First things first with SEO, you really have to know what you are going after. OptiLaw handles law firm web site development and SEO for law practices. Lets say you are helping a law firm that practices personal injury cases and their office is located in Maryland. The first question is what phrases are you going to go after?
Choosing your battles
Using the above example the answer should be obvious, 'Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer'. However lets think about this for a moment. Before you pick the phrase you must understand the site. Is your site new? What is the PageRank of the site? Is it performing well in any phrases already? If you are dealing with a new site or a site that isn't particularly strong you may want to rethink your strategy.
To rank in very competitive terms you really need a strong site with a lot of text to backup those keywords. Competitive terms are defined as large geographic areas and very general terms.
Examples of competitive terms:
So how can smaller sites perform well? Use less competitive keywords such as:
By using these less competitive keywords you will see results faster. Now that we have our keywords defined lets take a look at the best place to place them into your code for best results.
Place your keywords
Ok so lets say we are going after 'Greenbelt Injury Lawyer' (its best to go after a few phrases at a time, a good number would be four or five) first things first lets put that in our title tag for our main page.
<title>Greenbelt Injury Lawyer</title>
Now early in your code as possible lets place a line like this.
<h1>Greenbelt Injury Lawyer - Fighting for your rights</h1>
Heading tags are very important, they really tell the search engines that the text inbetween these tags are important. So if we have the same text in our title and h1 tag Google will really know 'Hey this page must be about Injury Lawyers in Greenbelt'.
Now lets also put these keywords in our META tags, yes I know META tags are really the most important thing in the world anymore but yes they do still count so I put stuff in there. Place this anywhere at the top of your page in between the <head></head> tags.
<meta name="keywords" content="greenbelt injury lawyer">
Of course you would probably want to place more keywords in the above tag but for our example I just put one in there. Now you have your tags all in line its important that your text in your page now backs up these keywords. So in your web site I would expect to see text talk about injuries, the area of Greenbelt, area of Maryland, information about the law firm, etc. Also the same way that <h1> is important, so are the lesser tags of <h2>. If <h1> is the main heading, then <h2> is the sub headings. So we should break our page into sections and have sub headings. If our third paragraph is about recent successes in injury cases then the <h2> sub heading should be 'Client Testimonials' or something similar.
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