CaseDetails.com - Internet Marketing for Law Firms

Woohoo! A short note today - I’ve seen this in the past but have never commented on it. CaseDetails.com is #1 in Google for “lawyer SEO” and #7 for “attorney SEO”. Are they high-volume targets? Nope. Are they high-yield targets? You betcha.

Seeing how I haven’t really tried too hard to linkbuild for these keywords, this is a good example of how accurate META tagging and good content can sometimes be enough to achieve good search engine rankings.

[update 102907 - well, the only constant is change. I'm back down to #4 on lawyer SEO. Maybe this post offended them. *L*]

Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine rankings

An XML sitemap is a simple way to “spoon feed” your page locations and other info (like page importance, update period, etc.) to the search engines. Through the recently-adopted Sitemaps.org XML sitemap standard, one file can serve the top 4 search engines. Most webmasters know about Google Webmaster Central and Yahoo! SiteExplorer, but those XML sitemap submission methods are cumbersome. Here’s the short way to tell search engines about your XML sitemap:

Ask.com:

Google:

Yahoo!:

Live.com/MSN.com is still the odd man out. To submit your sitemap to them, (as per Livesearch.spaces.live.com): modify robots.txt to include a line for Sitemap: <sitemap_location> where <sitemap_location>; is the complete URL of your Sitemap Index File (or your sitemap file, if you don’t have an index file).

My advice, use www.xml-sitemaps.com to create your sitemap, upload it to your root directory and use the methods above to submit!

Technorati Tags: XML sitemap, sitemaps

You may have read but over the July 4th holiday, Google posted some subtle changes to their algorithm and rankings. I’ve seen a few notes about website age being one of the most noticeable factors in the changes. It’s a long story, but I’ve turned up pretty clear indications that they also rolled another feature into the new algorithm: Google is now indexing project titles and links within Flash SWF files. I’m still testing to see if they’re also spidering text content found inside SWFs but I can say with 99% certainty that they picked up URLs that exist only inside an SWF I previously had online. What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Google, algorithm, Flash, SWF

I am suspicious of the datasource, but I read an interesting article today about how MSN is taking a lot of market share from Yahoo (in particular). Is MSN up to their standard trickery — rolling traffic from Hotmail and "ClubLive" through their primary URL to inflate the numbers? Or is MSN finally regaining market share above 9%?

Compete Blog » June Search Market Share Update: MSN still up without ClubLive

Happy July 4th. Quick post: I read Yahoo is rolling out some advanced PPC targeting features… ones that will target ads by the individual’s demographics. I’ve been talking to colleagues for a while about this: how we haven’t seen anything yet when it comes to paid and natural search result targeting. Read more about the Yahoo PPC changes on, of all places, MSN.com:

In a bid to keep up with its competition, Yahoo yesterday launched a system to let marketers tailor advertising content to individual users, theoretically making the ads more effective and, therefore, more lucrative for Yahoo.

We’ll see how easy the targeting system is to manage… and what the bid prices will look like for this level of high-ROI ad.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, PPC

I ran across an article on microsoft.com (of all places) on How to Write Web Content for a Busy Audience the other day and it prompted me to organize my thoughts on how to write/modify legal content for online distribution. Of course, the primary goal will be to get rankings for those keyphrases that people are actually searching for rather that what you may think people are searching for. A perfect example: I sometimes encounter lawyers who focus on Matrimonial Law, to the exclusion of all other keywords. Family law, divorce, settlements, etc. are far better choices. Similarly, attorneys occasionally obsess over being ranked for Somewhere County injury attorney. Other than a very select few US counties, this personal preference to think about a firm’s practice within a county-based keyword set ignores the fact that better targets like CityName StateName injury attorney, CityName StateName attorney and CityName injury are more appropriate. So how does an copywriter or web developer decide these things in the online legal market place? Download the PDF on Targeting Legal Content for the Web to find out more…

Technorati Tags: web content, copywriting