Legal Internet Marketing Blog

From the people who brought you the social networking sensation twitter.com, comes tweetlaw.com, a Twitter application designed specifically for legal professionals. Why tweetlaw? The webpage explains it like this:

“We believe that sometimes, labels are necessary. So many careers and specialties fall under the legal profession, and we want to give you the opportunity to stand out in your field.”

The site was launched on April 1st, 2009 and as of the writing of this article on May 10th, 2009 has 389 legal professionals tweeting.

Signing up for an account on tweetlaw.com is easy. You login by using your twitter.com username and password. You are then able to make a custom tweetlaw.com profile. Unlike twitter, your tweetlaw.com profile can be as long as you want it to be (twitter limits it to 140 characters). Creating your profile also allows you to specify several URLs to associate with your profile, one for your “personal” site, another for your ‘work” site. You can also add information like your mailing address, phone number, email address, and a bio about who you are and what you do.

Tweetlaw.com also allows you to specify up to 4 “categories” that describe what you do. Currently the site features 40 categories to choose from including: Blawgers, Law Students, Litigators, Paralegals, Family Lawyers, Small Law Firms and Big Law Firms to name a few. These categories feature members tweeting about relevant subject matter.

Like twitter, tweetlaw.com can serve a purpose for attorneys who are looking to effectively market themselves online. A large online legal network is a useful tool when gauging the temperament of lawyers nationwide. It is also very useful for bouncing marketing ideas off of your peers who might otherwise be unavailable, or unwilling, to help you. Rebroadcasting your blog stories on twitter can also increase readership and get your articles read by more individuals, who may decide to link those articles to their own blogs/ tweets (if they are any good).

Since the site is relatively new, the indexing of this information on search engines could take some time, but it is always good to have incoming links from reputable, popular locations on the internet, and tweetlaw.com seems to be destined to be just that.

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Legal Marketing Tips , Social Media , Social Networking

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LinkedIn is a great online networking tool that caters to the individual who is less interested in connecting with ‘buddies’ or ‘friends’ and more interested in networking with like-minded and career oriented individuals on the Internet.

What separates Linkedin from other social networking sites is that it is designed with the business user in mind. With 40 million members in over 200 countries around the world and executives from all Fortune 500 companies in its ranks, LinkedIn profiles are becoming necessities for the users who are looking to not only network online, but also maintain a strong, branded online presence.

From the LinkedIn webpage:

“When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments. You can then form enduring connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of qualified professionals and experts.”

The benefits of LinkedIn are numerous and quickly recognizable. Besides being able to manage the information that’s publicly available about you as a professional, you can build your client development, collaborate with peers on projects, even partner with them for potential business opportunities, gain new insight from discussions with other professionals who share your interests and also place job listings for your organization.

Perhaps, most importantly, is the clout that google seems to lend to LinkedIn profiles. It is very rare to Google an individual’s name and not find their Linkedin profile among the first few organic search engine results. This is very important for several reasons. Most obviously, this increases your web presence and visibility, but it also enables you to control the information that people searching for you see.

If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, you should get one now. They are free and easy to setup: https://www.linkedin.com/.

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Legal Marketing Tips , Social Networking

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Everyone knows that a good sitemap on your webpage is imperative to getting your pages noticed by Google. What many people don’t know is that Google has a Sitemap Protocol that allows you to inform all search engines about URLs on your websites that are available for crawling in a more dynamic fashion. This Sitemap Protocol is rendered as an XML file that lists all of the URLs on your site like a normal sitemap would, however its scalability and custom commands allows you other options that a typical HTML sitemap would not.

XML Sitemaps enable webmasters to include information about URL’s like when the page was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other pages in the site. The document provided by Google describes the formats for Sitemap files and also explains where you should post your Sitemap files so that search engines can retrieve them.

Some of the XML tags that are described in the document are:

• <lastmod>: This tag indicates the date of the last modification of this file.


• <changefreq>: Indicates how frequently the page is likely to change. Values like ‘always’, ‘hourly’, ‘daily’, ‘weekly’, ‘monthly’, ‘yearly’, and ‘never’ are all acceptable.


• <priority>: Indicates the priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site. Valid values range from 0.0 to 1.0.

XML Sitemaps can be a valuable tool for your legal website that allow search engine crawlers to more effectively and efficiently crawl your site. It is important to note, however, that the Sitemap Protocol supplements, but does not replace, the crawl-based mechanisms that search engines already use to discover URLs. As Google’s XML sitemap page indicates:
“Using this protocol does not guarantee that your webpages will be included in search indexes… using this protocol will not influence the way your pages are ranked by Google”

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Legal Marketing Tips , Legal Web Site , SEO Tools

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With today’s economic woes affecting seemingly all aspects of business, many law firms large and small are struggling with exactly how to spend their marketing budgets. A solid indicator of where to spend your money can come from looking at other industries, gauging the climate of search engine marketing budgets across the board to get a feel for how much of your budget should be spent online.

A report published on emarketer.com regarding a study conducted by Econsultancy and SEO firm Guava, indicated that online marketers around the globe are increasingly turning to search marketing tactics.

Fifty-five percent of respondents said they planned to raise spending on SEO, and 45% said the same of paid search. In addition, 31% of SEO and 32% of paid search users said they intended to maintain their budgets.

It seems that business marketing executives are learning what many of our clients have known for quite some time, that search engine marketing is the most reliable, efficient tool in attracting new customers. SEO offers inherent advantages over paid search options, although the benefits may take time to make themselves apparent.

“SEO improves organic listings, which Internet users prefer over paid search, and it is cost-effective,” said eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman. “Furthermore, optimization works across all search engines, and an optimized site does not drop off the first results page even when marketer spending slows or stops—as it can with paid search.”

Although this article refers primarily to online sites that have a traditional, commerce driven product, the goal of a solid legal Internet marketing strategy is always the same, increase traffic to the site and visibility in organic searches for relevant keyword terms. All attorneys, regardless of their specific mode of practice, can benefit from a sound online marketing campaign whose focal point is a strong SEO plan.

Our firm has specialized in building these types of marketing plans for more than 10 years. Our track record of success is well documented and we remain at the forefront of search engine marketing tactics. Contact us today, we can help your firm dominate online searches and help potential clients find and contact your website first.

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Legal Marketing Tips , Legal Web Site , Straight Talk about SEO

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Linking with reputable sites can win you points with the search engines, which highly prize viable networking achievements. However, if you’re careless about which sites you link to, you could run into trouble.

The Internet is awash with so-called “link farms” – shady services that offer to artificially inflate a site’s network in the hopes of fooling the search engines into thinking that the site is popular. While using link farms can actually yield some short-term gain, this process puts you at risk for getting de-listed by the search engines and thus ruining your online legal marketing efforts.

A better approach is to develop with great on site resources, including original content, answers to questions about your niche of the law, and biographical info and data/awards about your firm. With this foundation in place, other valid, high-ranking sites will likely want to link to YOU. Your cachet as a “high-value” site makes you appealing as a link to other high-value sites, which also want to climb the ranks. So by refocusing your efforts to improve site quality, you can coincidentally improve your likelihood of making important new online friends.

You can build content and links simultaneously – and in fact most successful owners do “walk and chew gum at the same time” – but remember that these two processes are linked. It all starts with unique, well-branded, well-developed source material.

Posted by Susan Sipe | Permalink | Email This Post

Posted In: Content Development , Legal Web Site , Quality Linking Strategies

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