If your law firm is building a new website, many of the vendors you interview will offer to provide you with a content management system, or CMS. A CMS is a web-based application that will enable even non-technical staff members at your firm to add content to the website on their own on a self-service basis without having to call a programmer.
Given the importance of optimizing a law firm website for the search engines, a good CMS will ideally offer the following five features to assist with your SEO efforts:
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Customize the following elements for each web page with targeted keyword phrases: Page title, URL, Header tags (e.g., H1), and Meta Description. Being able to populate these elements with targeted keywords helps Google better understand what each page is about and rank it appropriately.
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Add new pages to your website on-the-fly with "deep" links to selected new pages automatically displaying on the homepage under an appropriate heading - this enables you to constantly refresh your website, and especially the homepage, with new content.
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Quickly link to different pages on your site from within other pages using customized "anchor text," thereby enhancing your internal linking structure.
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Add new pages to your navigation and edit the labels for existing navigational links - while perhaps not on the main navigation bar (which is frequently composed of graphics), then at least the text links in any drop down menus.
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Deploy an XML sitemap
Joshua: Appreciate the thoughts on this b/c the designer of my website is going to be teaching me how to update my site by myself. However, at least at this point, your recommendations are over my head. Any help in more layman terms would be appreciated. Of course, once my web people teach me next week, maybe this will all make sense.
Posted by: Craig Niedenthal | November 13, 2008 at 08:04 AM
Craig - hi, good luck. With Justia.com, you should be in good hands. But feel free to reach out if you require any additional help with online marketing tools like HTML email, podcasts or lawyer video. Good luck, Josh
Posted by: Joshua Fruchter | November 13, 2008 at 08:28 PM