
Whoa!! I just got this forwarded to me by a bunch of my Attorney Web clients. Looks like Findlaw was up to no good trying to circumvent the natural evolution of organic search. Honestly, I got confused reading what they were offering. I think Oilman did a great job of breaking it down, in a humorous way, exactly what Findlaw was doing for SEO (click to read)
Many of our clients are ex-Findlaw people and have other horror stories about their web design and search engine optimization practices.
Natural or organic search is exactly that. Whenever you "buy" links and try to incorporate that into the organic world, you will get in trouble by the Google police. If you want to buy links to your site, go for it! It's not illegal, nor is it frowned upon by Google - not at all!
It's just called ADWORDS.
Findlaw is (or was) allegedly trying to sell links to upset the delicate balance of natural placement by PageRank.
PageRank is simply how popular your page is to other web pages. It is a critical element to the way Google measures sites naturally and FAIRLY against each other.
Here's another lawyer blog that provides another view of what happened to Findlaw.
Stick to adding relevant content to your website for the services you offer and you will be fine.
DSS does not do anything tricky like that. At FWM, we make sure that we do not do anything, or advise our clients to do anything, that will hurt them on the search engines. DSS is designed to be an easy to use tool to update your website in the areas that matter most to Google while still paying careful attention and respect to the natural balance of organic search.
PageRank is a naturally occurring event in that other website will link to your page if it is relevant thereby increasing your PageRank status. DSS gives you easy and fast access to deploy your content and links to others. DSS promotes the social aspect of the web without trying trick the search engines.
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If you follow the link below, you will find an article in Business Week, which is a publication that we all respect here at Foster Web Marketing.
But having said that, there is nothing in the article about the importance of good search engine placement. While the article is loaded with good tips on keeping customers and utilizing the communications aspect of the internet, none of these suggestions will do you any good if they don't know you are there.
Search engine placement will soon become THE standard for marketing.
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The Yellow Pages are going to go the way of the dodo bird and television antennas.
An article in the New York Times confirms what we have suspected for quite awhile now. 49% of internet users turn to search engines to get information. Recipes, addresses, directions, oriental rugs, or anything that you can imagine. And as we definitely know, they are using search engines to find legal help. They look for divorce attorneys, criminal defense attorneys, tax attorneys, and most certainly personal injury attorneys. And the lawyers who are smart about search engine optimization are the ones who will benefit.
As the population gets older and more computer-savvy, the number of people who use search engines on a daily basis isn't going to do anything but go up. There is no better time to position your website to take advantage of these rising numbers.
Contact Foster Web Marketing to see how your firm can benefit from attorney search engine optimization.
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Apparently, Google AdWords weren't functioning properly last week. With the amount of money that it costs to run an AdWord on Google, even a half second where it isn't doing what it's supposed to is a horrible waste of money.
While AdWords might be the simple way to get prominently listed, the costs are more than your average PI law firm can bear. Working the search engines organically is a much more cost effective way of achieving good search engine placement, especially if there are the inevitable crashes and bugs in the AdWords system.
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017830.html
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An internet tracking group called comScore released it's June 2008 reports, and in case anyone would dare to think otherwise, Google is still on top of the search engine business.
According to the report, 61.5% of June searches happened through Google. It's nearest competitor is Yahoo, which only captured just over 20% of internet searches.
While doing well with Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all the rest is nothing to sneeze at, having a solid ranking on Google will do much more to improve the visibility of your site.
To see the story on this report, follow this link:
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A recent article at the BBC makes a very interesting point. The behavior of some web surfers might cause web-counters to overestimate the number of visitors that you are actually getting.
The article also gives some column inches to the importance of time spent on sites by individual users, which we have considered to be an important indicator for years.
To read the article, follow the link below.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6564671.stm
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Google wants to return the most relevant information when someone types a search request into its box. Now, ‘relevant’ has gotten bigger, even ‘universal.’
Google “Universal Search,” which we are expecting to see in November, lists maps, news, images and books related to a search query. Right now, you can get these returns by clicking on different tabs on the Google search bar. In just a few months, they will be combined into one. Video will be next!
Check out the Universal Search Article
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An article in The Wall Street Journal mentions that newspapers aren't even bothering to go after the out of town market for online ads. Most of the ad revenue for the online advertising is coming from local sales.
Just because someone from Peoria, Illinois CAN access the daily newspaper of Tallahassee, Florida whenever he wants doesn't mean that he WILL. This serves as an example as to why it's important to stick with the immediate geographical area of your firm. While you might get the odd case from the other side of the state, it's more practical to keep your nets closer to your own boat.
Focusing your keywords, content and news updates on your immediate geographical area will bring in much better results.
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DSSv5 will let clients edit the most important aspects of their home page wihout having to know HTML code. This important update allows users to update import SEO aspects of their website like PAGE TITLE, KEYWORDS, DESCRIPTION, EASILY ADD CONTEXTUAL LINKS IN THE CONTENT.
All kinds of stuff!
More to come!
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OK, I already admitted to not reading the paper because I don't like being depressed, but I don't like not knowing what's going on either. So, my wife reads the paper and tells me all the happy things!
I just added to my library an interesting article about whether Google is all that it is cracked up to be. The gist is that there are always people smarter than you. Google is becoming so big and so dependent on Pay-Per-Click that other smaller search companies have an opportunity if they play their cards right.
Read More about "Is Google the BEST or NO?"