Law Websites' High Internet Exposure
Practical Guide to marketing a legal website and attorney internet marketing!


1. Search Engine Optimization.

- Tilte
Title is pretty important for your legal website. Website title is your identity on the net.
It will appear on the top of surfer’s window display and also as a bookmark title.
But it will most importantly serve as a text link to your website when search engine results displayed.
Lawyers need to think of a descriptive title, title that would be in relation with their legal practice area for example.
Do not limit your title to your law firm or your own name as an attorney.
However, keep in mind that you need to keep your title no longer than 7 words.
That is why keep away from using ‘the’, ‘and’, ‘with’, etc.
The title for your law related website also needs to be interest and attention grabbing.
Surfers in need of legal assistance need to find what they are looking for in the text of your title (or something that would make them think they may get it through exploring your website’s pages).
Make sure you include in there what you use to differentiate from competition.

Your legal website’s title may look like this for example:
"NY immigration law firm – lowest fees guaranteed!"

- META Description
The META Description of your law related website is of great importance.
It actually briefly describes the legal text content of your web pages.
In most cases it needs to be no longer than 250 characters but lawyers need to keep in mind that only first 60-70 characters are actually displayed in search results, so try to include in the first sentence the essence of your law site’s text content.
It may repeat your title as well.
It also needs to make surfers aware of your legal area of practice.
Make sure it includes your keywords there as well: law, firm, legal practice, city of practice, etc.
Description also needs to be attractive.
You can here better differentiate yourself form competitor law firms.

Attorney’s website sample description:
"NY immigration law firm – lowest fees guaranteed. Legal services for Mexican citizens seeking legal admission to US. Green Card Application for only … USD – best price guaranteed!"

- META Keywords
Unlike META Description, META Keywords is not absolutely necessary for legal websites.
Lawyers need to have their keywords properly optimized.
That means the need to market their websites through carefully choosing the appropriate keywords.
Keywords need to be present in your law firm website’s text.
They also need to be highly used by legal websites’ surfers.
You may use some of the free online webmaster tools for generating proper law related keywords as well.
Keywords need to be included in the title and description of your legal website as well.
Keep in mind that you should not use a given keyword more than three times.
Keywords need to be properly separated by “,” as well.

A sample META Keywords:
"NY, NY, NY, immigration, immigration, immigration, law, law, law, firm, firm, firm, lowest, lowest, lowest, low, low, low, fees, fees, fees, guaranteed"

- H1, H2, H3 header tags
Lawyers should make sure their legal websites do have H1, H2 … tags included in their html.
Web designers tend to skip that part nowadays but that is incorrect.
Law websites owners (attorneys and law firms) need to make sure that would not happen at the very least.
" text " causes the law text to be displayed as level one heading.
Attorneys need to know that when printed this will appear at the very start of the page – that’s why this tag is of great importance.
Something that lawyers need to have in mind when search engine optimizing and marketing their law firm websites.
So make sure your desired keywords appear in one or two header tags.

Sample header tags:
"NY immigration law firm – lowest fees guaranteed!"

- Website's Text
Body text is your law website’s text content.
Attorneys need to make sure their websites provide surfers with useful and descriptive information.
Law websites’ owners also need to have their texts appropriately ‘stuffed’ with keywords.
However, they need to be carefully of not going over the density limit (1.7%).
Otherwise that would prove negative rather than positive and useful.
More is not always better.
Lawyers should include the desired keywords in the first paragraph possibly.
It is considered by major search engines the most important text section of your law firm’s website.
Keep your body text within 500 words per page and no bigger than 100K (msn).

- Title Description and Images’ ALT
Repeat your law website’s title in the ALT of your GIF and JPG image tags.
That is of plus to SEO though not of great importance.

- Links (Navigation). Frames. URL Keywords.
Links in your law site need to be clear.
They also need to be text or image links.
Flash and java script links are not indexed by search engines.
Lawyers should make sure they provide each web page with a return link to the homepage.
Navigation is of great importance to SEO.
That is why law sites should keep away from using frames.
They are not search engine friendly and thus their website’s internet marketing efforts will prove inefficient.
Use your keywords in your links URLs – that helps search engines crawl your law firm website in a better way.
If you could have your domain name related to your legal area of practice (keywords) then that would be even better.
Do your best to avoid broken links and sloppy code as well.
Develop your law website in a way that each page is meant to focus on a particular keyword or phrase.

- Link Popularity
Link popularity is the total number of websites that link to your law firm site.
Link popularity may dramatically targeted traffic to your site and thus make your marketing efforts much more efficient.
Link popularity check is one of the best ways to quantifiably and independently measure your legal website's online awareness and overall visibility.
List with web resources on free webmaster tools (and other apps as well) will be made available soon after the whole article gets finished.
Link to law related websites.
Business oriented at the very least.
It’s mostly targeted traffic that you need and linking to legal websites is of crucial importance.
There are 3 basic ways of achieving that goal:
1) online research;
2) other law sites’ link resources;
3) specialized link market websites.
You might be also interested in submitting an instant link with my law firm marketing related website – to do so, please follow that link!
However, you do need to avoid ‘bad neighborhood’ – that may ruin your Website Rank!

- Number of Pages. Quality of writing.
It is important that law related websites have more than a few pages.
That is a common mistake made by law firms.
The average law firm website would consist of 5-10 web pages, providing surfers with basic legal practice and contact information.
Attorneys need to do more than that.
After all, lawyers are those knowing how to write, right?
So consider writing articles as a good way of making your site more search engine friendly (with proper keywords taken into consideration, of course).
You might also find it a great idea to run a message board for FREE LEGAL ADVICE.
Required software is free.
Avoid misspelling as well.

- robots.txt
robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which pages to index.
The following is an example of robots.txt allowing all agents to crawl all files:

User-Agent: *
Disallow:


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Read Also:
The Multidisciplinary Law Firm
Establishing Law Firm Partnerhips Abroad

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