced ideas about how to promote your law firm online, check out my book The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book.

Labels: blog marketing, blogging, law firm blog marketing, law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, lawyer seo, legal blogging, legal marketing

The use of an autoresponder to collect email addresses is a technique that has been abused by some Internet marketers because it works. But it is a rarely used strategy for law firm promotion. In the marketing world, any marketer knows it takes multiple exposures to a marketing message for it to get through to your prospects. With an autoresponder, you automatically feed a series of messages to people who have indicated they are interested. It is one-on-one marketing that lets you do a “soft sell" by subtly promoting your firm while giving away valuable, free information.

The first thing you need to do is create a series of articles that will be the foundation of your email series. A divorce lawyer, for example, might create a series of lessons on strategies to make sure you receive your fair share in divorce settlements.

The next step is to use your material from the first step to create a series of emails that will be sent out over time. I suggest you set the emails to go out once per week.

To automate the process of sending your emails out over time, you will need an autoresponder. There are many autoresponders available, but two that are reputable and well-known are aweber.com and getresponse.com. There may be a required investment in time to learn how to set up your emails and use the system. Once your messages are loaded, you're ready to go!

All that's left now is to set up a form on your web site that lets your visitors sign up.

With this strategy, you kill two birds with one stone: you get the contact information of visitors to your site; and you automatically contact those people multiple times.

Feel free to contact me at www.workmedia.net, a search engine marketing company specializing in law firm and lead generation marketing.

Labels: autoresponder, email marketing, law firm internet marketing, lawyer marketing, legal marketing

I recently became aware of a web site (blog, technically) that could be of great use to anyone responsible for law firm online promotion. This blog is written by a guy who seems very intelligent and a master at his craft.

http://misterthorne.org/set_in_style/

With over 20 years of experience as a writer and editor, the blogger, the mysterious "Mister Thorne," has a lot of detailed knowledge about legal writing that he shares with his readers.

His blog is interesting because it is so specific: it deals only with the intricacies of legal writing, including web page copy. And he goes deep. For example, he has spent several blog posts recently discussing proper word spacing. This guy has knowledge that could be of great value to those looking to improve the conversion side of the Internet marketing equation.

Close more deals with better writing.

If you need help with the traffic side (getting people to your web site), well, then you need to call my company, Work Media, or check out our Internet legal marketing portal, www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net.

Labels: blogging, law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, legal marketing, legal writing, writing

Today I'd like to explore another way to better leverage your time, which is making posts to blogs and social networking sites with your mobile device. This is fairly new to me, but it is a concept that can really save you some time.

For example, if you have a Blogger account, you can send a message to Blogger and they will assign you a code for your blog. The code lets you make posts with your phone. This lets you update your blog no matter where you are, even if you are nowhere near a computer.

Tumblr has another very interesting example, which is the ability to call a phone number and leave a message which is instantly converted into an audio post on your blog. This is a great way to instantly add some audio multimedia to your blog, and all you have to do is speak into your cell phone. Audio and video are excellent additions to your blog.

There are just a couple of examples that I have played around with personally, but you have lots of options for mobile blogging opportunities. Just find the directions for doing it on the platform of your choice and practice it a couple of times. Do it on a regular basis and you might even be able to keep all of your blogs updated without using your computer. It does help to have a phone with a qwerty keyboard.

For a complete search engine marketing strategy for your law firm, check out The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book (for sale on Amazon.com):

http://www.amazon.com/Law-Firm-Internet-Marketing-Book/dp/1440485585/

Labels: blogging, law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, lawyer marketing, lawyer seo, legal marketing, mobile blogging, search engine marketing, search engine optimization

Go wide with your blogging Wide as in managing five blogs, not just one.

Whoowhee... It's hard enough just to make regular posts to one blog, much less five.

And what would be the point? For one thing, it gives you the opportunity to be more focused on specific areas of practice. And the process creates lots of content for Google to index. The key to managing five blogs is leverage.

Here' how to do it. At the start of the week (or Wednesday, or Thursday at 3:00 AM...whenever), create five new blog posts, each between 200 and 300 words, using article spinning syntax and many alternate passages and paragraps. In other words, each of the five blog posts should be written in such a way to serve as a seed article for numerous other technically unique posts.

Next, use article spinning software to create five versions of each blog post. You now have unique content for twenty five blog posts, which you can distribute among your five blogs over a couple of weeks.

It would also be useful to do some keyword research before you write the five blog posts so that you can write them to emphasize some specific keywords. Look for specific, niche keywords that you can dominate. Your posts should also contain a liberal amount of links to your other web properties.

Need help with this stuff? Call me. I'm Jerry Work, with Work Media. www.WorkMedia.net. You can also learn more law firm Internet marketing strategies at www.law-firm-internet-marketing.net.

Labels: blogging, law firm internet marketing, law firm link building, law firm marketing, law firm seo, lawyer seo, legal marketing

We've started playing around with Ning, which is a very interesting concept. It's basically a social networking site that allows users to set up their own social networking sites. So we set up one specifically for law firm Internet marketing:

http://lawfirminternetmarketing.ning.com/

I also joined another group on Ning:

http://lawmarketing.ning.com

Ning is the type of site that Google loves, so it would behoove you to set one up for yourself. For instance, let's say you practice divorce law in St. Louis. Why not set up a St. Louis divorce Ning site? It would be another way for people to communicate with you and learn some things about divorce law. And of course, as the creator of the site, you could pepper it with links back to your site and place your marketing message prominently on the site. You may even find that your Ning site ranks higher than your own main web site, but that's just fine.

The site has lots of interesting features that you can add to your own site: forums, blogs, videos, images, etc., all of which get added to the main menu. It really does let you create some powerful, interactive sites.

I invite everyone reading this to come join us on our law firm Internet marketing Ning site. You just might learn something...and you don't even have to pay us!

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm link building, law firm seo, legal marketing, ning, social networking

I've been updating some Squidoo lenses this week. It had been a while since we had logged in (shame on us!), and noticed that there have been some changes to the Squidoo interface. One of the great things about Squidoo is all of the modules you can use that make the pages dynamic by updating themselves from various information sources (blogs, Google News, RSS feeds, etc.). So a Squidoo lens, if built the right way, will update itself forever.

The new Squidoo interface makes it much quicker to add modules and align modules on your page. Formerly, this was a very slow and tedious process. The new system is much better.

So why should you set up pages in Squidoo to promote your law firm? Because Google really loves it. Often, a page on Squidoo that pertains to your practice area will rank quicker and higher than your own web site. So links from Squidoo carry a lot of weight. And as you know, one of the things you should be trying to do in your law firm seo campaign is build a catalog of links from web sites that Google holds in high esteem.

You should incorporate Squidoo as part of your social networking/content distribution campaign. If you publish a blog for your law firm, you should use the RSS module to stream your blog posts to your Squidoo lenses. And use some of the other modules to stream legal news or other blog posts to your Squidoo pages. It is a simple and quick way to build a high quality industry page that links directly to youf firm.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm link building, law firm seo, legal marketing, squidoo

Do you perform keyword research before writing a new blog post or article? If you do, we applaud you. If not, you're not alone. Most lawyers (and Web content creators in general) probably do not. But starting today, you are going to do things differently. Starting today, here is what you are going to do when writing content for the Web:

1. You are going to use Google's external keyword research tool to find a keyword related to your practice areas and markets that receives some traffic and mild competition.

2. You are going to use that keyword in your content title and prominently in the main text, and if allowed, in bold and in a header (H1) tag.

If you do this, you will have a tremendous advantage over online authors who write without regard to keywords. Why? Because your writing will have focus. It will be specific, and it will very possibly rank highly for your target keyword, helping drive traffic to your web site.

We confess: we do not always do this ourselves. If there is something you want to write about that just doesn't match up with any particular keyword, then go ahead and write it. But the more you write with specific keywords in mind, the more of your content will show up in search engine results pages. And that's always a good thing.

Labels: blogging, keyword research, law firm internet marketing, law firm seo, lawyer seo, legal marketing, seo

Our BRAND NEW book, The Law Firm Internet Marketing Book, is now available for purchase on the following page:

http://law-firm-internet-marketing.net/the-law-firm-internet-marketing-book.asp

This book is written specifically for people who promote and market law firms. It compresses everything we know into a tight, cohesive law firm Internet marketing plan that incorporates MANY different elements: SEO, PPC, social networking, blogging, etc.

Currently, it is only for sale via digital download in PDF format, but in a couple of weeks it will be for sale on Amazon.com for those of you who prefer a hard copy.

Some of the topics covered by the book include:

• Keyword research to identify the keywords that people are using to search for the legal services you offer.
  
  
• On-page optimization to rank highly for your target keywords.
  
  
• How to use blogs and the SEO content cycle to create huge amounts of content to link to your site.
  
  
• Using social networking sites like Squidoo and StumbleUpon to promote your web site.
  
  
• Using social bookmarking sites to improve search rankings.
  
  
• Creating your own informational site to guide the search engines to links you want them to find.
  
  
• How to create XML sitemaps to make sure the search engines find all of your web pages.
  
  
• How to perform keyword research specifically for pay per click.
  
  
• How to manage your pay per click accounts to generate the maximum number of leads for your marketing dollars.
  
  
• How to write pay per click ads and landing pages that get results.
  
  
• Specific pay per click strategies for Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter.
  
  
• How all the pieces of search engine marketing fit together.
  

This is a book based on real-world strategies that Work Media uses to promote our clients.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, law firm seo, lawyer seo, lawyer website marketing, legal marketing

Google just released a new feature for AdWords that is in beta trials called automatic matching. This could be useful for your the promotion of your law firm's web site if you are not maxing out your budget every month.

The feature is intended to help you capture traffic that you may have missed because you didn't have certain keywords in your account. It works by analyzing your account and displaying your ads for keywords that Google deems relevant, even if you have not specified to show ads for those keywords.

The amount of traffic your existing keywords receive is not supposed to be affected. So if you already spend all of your budget, then the feature probably won't have any affect on your account. However, the pay per click market for legal terms is very expensive, so this might be a good way to get some additional traffic by letting Google automatically manage any budget that may be left over.

Google wants you to spend every dollar of your budget, so this is certainly helpful for Google because it helps the company maximize its revenue.

But is it good for law firm advertisers?

It depends. I would certainly not recommend increasing your budget just to let Google manage some of it for you. If the economics of your account are working in your favor, then it probably won't make much difference. But if you are in a very expensive market (as most legal markets tend to be), then it might be a way to generate some additional targeted traffic.

The following links contain more information about pay per click placement:

http://hubpages.com/hub/placing-ppc-ads

http://placing-ppc-ads.tumblr.com/

Labels: AdWords, automatic matching, Google, law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, lawyer website marketing, legal marketing

Welcome to the Law Firm Internet Marketing blog! We will occasionally publish articles of a more lengthy nature (available via our Articles page), but in this blog we will pass along frequent, small nuggets of information and advice related to online law firm promotion. We have years of experience in the online promotion of law firms, and our intention here is education you so that you make good use of your marketing dollars.

It is so easy to get ripped off in this industry...

We're not going to name names, but there are some very large companies associated with the business of promoting law firms who take on multiple, multiple clients in the same market and the guarantee them all high search engine rankings. How exactly does that work?

Don't fall for it. Educate yourself about this business. And then hire a company you trust. It would be great if you hired us. But regardless, learn as much as you can and then make a decision that you are comfortable with.

We'll do our best help with the process.

Labels: law firm internet marketing, law firm marketing, lawyer website marketing, legal marketing