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Search Engine Optimization

Getting The Most From Your Online Marketing

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SEO – Search Engine Optimization – is the way to bring visitor traffic to your website from search engines. SEO can be enhanced by offering search engines like Google with relevant data about your business and by doing it in a way that makes your content easy to find. Regularly increasing the size of your website and the amount of your original content allows search engines to index more pages on your site, which in turn increases the odds of your site rising higher in the SERPS (Search Engine Ranking Pages). From your original home pages to today’s brief blog post, your website should strengthen your SEO performance from front to back.

Always be certain to add the “meta” information for each page or blog post on your site, so that search engines can more easily recognize the content on that page. Search engine bots “crawl” websites daily, but if a web page fails to offer a detailed description of what it’s about, search crawlers may not index the page correctly. Completing the meta information is part of pursuing the best SEO practices.

Internal and external link creation is another essential component in any successful SEO campaign. By linking thoroughly to other pages on your website, you help your visitors find the content they seek, and search engines can perform a more thorough crawl on each page of your site. Social media, of course, is vital today to any effort to engage users. Social media has emerged as an increasingly indispensable way to share your website’s content, to tell visitors about your business, to answer consumer questions, and more. As you engage more followers on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, your content will be more widely-shared, meaning more traffic to your website, meaning more business.

Most business owners, of course, have their hands full just doing business, and they don’t have time for (or interest in) search engine bots or meta information. By hiring a committed team of online marketing professionals, business owners can ease their online marketing anxieties and focus on the business side of their businesses.

Link Tactics to Avoid

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Forward Linking

Forward links are links that point from the target website, the website which a business or professional is trying to promote, to a third party website. Search engines will take note of the sites that a target site points to and, when the links are legitimate, will consider the target site as relevant to the same topic as the site at the end of the link. This is why it can be advantageous to link to well respected websites within a niche – but this should be done with caution, as the target website doesn’t want to promote a direct competitor.

Backlinking

Backlinks are links from a third party website that point back to a target website. Because of the way that search engines are designed to rank websites, backlinks can be very valuable to a website’s chances of climbing search engine page ranks. The more backlinks that exist on the web that point back to a target website, the more relevant to a given topic the search engine will perceive the target site to be. Interestingly, the reason for this is academic.

In the world of academic publishing, published papers that are cited the most are considered more scholarly than those that are cited least. Since most people wouldn’t cite a paper or link to a site unless they thought there would be something worth referencing, this philosophy makes sense. Not all backlinks, however, are created equal, which means that some backlinking strategies can actually hurt a website’s rank on search engines.

Link Tactics to Avoid

Link circling is an agreement between several sites to link to each other in a circle or some other type of pattern. So, site 1 would link to site 2, which would link to site 3, which links back to site 1. While clever, search engines can detect link circles and don’t usually favor the sites involved.

While linking to respected niche websites can do a target website good, linking to a website which has been removed can make readers and search engines alike think that the site is poorly maintained and/or out of date. Links on a target website should remain active and all broken links should be repaired or removed. When a search engine perceives a website as out of date, it will usually suppress it.

Finally, link listing should be avoided. This goes for forward link lists and backlink lists. Target websites should not include pages that are primarily links, nor should a business or professional pay for a site’s link to appear on a third party’s link list. Search engines usually don’t favor link lists because they have been over abused by spammers. Some social networks, however, do not discriminate against link lists, but owners of target websites should not expect their link listing efforts to help them climb to the top of a search engine result pages any time soon.

For the most accurate advice on the best linking strategy for a particular website, businesses and professionals should partner with a professional online and search engine marketing team. The smaller the team, the better, as the service provided will be much more customized and responsive than any large agency could hope to offer.

Backlink Placement Strategy

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Anyone with a basic knowledge of search engine optimization (SEO) will understand exactly how important backlinks are to SEO strategy. In a nutshell, backlinks are links from one website to a target website. The site that wants the search engine benefit of the backlink is the target website. The more relevant places that a backlink can be placed online, the higher in search engine rank the target site will be able to climb. Backlinks can be placed:

In Status Updates

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ status updates are great places to include links to a website because social networks maintain their own search engines which are becoming increasingly popular among web users looking for products or services. Internal search engines index the content of status updates the same way search engines index the content of websites. The more popular that a site can become on a social network’s search engine, then the more likely the site will be able to climb in popularity on external search engines.

In Signature Section of Forum Postings

Forums dedicated to the topic of a business or professional’s niche are great places for businesses and professionals to network, attract leads, and leave links to websites. Most forums allow users to include a “signature” section in every post that imprints a preselected comment or statement to the bottom of every post. Once a signature is set, the business or professional can answer questions or comment on niche related issues on the forum, leaving behind a relevant backlink with every response.

In Blog Posts

Creating blog posts is perhaps one of the best ways to market a website online. Blog posts can be hosted on target sites or created as guest posts for other sites. If written on another site, the link in the post will be a back link and will count toward the target site’s overall SEO rank.

Avoid Overdoing It

While posting backlinks to a target website in the locations above is good for SEO, there is such a thing as overdoing it. Putting too many backlinks on a single page can make search engines interpret the page containing the backlinks as spam, and will penalize both the host website and the target website. Status updates should contain actual substance and context instead of just links.

Signature sections on digital forums should be attached to useful and relevant responses to forum discussions. Posting frivolous posts just to get a signature section online will get a person banned from the forum and will do next to nothing for the target site’s overall SEO rank. As for blog posts, a single backlink in a single blog post up to 500 words is usually sufficient to help a site’s SEO rank without activating search engine spam filters.

Longer blog posts, those over 500 words, can usually afford an extra backlink, but it should point to a different section of the target site. In other words, backlinks in the same piece of content should all be different. One backlink can point a homepage and another can point to an “About Us” page. One backlink can point to a Facebook page, and one can point to a Twitter feed.

Blogs Are Big News

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Increasingly, Americans are abandoning television and newspapers to get their news from the internet. Surprisingly, however, many of those abandoning traditional media aren’t transitioning to news sites like the Drudge Report, Huffington Post, or CNN.com. Instead, large percentages are now “getting their news” from social media sites, according to a new study from the Pew Research Journalism Project.

Americans are seeking news from sources they trust: social media networks. Facebook is the largest social networking site; users include 64 percent of the adults in the United States. The Pew study shows that half of these adults are using Facebook as a primary news source. That would mean that 32% of the adults in the U.S. are relying on Facebook as a news source.

In terms of usage, YouTube is the second-largest site, used by 51 percent of adults in the U.S., although only 20 percent of the users (about 10 percent of America’s adults) consider YouTube a news source.

Twitter, Reddit, and LinkedIn are also used as news sources, but by much smaller numbers of users. Of particular note for law firms and “high-end” retailers is the demographic group receiving its news via social media. It trends towards the highly-educated, high-income, 30-to-64-year olds, precisely the demographic that interests law firms, accounting firms, healthcare businesses, and high tech electronics retailers.

The recent Pew study, then, is good news for bloggers and others who make social media a marketing priority. Blogs move, to a great extent, through social networks. Blogs posts are shared by the readers who have the strongest interest in the post’s topic. Articles and newsletters do not get the traction that blog posts when it comes to sharing; blog posts are precise, timely, and topical, unlike “permanent” website content.

The takeaway: You need to be blogging. Blogs grow influence. A blogger sharing insights, commentary, and opinion establishes a name as a trusted, reliable voice. That influence grows as your content is shared over Facebook and other networks. If you don’t feel confident as a writer, or if you’re as busy as most professionals and business owners, consider hiring a free-lance blog writer or a social media marketing company to provide the timely, interesting blog posts you need.

LinkedIn For Law Firms

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LinkedIn drives more traffic to law firm websites than all other social media sites put together. Several recent surveys indicate that nearly two-thirds of the traffic to corporate websites from social media sites is coming directly from LinkedIn. Based on that figure, LinkedIn is probably driving much more traffic to your firm’s website(s) than all other social media sites combined, and for a number of reasons.

Firstly, LinkedIn is widely perceived as a reliable source for information about professionals and firms. Secondly, a lawyer’s LinkedIn pages will usually land near the top of a user’s Google search for an attorney or law firm. And thirdly, someone making a referral is likely to send a link to the attorney’s LinkedIn profile. Additionally, most attorneys now routinely print a link to their LinkedIn profile on emails, business cards, and other social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Be sure that you’re taking advantage of everything that LinkedIn offers. Make sure your profile is thorough and complete, and update frequently. Otherwise, you’ll probably miss potential traffic to your site.

While the importance of LinkedIn can’t be overstated, professionals and small businesses should also note that Twitter’s influence is up significantly while Facebook seems to be in decline. Twitter generated 14 percent of all visits from social media sites to corporate websites, up from 4 percent only two years ago. While Facebook generated 17 percent of all visits from social media sites to corporate websites, that figure represents a huge drop from Facebook’s 30 percent figure in 2011. Visits from Flickr, YouTube, and Google+ are virtually nonexistent. LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook now generate 95% of the traffic to corporate websites from social media sites.

The takeaway for attorneys and law firms is clear; for the best results from social media, take full advantage of LinkedIn and start taking advantage of Twitter.

Legal Blogs Gaining Prestige

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Only a few years ago, blogs were pretty much the monopoly of those offering their personal (and sometimes extreme) opinions on politics, religion, sports, and pop culture. Today, however, blogging is seen as a nearly indispensable element in online marketing, and nearly three-quarters of social media marketers have established online blogs.

Why has blogging emerged as such an important internet marketing tool? Compared to, say, preparing an email blast, a blog post is quick and easy. In fact, the large law firms that first posted blogs with the LexBlog Network did so to save the time it took to prepare conventional email newsletters. Legal blogs are now perceived as credible sources for news, information, and legal insights. They’re cited by other attorneys and by the news media, and they’re easy to read from mobile devices. Walter Olsen, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, believes that legal blogs will soon replace law journals. Of the current Am Law 200 law firms, 78 percent publish blogs.

Blogs provide other advantages to marketers and especially to law firms. Well-written blogs are apt to be shared. They help lawyers and firms attract clients, and they help boost an attorney’s search engine ranking. Unlike a law journal, a blog post is instantly available everywhere. And you can incorporate your blog into your own website, establish it as a separate site, or contribute it to a “blogging community” site like Open Salon.

Of course, you’ll want to post links to your blog on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Coordinated social media marketing is critical to overall marketing success. Finally, if you don’t have a great deal of time for writing, or if you just don’t feel competent as a prose writer, you may want to consider hiring a ghost-writer or a social media marketing company that provides content-creating services.