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. 

What Findlaw Did Wrong

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.

What About DSS?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/technology/comscore-releases-june--search-engine-rankings/

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

1. Your future clients, who are today?s teenagers, use youtube constantly to watch music videos, funny shorts, reruns and all kinds of other stuff that is constantly being uploaded for free.
2. All media and entertainment websites have video ? these industries are always first to market. They were some of the first to generate websites. It?s always good to watch what these guys do first and see what happens.
3. Attorneys can really be informative through the use of video clips.
4. Video Testimonials from clients are very powerful.
5. More and more attorneys are embracing video.
6. It is very easy to do yourself now without looking like an amateur.
7. The equipment you need to do it yourself is very inexpensive: camera, tripod, your computer.
8. Everyday you wait, you could miss out on a case.

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

All kinds of stuff!

More to come!

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.

Please read this article about Google Search that was in the Washington Post on August 9th, 2007 by Rob Pegoraro. Interesting!!