New SEO and Online Lawyer Marketing Posts Over at GetLawyerLeads.com, I wrote a post commenting on an interesting and worthwhile article on lawyer site SEO at law.com.
In a separate post, I break down a paid lawyer directory listing offer, and whether it lives up to the value it suggests.

Labels: marketing, seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:14 AM  (0) comments

  How Can I Rank? (SEO Get Rich Quick Schemes) What can you do to get me to rank for "keyword x"? (and how much will it cost) is the classic question I get from people who thing they know what Search Engine Optimization is, but don't know how it works, or what it's about.

"I Have This Business Idea, I'm going to Start Doing X. Can You Get Me on Page 1?"

Quickly? Based on a half a page of content tacked on to your site? Umm, probably not.

Many people think SEO is a get rich quick scheme. If I just get this ranking, then I will instantly profit from it. And most people who think this haven't done any keyword research or comparative analysis of the potential value and competitiveness of the keywords they are fixated on.

In addition, because I've had success getting rankings and traffic for clients, some of them think I can do anything. They think I am just waiting for an offer of enough money to work the magic.

In some sense, that's probably true. If you throw enough money and effort at a site, you probably can get the rankings you want. But it many cases, that number well exceeds the business value of that traffic.

Are You Serious?

I think it is because SEO is perceived by some as a scheme, it can be easy to consider it detached from the real goals of your business - getting customers, and selling them services or goods, at a profit.

SEO/SEM needs to be just like any other marketing effort for a business. Either you are getting a return on your investment, or you aren't. And it is hard for most people to get anywhere with online marketing without putting some thought, effort, and real business goals.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 8:49 AM  (0) comments

  Google Conspiracy Theories I recently had a conversation with someone who expressed a view that there are magical, secret techniques for getting top google rankings. Big companies allegedly pay millions of dollars a year for this information and access. And some SEO firms who are "in the know" can also make this happen.

One piece of evidence was that in one particular relatively competitive niche, "site a" outranked "site b", even though "site b" was clearly "better". Of course "site a" was operated by one of these sneaky SEO firms who had the secret.

Apparently, a number of people in this self-reinforcing circle of Google outsiders agreed that "site b" was much better, and that there was no good ascertainable reason why it was being thrashed by "site a". (Site b wasn't just being thrashed by site a, but by everyone. It was nearly invisible. But I'll address that separately.)

As a Google outsider myself who is vastly skeptical of grand conspiracies (though if someone wants to bring me inside, I'm all for it... email me, I won't tell!), I decided to take up the challenge of looking at both sites and seeing if there might be a simpler explanation.

As it turns out, at least part of the story was true. I agree that "site b" is better than "site a". It has better and broader content, and overall seemed more compelling to me. In fact, site a seemed singularly unimpressive, and in my initial thoughts, it did seem somewhat odd to me that it should rank so highly.

But then a did a little digging. Neither site was all that old, site a went up in 2004, site b in 2005. Site a did have more backlinks than site b, but it was not a huge number, or a massive difference, either.

But after taking a closer look at the backlinks, as it turns out, site a had several extremely strong links from the home page of a very old, extremely authoritative, and topically related site (we'll call it "site x"). Bingo! A quick look at the wayback machine showed that those links had been on that home page for 2 years. Those killer links had been there longer than site b had been in existence! Case closed!

Conspiracy theory? Well, other than the fact that site a and site x were controlled by the same SEO firm, and that the home page links from site x to site a were invisible (no anchor text! - apparently that works if your site has enough trustrank? - slimy, but successful) it all seemed quite cut and dried.

I'll even leave out of the story all the massive problems that site b has (canonical domain issues - some pages in in index as www, some not - lots of pages in the supplemental index - no unique title tags - no meta descriptions tags - possible duplicate content problems - and more), since even if all those problems were fixed, it wouldn't beat site a for the highest traffic keywords, though it would at least get in the ball game.



Ockham, you magnificent bastard, you did it again.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:57 PM  (0) comments

  Go Negative! I've always been a big fan of negative keywords in your PPC campaign. It can save you lots of money on wasted clicks for traffic you know isn't targeting to what you are offering. Proper use of negative keywords will also boost your overall click through rate, which in turn can move up you ad placement in the listings. Win win!

I'm probably slow to this since I haven't been doing many Adwords campaign updates lately, but the negative keywords option in the Google Adwords keyword tool is quite nice. Easy to use and highly recommended for everyone.

An example of a negative keyword I always use in my criminal defense lawyer campaigns is "-statistics". I think it's a pretty safe bet that someone who's been arrested on a criminal charge and needs a lawyer doesn't much care about crime statistics! That searcher almost certainly is doing some kind of research, and it not my target customer.

Labels: ppc, seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 9:04 PM  (0) comments

  SEO Expert poll of key Search Engine Ranking Factors SEOmoz | Google Search Engine Ranking Factors

Interesting poll of what is important in the SEO of your site.

I find it particularly noteworthy that there is a strong consensus that Title Tags are the most important on-page attribute, both for positive SEO gains, and the fact that using the same title tag repeatedly across your site can seriously damage your change to get good rankings, and can deposit you in Google's Supplemental Index.

H/T Nick.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 4:15 PM  (0) comments

  Measuring Success in your SEO Efforts - First Page Keywords? I was recently asked what I thought about an SEO company that promises "100 first page keyword rankings" if you hire them.

This is not a meaningful measure of a successful campaign. If the "100 keywords" selected are well targeted to the business goals, and generate a lot of search impressions, then there may well be some value there. But it is probably more likely that you'll get rankings for uncompetitive or unimportant searches that generate little to no actual traffic and customers. I

I would not put any trust in an SEO company that offered this as a metric. To me, it means they are either willfully providing a measurement that has no clear intrinsic value, or that they fundamentally don't understand what is important to their customers' business.

Neither is a good answer.

Labels: metrics, seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 3:54 PM  (0) comments

  Is There Such a Thing as Freeloader Site Traffic? Do you have a commercial site that has a few pages with content that attracts traffic, but doesn't generate any business? Perhaps purely informational content relevant to browsers and researchers, but not customers or clients?

It is easy to fall into the trap of considering this "freeloader" traffic. You can try to dress it up to be more sales-y, by pushing your pitch harder, and doing more call to actions to squeeze commercial value out. Or you could put up more advertising on the page to generate some revenue. Or just ignore it entirely.

But the best option might be to stop fighting it and embrace the nature and quality of the traffic you are generating. It's not easy to become an authoritative source for information, but it can be ultimately very valuable.

Try to determine what those who find your site are after, and make that landing page the authoritative answer to those questions.

The benefits of doing this include:

• Credibility. You are building yourself into a subject matter authority, both in the eyes of the general information seekers who are finding this page, and real potential customers who are looking at other parts of your site and may click on this page.
• Press & PR. You may get calls based on your subject matter expertise and authority that pay dividends down the road, and further enhance your credibility.
• Links! Authoritative helpful information is killer link bait, which can be incredibly valuable for increasing search engine rankings on your entire site.
  

All these elements have a snowball effect to them as well. More credibility brings more press, more links, more search engine respect, higher rankings, more traffic, and more business.

Example: This site generates lots of informational browser traffic on Melanie's Law, the name of a Massachusetts drunk driving law.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:07 AM  (0) comments

  101 Ways to Build Link Popularity in 2006 : SEO Book.com Who doesn't love these kinds of lists? And these guys really know what they are talking about when it comes to link building. Great stuff.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 5:27 PM  (0) comments

  SEO and Guarantees: Like Oil and Water Comments on SEO firm claims and guarantees.

SEO and Guarantees: Like Oil and Water

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 11:01 AM  (0) comments

  How to Measure Site Traffic Measuring site traffic month to month is a good way to track how your SEO/SEM efforts are working. But the question is, what to measure?

One of the simplest things to track is Pageviews, but unfortunately pageviews tend to count a lot of useless traffic, such as

1. bots crawling for email addresses to spam
2. bots crawling for content scraping to copy and use for scummy fake blogs for Adsense traffic
3. people or bots looking at sites for link exchanges

Unfortunately, I suspect that this kind useless traffic is growing at a faster rate than actual traffic that is useful to your business, so pure pageviews can give you an inflated impression of your sites traffic levels.

The metric that I believe is most useful is monthly search engine referrals. I track the unique number of referrals from each of the major search engines. There are certainly flaws in this method, such as:

1. See #3 above. This traffic will often originate from Search Engines (though at least it only counts as one referral hit)
2. It discounts non-search engine traffic that could actually be worthwhile traffic, such as from other related websites or directories.

For lawyer web sites, you generally don't get that much useful traffic from other sites or directories. But if there are some sites that do provide worthwhile visitors, you could always count those referrals in your own metric, along with the search engines.

That's what I do, anyway. It can be a pain to have do dig through the logs of each individual site if you have a large number of site to manage, but I feel like it an important way to measure how the site is doing.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 9:24 PM  (0) comments

  Case Study in Unethical and Deceptive Linking Practices I found an interesting spin on a link exchange/purchase scam. It's the first time I've seen a site devaluing it's own links directory pages.

First, a little basic html background. Search engines crawlers do not run javascript code, only html. Therefore any links embedded in javascript are only clickable to humans. Links have value to a search engine as "votes", and are very important for rankings. So an occasional slimy practice to devalue outgoing links from your site is to put them in javascript, so you get the benefit of a link without having to give anything up.

The site in question takes it one step further and devalues it's entire links page in the way that it has coded it's own navigation links to those pages. If you view the source code, it looks like this:

<a href=""  onclick='msgWindow=window.open ("http://www.offsiteurl.com"); return false'>

the href field is normally where a link is found, but that is blank. The link is executed in the onclick field, which is a predefined javascript code.

It's a very odd and suspicious thing to do. When you add up the additional evidence that a) other internal site navigation links are normal, crawlable links, and b) the referring page on which this link exist contains a very expensive ad placement where the site presumably gets most of it's money, it's impossible to believe this isn't a deliberately deceptive practice.

I can only conclude that it was done to prevent the risk of the big money page getting search ranking competition from the free links page. What's even worse, is that on this free links page, you can also buy a top "premium listing" (and they aren't cheap) that suffers from the same page discounting technique.

To be fair, it is possible that one may still get human traffic from these links, and that traffic may have some value. But most people who exchange links do so primarily for the search engine rankings.

**UPDATE After speaking with the proprietors of the site in question, I've come to the conclusion that it is reasonably likely that it was accidental after all. It does sound hard to believe, but it seems possible that it was misguided coding, although the story still doesn't make much sense to me. In any case, I removed the name of the site in question.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:21 PM  (1) comments

  SEO cold callers threatening customers with Google ban Just read a disturbing thread on the highrankings.com message board about an "SEO expert" calling up people with quality sites & good rankings, and telling them that they are about to be banned by Google, unless they pay him money to fix their site.

More on this charming fellow here.

This is a particularly egregious example of behavior that clearly leaps beyond unethical right to extortion. But I find myself constantly surprised at the number of scam artists out there claiming they can instantly launch you to the top of the rankings.

Maybe it's because SEO has a reputation as being just a big bag of tricks. "If I insert these magic words in the page enough times, will the search engines will rank me higher?"

I get questions along these lines all the time from well-meaning clients who are somewhat savvy about the internet and search engines. And I tell them it just doesn't work that way. There just aren't any magic quick fixes. Maybe 4 years ago some of these tricks would work, but the search engines are too smart, and getting smarter all the time.

As I keep saying, "optimization" is becoming less and less important. SEO is now a matter of getting the basics right, and not making mistakes that will make your site difficult to crawl, or look scammy or wrong to the search engines. I focus most of my efforts on Marketing/SEM - developing more quality content, which is the only long term choice for generating business on your web site.

There still seems to be an endless supply of these slick talkers out there, and the myths and misunderstanding of what SEO is makes them seem more credible.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:09 AM  (0) comments

  SEO Meetup I am the organizer of the local The Cambridge Search Engine Optimization Meetup Group .

We've only had 2 meetings so far, but I'm very encouraged. I personally work mostly alone, so it's a great opportunity to talk with other people doing SEO work.

I welcome anyone in the Boston area to joins us!

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:45 PM  (0) comments

  Traffic Building - Link Building for 2006 Nice thread cited on link building vs. traffic building.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:09 AM  (0) comments

  The Value of Links & Exchanges. Links are still critical to any site. The gold standard of links in to your site is one-way links from respected "authority" sites. A quality one-way link is often unsolicited, and is something you can usually only get by having great content or information to which others actually want to link.

Search Engine experts generally agree that 2-way reciprocal links aren't as important as they used to be. Some believe they still have some value if they are with quality site, while others believe that reciprocal links have little to no search engine value.

A 3-way link is when you get a link from one site in exchange for a link to another site, the theory being that each link will look like a one-way link. However, many experts believe this scheme is easily detectable by the search engines. These links may be penalized or devalued even further , since they clearly exist only to "game the system".

When considering any SEO "trick", a good rule of thumb is "am I doing this to help the user experience, or only for the benefit of search engine rankings?" Though most reciprocal linking is search engine driven, there are legitimate reasons for agreeing to direct traffic between other related, quality sites. When you go to a 3 way link scheme pretending to be a 1 way link, I think you've clearly crossed that line.

My current philosophy with link exchanges is that I will exchange with high quality, related sites, which ends up being is a very small percentage of the requests I get. I won't do 3 way links, links with off-topic sites, links with sites that have too many links on their links page, or links that are buried many levels down in the site.

I also won't link with sites that clearly only exist to pick up traffic to redirect to their adsense ads. There are a large number of these pure ad spam sites that have an Adsense box up at the top, and content via newsfeeds, site scraping or blog spam. If your site has no unique value to your visitors, then you are wasting everyone's time.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 12:27 PM  (0) comments

  SEO is Dead ...at least in the traditional sense. There will always been Search Engine Marketing, at least for the foreseeable future, and Search Engine Optimization techniques will continue to be important in getting a quality site to rank well. But, any expectation of search engine optimization where you can simply shuffle around keywords and title tags, and expect to rank well for any moderately competitive keywords is dying or dead. And that's a probably good thing.

After all, if your site isn't the best, most comprehensive, and helpful site, why do you think you are somehow entitled to a high search engine ranking?

The consensus after the recent Google algorithm update "Jagger" is that Google is increasingly rewarding larger sites with unique content and quality inbound links, and de-emphasizing reciprocal linking schemes and some on-page optimization tricks.

If you have a web site from which you hope to gain customers or clients, you need to take a hard look at your site. Do a search for the keywords you feel are important to you, and do an honest evaluation of the results. If you aren't the top ranked site, ask yourself if you honestly believe that your site is a better resource than what shows up at top of the rankings.

What are you doing to make your site the most comprehensive resource in your market?

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 5:23 PM  (0) comments

  Search Engine Submissions? Whenever I get spam from companies claiming to boost your web traffic, they almost always talk about Search Engine Submissions. "We'll submit your site to all the major search engines". I even see Many SEO firms list search engine submissions as one of their key services.

All of which makes absolutely no sense, since anyone who actually understands Search Engines knows that "submitting" is a waste of time. The only thing a site needs to get indexed is a link from a site that already is indexed. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and many other niche search engines all have crawlers that will eventually find your site from other links.

Search Engine Submissions must just be a popular myth that resonates with people, so it lives on.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 10:30 PM  (0) comments

  A Broad Search Engine Marketing Overview I wrote this for a lawyer newsletter.

---

Effective Search Marketing With Your Web Site

Your web site is not about you. If the goal of your site is to find clients and generate business, everything about your site should be with that client in mind.

When someone brings up Google or Yahoo to search, what exactly is it that they are searching for? In some cases, they may search for “Lawyer in San Diego who specializes in DUI defense”. That person has a clear idea of what they want. If you’re that San Diego lawyer, you absolutely want your site to be found for that search. It may not be simple to achieve, but it is a clear and reasonable goal.

However most of the time, a web searcher doesn’t have quite that clear an objective or outcome in mind. I have a problem; I’m looking for a solution. I may have no idea what the solution is. I have questions. I may not have even fully formulated the problem yet.

I was arrested, that’s a problem! What’s going to happen to me? What can I do about it? If you want that person to find your web site, then your site needs to have those answers. It needs to be the first step in the solution to a problem.

That’s why there are many more searches for “California DUI Laws” than there are for “California DUI Lawyer”. And even the person who searches for “San Diego DUI Lawyer” still needs to be sold that you are the answer to their problem.

I’ve seen lawyer sites that have the attorney’s resume on the front page. It’s great that you graduated at the top of your class from law school, but that shouldn’t be the first thing you want that person to learn from your site. And remember, experts say that a searcher makes a decision to stay or leave your site after 8 seconds or less. If that person doesn’t think they are getting close to the answer, they will leave and look elsewhere.

Basic Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Ready to build a helpful and authoritative web site? The first step in any search engine optimization/marketing project is keyword research. What are the most popular search phrases that are relevant to your business? There is a free keyword research tool at www.overture.com, and the best keyword tool is a paid service at www.wordtracker.com. If you enter a phrase link “DUI Lawyer”, you can find related phrases, and how frequently they are searched.

Now you’ve got a list of prioritizes keyword phrases, and it’s time to go work them into your site. You can only optimize your home page for a few keyword phrases at most. Let’s assume you are happy with the keywords on and searches to your home page, but you want to add some breadth and additional reach to your site. Through your keyword research, you determined that “Washington State DUI Penalties” is a good phrase for which you’d like to get search engine traffic. You’ve written some nice content on the topic (at least 300-400 words) that you believe answer the question that the typical searcher has, and hopefully prompts them to further action. i.e., calling you on the phone. Now it’s time to put it on your site.

There are really only 3 important element of “On Page Optimization”. There are the title tags, the header tags, and the body copy. You need to have your keyword phrase in the page title, once, toward the beginning. You also want to have the keyword phrase in the header (h1) tags. Finally, you’ll want to have that phrase in the body copy of your page 2 or 3 times, depending on how much copy you have. You’ll want to have the phrase in the first paragraph, and then one or two other times where it makes sense and doesn’t feel forced.

This may sound almost too simple, but if you can just do that much, you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of your competition when it comes to on page optimization. In particular, the title tag is often overlooked, and it is critically important. Many people do not vary their title tag to reflect the important keywords of the page, or waste the title on something unimportant to most searchers, such as just having it say “Jones and Smith Law Firm, LLC” on every page. The title of your firm is unlikely to be a competitive phrase, and if you aren’t being found for that search, you’ve probably got bigger problems with your site.

The second and probably most important part of Search Engine Optimization is known as “Off Page Optimization”. Off Page Optimization is what other pages say about a particular page, in the form of links to that page. The links that make up the internal navigation of your own site, as well as links to your site from other sites are critically important.

The web is all about links, and that’s how search engines read and rank content. Every link is like a vote that says, “This page is important”. More than that, the “link text”, the words you click on to go to another page, provide important information to both the searcher and the search engines on what that page is about.

You can’t always control what other sites say about you in links, but you can control your own internal site links. It’s very important to have good, descriptive keywords in your link text. That page you created on “Washington State DUI Penalties” should be linked from your home page with the link text “Washington State DUI Penalties”, or at a minimum, “DUI Penalties”.

How important is Off Page Optimization? Consider one of the most common phrases used in the text of a link: “click here”. According to Google, there are over 1.1 Billion results pages for that phrase. That’s about as competitive a phrase as you’ll find. So what page ranks #1 for “click here”? It happens to be the download page for the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which makes sense. How many times do you think the phrase “click here” appear on that page in the title, header, or body? Exactly none. It’s the power of the countless sites that link to that page with the words “click here” in the link text that make this page outrank the other billion pages.

How do you get other sites to link to you, and help your search engine rankings? Any way you can, is one answer. But one of the best ways is to simply have a great site with great content. If you make your site an authoritative reference, you’ll naturally attract links to your site, as well as web searchers, and ultimately, clients.




David Matson is a search engine marketing and optimization expert in Massachusetts. He specializes in working on web sites for lawyers that rank well in search engines and generate valuable client leads. His web site is http://www.highsteppinsearches.com.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 12:53 PM  (0) comments

  Broad Inclusion PPC I had a client ask me to review an existing pay-per-click campaign on Looksmart. They were spending over a hundred dollars a month on PPC ads there. I thought that sounded pretty fishy - I didn't think it was possible to spend that much on Looksmart, which only shows its ads on some fairly small search engines, such as Wisenut, and other niche directory and portal sites. Especially given that they are advertising a regional, niche product.

Sure enough, most of the clicks were going to broadly matched "Inclusion Targeted Listings" - ads that show anywhere Looksmart may decide to show them, based on any words in the ad. It was clear that this advertising was probably entirely useless in this case. The specific keyword targeted traffic that was actually worthwhile was only adding up to a couple of bucks per month.

Pay-Per-Click advertising may be the most economical and efficient way to reach new customers, but it is still quite possible to waste your money!

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 11:49 PM  (0) comments

  Linking Strategies in 2005 Interesting article on Natural vs. Artificial Links.

I agree with most of the points listed, and I have been trying to employ many of these strategies myself. Certainly directory listings and other one way links (especially from topical sites) are extremely helpful, and appear more "natural". I still believe in reciprocal links from relevant & topic related sites. I have been trying to mix up my incoming link text, so that all of the link text (and corresponding page reputation) is not identical, and therefore artificial & spammy looking. I suspect that may be hurting some of my sites in google, though apparently yahoo is more forgiving in this area.

I have also become far more picky about not doing link exchanges with wildly off-topic and/or spammy & content free sites.

Many SEO experts say - "When in doubt, consider what would actually matter to your users." If you are doing something for no other reason than rankings, be extra careful. I'm not quite as down on reciprocal links as this article suggests, since I believe that helpful & relevant links are a benefit to the users of a site.

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 11:31 AM  (0) comments

  Title Tags and link exchanges I just got a link exchange request, where the requestee was a legal site, and was asking for a link title of "Colorado DUI Gunslinger".

Links are, of course, what makes the internet work. Link titles, or link text, which is the piece of text attached to the link, like this, is critical for Search Engine Optimization purposes. The link text tells the search engine something about the page when the link is crawled, and is a vital part of what is known as page reputation. Page reputation is one of the more important factors in how a page is ranked in the search engines.

For example, if you search for news on google or yahoo, you'll find CNN.com ranked at number 1 or 2 (sometimes the BBC site outranks it). Why is this, you ask? What makes CNN one of the top ranked news web sites? It's not due to "on page" factors, like having the word news repeated many times in the text of the page. CNN.com doesn't even have the work news in the Title Tag, which is probably the single most important on-page factor.

Nope, it's all about the text links. There are thousands, if not millions of site that link to CNN.com with the word news in the link, just like that. Every link is like a vote for how important a page is, and what that page is about. And CNN gets a lot of votes, and the search engines count those votes as one of the most important factors in how sites rank.

There is an entire industry of text link brokers that has sprung up to service this need. People buy (or more likely, rent per month) text link ads on pages with high pagerank to enhance the page reputation of a certain page for those specific keywords.

Therefore, choosing your link text is a very important decision, whether trading links with other sites, or in choosing the menu navigation on your own site. It makes no sense to choose words that aren't the most important and relevant keywords for searches to that page. In the case of the link request mentioned above, I'd say it's a safe bet that there aren't many people searching for a "DUI Gunslinger" on google. A "DUI lawyer", or "DUI attorney", you bet!

Labels: seo

 

posted by Dave Matson at 9:53 PM  (1) comments