Should You Disclaim the Information on Your Blog or Website?
According to the South Carolina Bar and also the opinions it lists for support, the key question is whether the information you provide is based on a set of facts submitted to the attorney by a questioner or generalized information about a legal issue. A fuzzy area to me is where a blogger writes about a client’s situation without revealing confidential information which provides the facts and then states the advice.

What is the Difference Between Legal Advice & Legal Information?
Is that specific enough to require a disclaimer by the attorney that this information isn’t to be relied on as legal advice? My guess is that the attorney would be in the clear because he isn’t responding to a specific question from an inquiring individual. However, I would recommend against delineating fact patterns in blog posts or on your website. Instead, pose a series of questions that a client facing specific facts should consider before a lawyer could provide any advice.

In the specific case the South Carolina Bar reviews, it objects to the “answers” website because the lawyer gets compensated by a third party, not the client and the attorney is answering specific questions from individuals, meaning a generalized disclaimer not to consider the information as legal advise fails to apply.

Longevity gets you recognition

How long ago your domain was established has impact on the visibility of your website.  Sites that got into the game on the early side have an advantage over a more recently created domain.  Following other SEO practices compounds this benefit: rich content, key words, proper coding, and link popularity to name a few.  Similarly, SEO value has some dependency on the age of the inbound links to your site, so the inter-relationships of your link sources are important as well.

Google employs a method designed to minimize search engine spam by relegating new sites to a kind of a waiting period – approximately 90 days or so – before a site attains page rank. Known as the “sandbox effect”, it’s Google’s way of seeing if new sites are serious about having a significant and substantive web presence. Why the sandbox? Take a look at human behavioral traits and childhood development. It comes from the concept that all new sites are put into a sandbox where they are allowed to play together, away from adults. As the young sites demonstrate mature behavior, they are allowed to coexist with the grown ups, or the other well established sites.

Action items for domain owners
Following are some easy tips to help your efforts:

1. Hold on to your domains as long as you can, and keep registration current.  Top flight domain name registrars provide automatic recurring billing, making renewal simple and efficient.
2. Consider registering a domain before you actually need it, and think about registering variations in addition to your top level domain.  You’ll find the cost lower for some extensions like .co and .tv.
3. Consider purchasing a pre-owned domain.  This can prove costly, all depending on the seller’s asking price, but it is bound to negate the sandbox period.
4. Keep track of the age of your domain at ths site: http://www.webconfs.com/domain-age.php

You sometime hear about athletes that amass incredible stats over their playing careers, they may state in a self-deprecating manner that they were lucky just to “stick around long enough” to achieve such lofty numbers.  We can be sure that there’s more to it than just sticking around.

OK, you’ve taken steps to make your site visible. But this isn’t always a good thing without credibility. These two themes are linked. I think of credibility as “visibility plus.” Becoming a credible go-to attorney on specific issues boosts your visibility in the best possible way. Here’s how it works: When you have a niche, you are seen as an expert in a particular area and become a credible source in the industry.

How to make this happen? If you’ve written or spoken on a topic or within a particular practice area, your task is relatively easy. Set up a blog. Then break down the material into separate topics and transform them into blog posts. Finally, set up Google alerts using the key words in your area of expertise to alert you to related current events and blog about them when they happen.

If you don’t have an expertise yet, then get started. Review your inventory of legal work and focus on an area where you can become an expert. Start reading up on the subject, look at other blogs on that topic and create your own. Think you don’t have time? Start slowly and commit yourself to thirty minutes a week and soon you will be blogging your way to expert status.

Tools Make It Easier

You don’t want to spending your days posting tweets, or Facebook updates or Linkedin status reports. I’ve found a free tool that allows you to create content easily and schedule it for posting to up to five different social networking platforms. There are limitations to the free version but its a great way to get your feet wet and save time doing it as well. The platform I use is called “Hootsuite” but its just one of many. You could spend an hour a month and release content consistently and selectively over a 30 day period without having to lift a finger. That hour will go a long way to increasing your online credibility as well as your visibility.

 Steer Clear of Tables

Way back when (in internet time, this is referring to the late 90’s), makers of graphics software devised products that enabled designers to deploy visually rich websites. But it came with a trade-off, many times the sites were heavily dependent on graphics for the text elements displayed on the site, like menu items and page headings, making the websites harder to edit and harder for search engines to index. They were also built with heavy reliance on html tables, which can be thought of as a kind of a spreadsheet matrix. These tables still present an obstacle to search engines, mostly due to the many ways that tables can be manipulated, making the order of the content harder to correctly decipher.

Don’t Forget the Title Tag!

A well structured website takes advantage of the most effective HTML elements by combining code with keywords. And one of the most important of these “tags” is the title tag (read more)

When you are looking at a website, pay attention to the text that appears at the very top of the browser window – this is above the page content itself, and usually above the window containing the website address or URL. That text is the content of the title tag, and search engines display it on results pages. A descriptive page title tells both the search engines and the searchers what a particular page is about. For example, consider these page titles of a fictitious company: “Jones Law Firm” says nothing about the business, but “Employment Law Experts in Southern California – Jones Law Firm” speaks to the nature and location of the same firm. Using descriptive page titles is one of the most effective SEO techniques in use.

Where Coding Meets Visuals

Pictures and graphics are useful in making a website interesting and engaging for viewers, but without alternate text in the code, images are basically invisible to search engines. Alternate text coded into images can be used to tell the search engines who or what is in a photograph, for example, “Attorney Henry Jones receives the Los Angeles County Bar Association Distinguished Service Award.” Without this text, the search engines have no way to differentiate a photo of a person receiving an award from a photo of a beach sunset.

Employing a call to action is an effective method to get a viewer to visit a particular page, but using the simple phrase “click here” represents a lost opportunity to call attention to search engines. Giving the link text a stronger context makes it more user-friendly and increases its SEO potential – “View our list of recent employment law victories”.

Text Formatting

When faced with a large block of text, there’s the danger that a viewer’s eyes may glaze over and they will become restless, disinterested, and leave your site for greener pastures. Headings and text formatting can counter the effects of long, intimidating text passages. HTML code for headings are controlled by a website’s style sheet (technical term: CSS), and are varied on a scale from 1 as the most, to 6 as the least in prominence, very useful in showing a hierarchy of information and breaking up long passages. In a similar fashion, using bold or italic text can accomplish important visibility and viewer retention goals: the search engines are made aware of text that the author deems important, and the rendering of the page allows a person to scan to quickly get a sense of the page content.

There’s a lot more to it than what has been outlined here, but these elements should be examined if you are revamping an existing website, or building a new one using a the strongest possible foundation.

Website Development not a One Time Effort

Typically, when attorneys face a lull in their workload, they have a burst of energy and update their website.  Then that passes and they move on to other things. The website gets no attention and in a year or so it begins to look old and forgotten.

Link Popularity

Among search engines’ basic goals are to bring useful information to as many people as possible.  Yes, it’s also about their own advertising revenue, but we’ll look beyond that for now.  Search engines detect the potential for traffic as it relates to your site, both inbound and outbound.  Inbound links that comes from other sites has an impact on your page rank, as do outbound links that lead visitors from your site to other related site.  Peeling back a layer, the quality of the sites that are linking to your own have impact on your page rank. In that way, quality traffic begets quality traffic.  Among the most coveted inbound links are those from a .edu domain, learning institutions are seen as sources of quality information by search engines.  Links from reputable, established, information-rich domains will contribute to your SEO value and rank.That’s all great, but how do those inbound links come into being?  Now it’s time for the workout. The first step is to ensure that your own site has quality content, demonstrating that there are compelling reasons to capture those inbound links – this is a must.  It circles back to your content, which should be on-topic, sincere, informative, timely, and rich with key words.

Basics of Trading Links

Now some research is in store.  Find sites that are complimentary to your own, that deal with an aspect of your business where you think viewers or customers may generally find a connection.  You may be able to submit a linking request to their webmaster, in which case it may be reviewed, and ultimately published. Trading links with a related business is an established practice, but to reiterate, the key is in finding businesses that have something in common with yours – especially a similar kind of customer.  And the higher a linking site’s page rank, the better for your own visibility.Look for sites that encourage community involvement, including blogs and forums that publish contributor comments is another place to look. Social networking sites and directories usually provide you with the opportunity to display your profile, with space for your URL. If you have the time and energy, engage in that community, read, listen and contribute your own ideas and commentary.

Remember OutBound Links Matter Too

Outbound links have value as well.  Using keywords that pertain to your business as part of the text that comprises the link is an effective way of drawing a search engine’s attention to the link.  A descriptive phrase tells the search engine so much more than the tired phrase “click here”.Just as a personal trainer will advise on what NOT to eat, there are some SEO practices that a site owner would be wise to steer away from.  A “link farm” is a site that has nothing but outgoing links to a myriad of businesses, for the purpose of deceiving search engines into rewarding a site with a higher rank.  Some years ago the search engines got wise to this ploy and wrote programs to detect them.  A link from an unscrupulous source actually decreases your page rank, so be careful when approached by anyone using this kind of tactic.

Ken Begun has always liked animals and has worked with people whose loved ones died and didn’t make arrangements for their animals. Ken decided to put his love and experience together to help others plan for their pet’s future if it happens without them. His blog, Trust Your Pet will feature tips on how to make sure that people make arrangements for their furry loved ones. DSD designed his blog to be warm, friendly and easy-to-read.

But it’s not all bad news, there are numerous activities that you, as a WordPress website owner, can undertake to incrementally improve your ranking.  By taking a series of sensible steps, and exercising moderate patience, you should be able to track the rise your site’s ranking.  In this series of tip, we point out challenges and solutions for each of the top factors that go into search engine page rank.

Content

As search engines continue to evolve, their level of sophistication and intelligence has increased in parallel.  It is no longer easy to trick the search engines into placing a listing at the top of the page.  Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other major players dedicate enormous resources into making their products more intuitively useful to PEOPLE.  Gone are the days when you could “trick” a search engine into a high ranking by repeating keywords hundreds of times, or by rendering key words in white text over a white background (generally known as “black hat” practices). When preparing content for your site, your priority should be on richly describing your business with sincerity, accuracy, and honesty, the way you would go about doing it in a conversation with a PERSON.  The use of long tail terms – phrases that describe your business, product or offering – enable the matching of specific requests to specific results.

The notion that “content is king” still rings true in the SEO world.  Be yourself, and be honest about it, you can still do it with enough eloquence and meaning that will be impactful to the humans who are looking for matches.

WordPress enables easy creation of web pages and blog posts, providing endless opportunities to set search hooks that will help drive search traffic to your site.  Careful planing and use of post categories can further help organize your content, make navigation easier for your visitors, and increase your chances of improving search engine page rank.

Your Practice: If you are focused on consumers as a criminal defense attorney, personal injury or even estate planning, Twitter could cut both ways. The advantage to Twitter is you can reach lots of people, gain followers and get business. However, the downside is the ethical risk of having your efforts considered advertising so you need to be very careful what you say, how you say it and who you say it to. On the other hand, if your practice is aimed at in-house counsel, you are less likely to reach a huge audience however, if what you have to say is pertinent to them, you will gain quality followers over quantity.

Your Referral Network: Are you well connected with people who love social networking? People who are on their smart phones? Then they are the perfect audience for Twitter. And you might say something that resonates with them. They forward it on to folks who may jump on what you say and reach out to you for representation. However, if most of your network is still uncomfortable with email, then you shouldn’t bother with Twitter

Your Expectations: If you are just looking to get business from Twitter, don’t bother. Yes, you might get referrals or leads but it will probably take effort into continually tweeting about topics of interest to potential clients. Twitter offers a cheap way to deliver your message and to connect with potential clients but it mostly just a communication channel not a way to land new business. That said, I’ve heard stories about people getting business directly from Twitter but I have also hear stories about people winning the lottery

Your Time: Initially it will take time to get a profile set up and figure out how best to use Twitter. However, over time, it can perform on its own. Particularly if you are streaming blog content through your Twitter account. However, if you plan to be an active Tweeter, then it will take ongoing time to read what others are say, what they are saying about you and responding.
Think carefully upfront about how much time you willing to put into learning it and also how much time you will devote to maintaining it.

Your Other Marketing Efforts: Think about what else you do to market and develop new business. Are there ways to integrate Twitter into those efforts? You can tell people where you are speaking or tweet live at a networking event. Obviously if you blog regularly then it will be easy use that as your content stream on Twitter as you can set up automatic links to your blog from Twitter.

Your Interests: Using Twitter because you feel obligated doesn’t make sense. Its too much learn and unlikely to result in much direct monetary return on your sweat labor. However, if there are areas of the law that you are passionate about, then using Twitter is a good soap box. If you love being on top of social media trends, then you should tweet. Remember, Twitter is a communications channel.

The Payoff: There is probably little chance you will be able to Tweet your way to a successful practice so you need to think of other benefits. You will connect with people you would never connect with otherwise. You have something to talk about at cocktail parties. If you work with people under 50, then they are likely to connect with you and Twitter. Twitter or technologies similar to Twitter will become increasingly common so knowing how Twitter works will give you a heads up on all those people who bury their heads in the sand. But if you decide to keep your head in the sand, remember, you are in good company.