We're often asked by law firm marketers to advise on the top factors to focus on to optimize a website or blog for search engine visibility. Sorry to say, but there's no secret formula or silver bullet, and any self-professed "SEO consultant" who tells you otherwise is selling snake oil.
SEOMoz, a leading provider of SEO tools and resources, polls the top SEO experts around the world every two years to obtain their insights into the top positive (and negative) factors for search engine optimization. The 2009 report, which surveyed 72 experts, identifies the top five positive factors.
- Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links (ranked "very important" by 73% of experts) (note: this factor refers to links to your site or blog from third parties where the links are comprised of keywords relevant to your website or blog, or even better to the page to which they link)
- External Link Popularity (ranked "very important" by 71% of experts) (note: refers to the overall quantity and quality of inbound links - low quality links would be those from sites that have nothing to do with the content on your site - e.g., if a law firm gets a link from the website of a laundromat - worse, if the third party site is a "link farm" - then a link from them would be highly negative)
- Diversity of Link Sources (ranked "very important" by 67% of experts) (note: refers to variety of links from many unique root domains)
- Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag (ranked "very important" by 66% of experts) (note: refers to populating your meta title tags with relevant keywords - should be different for each page of the site)
- Trustworthiness of the Domain (ranked "very important" by 66% of experts )(note: refers to trustworthiness of the domains linking to you)(i.e. better to get a link from Amazon than from Joe's Discount Books).
Other positive factors (along with comments from the SEO experts polled) are included in the report.
The report also highlights "negative" factors - i.e., things you should not be doing or you risk harming your search engine visibility, or even getting blacklisted.
Click here for the full 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors report
We recommend that law firm marketers read the report so at least they will be knowledgeable about SEO factors when talking to vendors. SEOMoz even offers a service where you can sign up for a month and ask any SEO question to a team of experts.
That said, while there's a strong consensus concerning the top positive and negative SEO factors, executing design and deployment of a law firm website or attorney blog incorporating those factors is a different story. In particular, law firms will want to work with a vendor that offers software designed to take advantage of the top positive SEO factors (e.g., customizable meta title and description tags, search-engine friendly URL's, self-service site updates, etc.).
Comments