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Keywords are what any searcher types in as an inquiry, thus keywords are what the search engine uses to evaluate and rank each prospective website.
Keywords are both the input and the target.
Domain names with keywords have built-in search engine influence and have already been “pre-marketed” to the entire population. These are the generic identifiers that people type-in for general searches, thus these keywords are also what the search engines are matching queries with.
Most law firms adopt the convention of naming the firm after the last names of founders and partners and their domain is selected based on some variant of the string of names. Such names do not have any ‘intuitive bridge’ –to search engines or human web searchers. Consequently, law firms need to establish alternative bridges between their domain and relevant keywords.
Due to the fact that domain addresses represent singular locations, they are a finite resource – there can be only one of each limited variation. That makes domain names with keywords ‘between the dots’ (e.g., www.[keywords].com) highly exclusive and highly valuable for the link power they can potentially convey.
All the major search engines hold their ranking algorithms top secret formula. However, in a landmark June 22, 2008 interview in USAToday, Google revealed the two most important factors that separate you from your competition from the eyes of search engines:
- Findability – What key words do people ‘type in’ to find products or services in your industry?
- Backlinks – One-way, inbound links from other web pages connecting to your web page. The value of any link depends on topic relevance (keywords).
These two factors will have a profound effect on both the status and the future revenue of your law firm. See Digital Law Firms Law Blogs section to see the third recommendation from Google.
The World Wide Web provides the playing field and the leading search engines provide the rankings. The internet is causing sea changes in all major industries. Those who fail to increase their internet presence will be left behind. |
- Links = referrals, recommendations, or editorial votes for your web page that appear on other web pages.
- Often referred to as “hyperlinks”, links represent bridges from other web pages to your web page accessed with the ‘click of a mouse’.
- The words contained in the link text (anchor text) are critical
- The words contained in the link are meaningful to humans (in determining whether to click your web page) and search engine bots (in determining the ranking of your web page on particular keywords).
There is a limit to the SEO that can be done directly to optimize a law firm’s own website content (on-page factors = optimization adjustments made directly to their firm’s website and all of its internal web pages)… and eventually every one of your competitors will do all the same things to optimize their “on-page” factors. This neutralizes any advantage of on-page factors in the equation leaving only the off-page factors (links) to determine the rankings.
Links: “It is not what you say about yourself that matters, but rather what others say about you.”
Search engines attempt to duplicate peer review ratings by utilizing links to serve as ‘editorial votes’ (that point to and promote the target web page). Search engine rankings are based primarily on the weighting of the one-way, inbound hyperlinks (backlinks) pointing from other web pages into your web page.
The weighting or advantage provided by each backlink depends primarily on the relevance of the link source to your web page (with regard to the specific keywords searched). Specifically, the highest weightings are granted to links that are from sources relevant to your practice area and contain the keywords that people ‘type in’.
Recognize that links are web addresses that also contain semantic information –but only the part of it that is ‘between the dots’ is fixed, finite and exclusive (the domain name portion, or parent domain = www.“domainname”.com).
Any website can plug keywords into links, but only websites with keyword domains can provide links with keywords in the only exclusive portion of the link – the domain address (‘between the dots’). The information in the link contained ‘between the dots’ (parent domain) is the only part of the equation that is a zero sum game. See Link Anatomy: What’s in a (domain) name?
Additionally, the links given from any single domain name are diluted by the total number of links granted from that domain.
For example, if www.politicians.com granted links to most all politicians, then the value of the individual links is reduced on two dimensions:
- If every politician has a link from www.politicians.com, every individual is even on that factor, leaving no one with any advantage over the other.
- If the website grants links to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of politicians then the value of each link is diminished as a function of a fixed supply. Meaning, each politician gets a smaller slice of a fixed pie with each additional link that is granted from a singular source.
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Quick fixes do NOT work. Link building campaigns that involve trading links do not work because they are reciprocal links, and thereby devalued in search engines rankings.
Additionally, link value is reduced based on the number of links given out by any single website. Thus, deep directory websites with many members only convey a diluted link value due to the high total number of links given away from any single domain.
Old methods of link building, buying, or trading are no longer effective. The practice of link building ran amok with indiscriminate links being traded or sold freely between otherwise unrelated web pages. These bare links with a lack of topic relevance provided no benefit to web searchers and have subsequently been devalued in search engine algorithms.
Simple text links are no longer enough to influence search engine rankings in competitive areas.
In the hyper-competitive legal arena, lawyers and law firms need to establish external outposts of rich content to benefit web searchers and to achieve the top rankings in search engines. This provides a better means of control over context, reputation, and topic relevance.
Law firms must begin establishing a more expansive internet presence for the long-view or risk getting left in the tail. Search engine rankings influence revenue and status perceptions – and in a field like law the two factors are highly correlated.
As a cutting edge solution that provides web visitors with informative content and articles on relevant legal issues and provides lawyers with the valuable editorial links that increase search engine rankings – Digital Law Firms has established an international Law Publishing Network.
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