If you’re unfamiliar with rich snippets you might want to start here.
A previous study seemed to indicate that authorship in organic search results might be more effective in terms of attracting clicks than video snippets. At least for the search “car accident lawyer.”
I was curious whether the results would hold true for a more informational search. Here’s what they did and what they found. Keep Reading ⇒
One commenter in particular (an appellate lawyer, natch) kept stubbornly insisting that it made sense to have his blog on his law firm website because he ranked #1 on Google for his target search terms. (If I had a dollar … )
Google Voice, a free, easy way to get a local phone number to give clients, may be hurting your local search results. And mine too. I have been a strong proponent of Google Voice since its inception. After all, it can help you appear more local, and you can hack Google Voice to send different callers to different phones. But I recently attended a CLE with Jabez Lebret, author of Online Law Practice Strategies: How to Turn Clicks Into Clients. He shed some light on “call tracking” numbers. I had never heard of those before, but when Lebret described them, they sounded suspicioulsy like my precious Google Voice service. So I followed up with him, and his answers about Google Voice and local search were surprising.
I don’t think outsourcing, insourcing, or other kinds of -sourcing are an inherently bad idea. What is a bad idea is hiring anyone to do anything without due diligence.
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A while back, I advised you to buy yourname.com so someone else doesn’t. Case in point: when Marc Randazza got in extortionist blogger Crystal Cox’s way, that’s what she did. And the domains of his wife and child. Then, she posted all sorts of horrible stuff. And then, she offered to “fix” Randazza’s online reputation — for a fee, of course.
Randazza wants his name back, so he brought a WIPO arbitration to get it back. And he just won. The arbitrator called Cox’s actions “an artifice intended to extort funds from the Complainant and thus a pretext for a rather egregious variant of cybersquatting.” “Extort” seems like exactly the right word. Actually, maybe not strong enough.
What is somewhat surprising is that Cox has won similar arbitrations in the past. I’ve written before about Randazza’s excellent legal writing. Maybe Cox finally screwed with the wrong lawyer.
I still think it’s a good idea to register your own domain name, but if someone gets there first, and tries to use it against you, it’s nice to know you have recourse.
Using secretive techniques to lure Internet users to a law firm website with false or deceptive information is wrong, members of the Bar’s Standing Committee on Advertising agree, but the committee wants more time to research the technical issues before approving an advisory opinion.
The committee met September 20 at the Bar’s Midyear Meeting in Orlando and reviewed a proposed advertising advisory opinion that addressed hidden text and meta tags (words on a webpage that are not visible to the viewer).
But there’s just one problem. These folks don’t really seem to know SEO. For example, they seem to imply that the use of the keywords meta tag can be used to optimize positions in search engine results. However, the keywords meta tag is not used by search engines (at least not by Google, at least not since 2009) to rank sites.
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Google Authorship is a way of enhancing the way your writing appears in Google’s search results. If you’ve told Google where to find your writing by connecting it to your Google+ account, your posts and pages will show up with a byline and your Google+ profile picture, like so:
Why would you want this? It makes your posts more visible, and as people see your posts more often, they will be more likely to associate you with your work. It’s like a super-charged byline. Plus, I’m sure it has some SEO value or something.
Some people just can’t seem to stop themselves from showing up at lunch with a stack of business cards to pass around. Don’t they realize how annoying everyone thinks that is?
Online, it’s the same thing when you use Indiana Mesothelioma Lawyer or Fancypants Legal Marketing instead of your real name — or a made-up handle, at least — to identify yourself in blog comments or on forums. It’s ineffective, it has negative SEO value (especially after Google’s recent updates), and it makes you look like a douche.
Be yourself. Or make up an interesting persona, at least.
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