Law Firm Website Designer

If you're here, you must be looking for a way to make Search Engine Optimization work for your law firm website.

First, let’s look at how crawler-based search engines work (both Google and Yahoo fall in this category). Each search engine has its own automated program called a "web spider" or "web crawler" that indexes the web. The main purpose of the spider is to index web pages, collect the content, and follow the links (both internal and external). The spider then deposits the information collected into the search engine’s database.
When potential law firm clients enter a query in the search box of a search engine, the search engine’s job is to find the most relevant results to the query by matching the search query to the information in its index.  So, if a person types in “Los Angeles DUI lawyer,” the search engine tries to find the website which are most relevant to this search term.

What makes or breaks a search engine is how well it answers your question when you perform a search. That’s based on what’s called the search engine algorithm which is basically a bunch of factors that the search engine uses to say “hey is this page RELEVANT or NOT?”. The higher your law firm’s website page ranks for these factors, the the higher your page will get displayed in the search engine result pages.

Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position, and this is what law firm SEO experts are hired for. A SEO expert's job has two aspects: On-Site and Off-Site.

On-Site SEO: are the things that you can do on your law firm website, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.

Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.

A good law firm SEO specialist will be able to use both of these avenues to generate traffic for your lawyer website.

Choosing the right keywords to base your site optimization around is an important first step. General or generic keywords are usually not the best approach, and sometimes it's better to be a little more specific and focus on niche keywords relating to your product or service.

For example, let's talk about www.devedit.com -- DevEdit is our WYSIWYG HTML editing component that drops into browser-based applications.

The problem is, there are a LOT of WYSIWYG HTML editors, but how can we get DevEdit to appear in Google's top 10 rankings? Well, let's see. Trying to optimize for the keyword "HTML" alone would be a tough task, as it's too general. There are HTML editors, HTML tutorials, HTML articles, etc.

We need to be more specific, which means:

1. Targeting a more suitable market that is looking for a content editing solution
2. Competing with fewer websites targeting the same keywords
3. Optimizing for keywords that people actually use when performing searches

Targeting a suitable market will depend on your website, as well as the products and services you offer. Try to be specific with your keywords, and remember that people no longer use single keyword search phrases - the average search phrase contains 3-5 related words.

For example, if you're optimizing for a web development site and you're located in Sydney, Australia, use keywords such as "web development Sydney" or "web development services Australia".

To find out how many websites are competing with your keywords -- either intentionally or not -- simply do a search on Google and note down how many results are returned. In our case, for "online html editor", we're competing with 9,080,000 sites. The more sites that are competing for your keywords, the harder it will be to get on the front page.