For law firms interested in optimizing their website for the search engines, below are links to some cool tools to address various search engine optimization issues. If you have any other tools you want to share with our readers, we invite you to submit them to the blog through the "Comments" link below the post.
1. Search Engine Spider Simulator: search engines rank your law firm website based on the subject matter of the content and links they find on your webpages. Alot of content and links displayed on your website may not actually be visible to search engines, e.g. Flash-based content, content generated through javascript, and content displayed as images. This tool simulates a search engine by displaying the contents of a webpage exactly how a search engine would see it.
To see specifically how Google views the text and links on your law firm website without all the surrounding images and other visual "bells and whistles," find your website in Google's search results, click "Cached" and then, on the next page, click "cached text only."
2. Google Webmaster Tools: For those with an account, Google offers a treasure trove of diagnostic tools for webmasters. For example, you can:
- Make sure Google has access to your site, and see when the Googlebot last visited.
- View URLs that Google had trouble crawling and why it couldn't crawl them.
- View top content from your site and see the words that other sites use to link to it.
- Find the top queries that drive traffic to your site and where your site is included in the top search results
- See how your site is indexed by Google and which of your pages are included in the index
3. Keyword Density Checker: this tool will help you determine the frequency of certain keyword and phrases on your homepage (or other URL's you may plug in) as a percentage of the total text on the page. As this site explains, "keyword density is important because search engines use this information to categorize a site's theme." The density of your important keywords needs to be balanced - too low and you will not get the optimum benefit, too high and your page might get flagged for "keyword spamming." Check out the full list of free SEO tools on the seochat website.
4. MarketLeap Search Engine Marketing Tools: This site offers a bunch of helpful tools. For example, the Keyword Verification tool checks several search engines to see whether your site is in the top three pages of results on those search engines for certain keyword or phrases.
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