In this week’s final segment of our two-part series on SEO – Search Engine Optimization, we’ll continue by concentrating on the advice that…

Less is More

Although the temptation is great – to a large degree we’ve all been taught that more is often better – DO NOT repeat your keywords (the words potential clients input into search engines to find an attorney) too often in your visible text. The formula is simple – your keywords should account for no more than 3 – 7% of the total word count for the entire displayed page.

For more to specifics on site-pushing tools – such as anchoring text and numerous “under-the-hood” methods, there are numerous online tutorials. Have your IT guys go to our personal favorite: http://www.seo-guy.com/seo-tutorial/seopreparation.html.

The Most Important Part of Getting on Page 1

To understand this you first must understand something called “PageRank” …PageRank is a slick term Google came up with that is exactly as it implies: a system of ranking page popularity on a 1 – 10 scale. For example – Google’s Home page is a PageRank (or “PR”) 10. EBay home page is a PR 9. Amazon is PR 10. MySpace home page (on the surface this is surprising, but read below) is a PR 7.

By way of brief explanation, PageRank is not a ranking of the entire SITE. It’s a literal ranking of the PAGE you’re looking at (That MySpace is PR 7 should make more sense now. The majority of MySpace viewers don’t go to MySpace’s home page when they sign in, but rather, to their own home pages).

Okay – so this page ranking tells us who’s hot and who’s not. Obviously you want to your site to be on the “hotter” end of things – so what’s the single most important thing you can do to start that process rolling? In a word – Backlinks.

For Google to determine and set the importance of your site, it must first find it It does this search with little bots called “Spiders”. Spiders find sites through “backlinks” and backlinks, simply defined provide “links” from one page to another. When you’ve received a link from another site or page to your site or page – be sure that the link being proposed has a PageRanking (PR) of 5 or more. They higher the ranking, the more affluent the link and it raises your site’s profile. Google’s spiders will have already indexed the high-ranking link and thereby raise your site’s visibility.

The solution is simple but it takes a bit of doing… Get as many sites to link to your site as possible – and put 80% of your efforts into the few % that have PR rankings of 5 or higher. (Note: STAY AWAY from “Link Farms”. These are companies that have a high ranking page and will try to sell their backlink to you. Google is way ahead of the game on this little number. Save your money and reputation – paid links are as valuable as fools’ gold.)

Google Changing the Rules again…Black Hat/White Hat and Al Gore Rhythms

Now just when we had page ranking somewhat understood, Google has just changed the rules again. In an effort to remain number one, Google has to contend with Black Hat SEO sites. In a nutshell, Black Hat normally refers to a type of hacker – but these days it’s largely changed to anyone who sets up a website to exploit loopholes in Google’s relevancy algorithm (the tracking methods used to determine which words traffic better and more often ). Google has made its search algorithm friendlier to sites that have question-answering headlines as opposed to just keywords. For example – if someone put in the search term “Where can I find an attorney skilled in representing one-eyed pirates in Freeport?” The pages (still taking pagerank into account) that will be shuffled to the top will be those that have a headline that answers that question (“…representing one-eyed pirates in Freeport since 1708″). This is probably one of the simplest things you can change to ramp up your site’s ranking. Looking through the eyes of the people most likely to be searching for your services, simply pre-emptively answer the questions they might ask in a how-to answer at the beginning.

Hopefully you will have come away with understanding page ranking and backlinks, and at the very least how your headlines draw the potential client’s eyes to your site. From a potential client’s eyes, an attorney on Page 1 of Google must have gotten there by being number one!

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