As a lawyer, you barely have time to properly service your clients, let alone, learn HTML. However, knowing a couple simple things about HTML will help you get better results from your law firm website.
Now don't get overwhelmed. I'm not going to go all technical on you. Let's start with some basics:
1. Open your website in a new tab or browser.
2. Right-mouse-click on your site so that you see a menu that includes an option that says something like "view source":
3. Left mouse-click on the view source option. Some kind of text document should open:
This is your web page's HTML source code. Calm down, it's not as confusing as it looks.
To start with, their are two very important HTML "tags" that you need to know (tags are the words surrounded by ""). The first is the <title> tag.
The <title> tag appears in the upper left-hand corner of your browser window, as well as, on the browser tab if you're using tabbed browsing.
The <title> tag is extremely important to the success of your website in search engines. It tells the search engines what your law firm website is about. One of the most common mistakes made on attorney websites is using your name, or law firm name, as the title of your website. Sure, you'll do very well for searches on your name, but you don't do very well for all the other searches that potential clients might be using to find you.
For example, take a look at our site's title:
As you can see, we're targeting Lawyer Internet Marketing, Law Firm SEO, and Lawyer Search Engine Marketing. We believe these terms are highly relevant to our business.
See, not so bad. Now go to your website and see if your <title> tag is optimized for key phrases relevant to your practice. If it's not, add some practice-specific and geographic specific keywords to the tag. You might be surprised by the results.
Obviously, there is way more to law firm SEO than simply optimizing your title tag. In fact, we believe on-page optimizations account for around 25% of the "SEO pie" depending on the competitiveness of the key phrase. However, keeping these optimizations in mind when you build new pages or write blog posts, will have a very positive effect on the search engine performance of your law firm website or blog.
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The local tag is a great tip that is not often used by Lawyers and other service professionals.
Readers should also note that the title tag should be about 64 characters max (including spaces). Any more and your prospective clients will see the (...) which is rather annoying. Google has suggested that "most search engines may give less weight to words after a certain point" - I would suggest that keywords be the 1st words on your title tag as a result.