Search Engine Optimization Experts

Don't Spam Google Local Business

2010-02-09T19:29:39Z

I recently had a potential client ask me to help with their optimization. We all want to show up when someone does a Google search for our business area. More and more (and more) Google is showing Google Local Business results mixed in with web results. Along with the local results are a nice Google map showing their location.

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If you haven't already done so - claim your business now. Just find your listing on Google maps and click 'Claim your business'. Google will call your business number and verify your listing. Once you do so you can add your business into categories to give Google even more information.

I've had clients ask me to create multiple false locations for them, obviously having more locations will allow their business to show up more right? Absolutely no way would I ever contribute to this spam issue. Google is fighting back and working on powerful spam tools to prevent and remove these listings. I would also bet Google will penalize anyone that adds to this mess.

Don't spam Google Local Business!

Why you should be on Twitter

2009-12-15T04:58:37Z

Recently I wrote a really great post about how to link your blog to Twitter. Today I wanted to talk a little on why you should use Twitter. Right now Twitter is a very young site, I think its powerful now but its future will be much stronger. A few months ago it was hard to say why people should use it. Take a look at my company's Twitter page - OptiLaw.

Take a look at a few firms that I'm following. Most of them have a really awesome icon that I made. When you click on a firm you will see a cool background and their contact info, etc, etc. Right now I'm using it as an extension to their blogs. I encourage my clients to blog about their areas of practice. Twitter then takes that information and passes it on to another network. That is the most powerful thing right now, taking your hard work and getting more out of it. Now that was a few months ago. Recently Google announced Twitter in search results, see the video here or read the announcement.

So now your Tweets could actually be in Google's web results. Isn't that our main goal? Pretty exciting.

YouTube's automatic captions

2009-11-19T17:59:59Z

Wow Google is really on a roll with Android, Go, SPDY, Wave and others announced recently now we have automatic captions! This means YouTube videos will use Google's speech recognition software to add captions for hearing impaired viewers. This is something is really great for those of us that may have hearing problems. The best part about this is you don't have to do anything now.

I have a few clients that are really taking advantage of videos and YouTube. Miller & Zois posts videos describing the effects of Yas / Yasmin, Greenberg & Bederman are doing the same. The questions for other law firms is this - why are you not on YouTube? It's free, its a huge network of people and YouTube videos are being returned with Google web search results.

Do a search for a Maryland malpractice lawyer and there is a chance a video from Miller & Zois may show up.

No more tables!

2009-11-09T16:57:21Z

I had a client contact me the other day asking to help optimize his site. The word optimize is something I think about a lot. What does it mean really? I would say it means a lot of different things to many different people. Probably easier to start with what is not optimized. I would say its important to have your code as lean as possible. This means externally mapped CSS and for the love of all that is holy - no tables! ]]> I looked at my potential clients current site and what did I see? Tables inside of tables that are surrounded by ... tables. So much HTML. Why are they bad? Let's do a comparison.

I'm surrounded by code!!!

Look at all that! That's so ugly. We also get very little control on how that's displayed. It's a mess. Let's see how that works with CSS.

I'm lite weight!

A lot cleaner. If you are using tables, stop. Soon HTML 5 will be here and we'll have even more control. HTML 5 will be a blessing for those interested in SEO. The code will literally tell the search engines what each part is. Giving them accurate readable labels that they understand. We'll go over in detail in the future. Just for now, if you are using tables please learn CSS.

Tweets to be included in Google search results

2009-10-22T12:01:37Z

Finally! I'm so happy to share with everyone that it has been announced; Tweets will now be included in Google search results. Let me explain how I believe this will work. You are in New York City and you want to go to 55 Bar (my favorite bar in NY), you do what you always do - Google it. So you Google '55 Bar' I image along the top we'll see Tweets from people mentioning the bar. You'll probably see something like OptiLaw says 'Having a good time @55Bar, great band tonight!'.

See the power in that? Real time updates on stuff that actually matters. This is where the power of Twitter actually really hits the real world. This is where Twitter dominates and nothing else comes close.

Another story on how Twitter helped me. I was in New York at my apartment in Battery Park. I heard loud cracking noises in the sky and bright lights. I was thinking 'What the hell is that?'. So I went on Google and stalled ... What should I search for? Battery park? New York? That would only return web sites or News feeds that are often times hours old. So I went on Twitter and found many people 'Enjoying the fireworks in New Jersey' (which is across the river from my apartment).

Twitter is awesome. Twitter with Google is super awesome. Oh yeah evidently Tweets will also be in Bing's search results, not that anyone uses Bing.

Move that domain ... the right way!

2009-09-22T02:33:07Z

Check out a post on our web design tutorial blog on the best way to move your domain name. This will be a multi part post, covering each step. In this step we show how to forward all your old links so they will still work. This is mega-super important for SEO!

Moving your domain name and keeping your links

Blogs that link together...

2009-08-11T03:28:30Z

Check out a post I made on our Law Firm SEO Blog about some linking ideas and why you should do it.

Choosing and placing keywords

2009-08-06T01:35:45Z

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?

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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:

· Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer

· Maryland Medical Malpractice Lawyer

· Maryland Workers Compensation Lawyer

So how can smaller sites perform well? Use less competitive keywords such as:

· Greenbelt Injury Lawyer

· Baltimore Construction Accident Lawyer

· Columbia Bankruptcy Attorney

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.

Greenbelt Injury Lawyer

Google (and the other search engines) looks throughout your pages at many different things to decide what you page about, the title is very important. One very important note: do not have all of the pages in your site to have the same title. This is bad, its confusing for your viewers and Google doesn't like it either.

Now early in your code as possible lets place a line like this.

Greenbelt Injury Lawyer - Fighting for your rights

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 tags.

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

is important, so are the lesser tags of

. If

is the main heading, then

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

sub heading should be 'Client Testimonials' or something similar.

In closing its important to use all these code areas to your advantage, keep each page on the same topic but keep each page different.

Bing + Live VS Google

2009-07-29T09:03:11Z

We all know by now that Microsoft and Yahoo teaming up is now a reality. How will this affect your SEO practices? I know myself, primary I spend my time on and optimize based on Google. If another search engine does start to gain in popularity how will this affect you?

If anything, right off the bat pay per click campaigns would be to be adjusted. Right now I have a few clients that use Yahoo, however all of them use Google's pay per click system. With more competition we would have to increase our efforts to be sure practices made to optimize on one system doesn't adversely affect the other. The good news is we'll probably not going to have to worry about a 'Google killer' now or anytime soon. Microsoft has been trying for sometime now to take down Google. Purchasing Yahoo will certainly help but in my eyes, its not enough.

Read my original post about the Microsoft & Yahoo Deal

Google ranking tool - Source code

2009-06-27T10:42:14Z

If you are a SEO professional one of the many parts of your job is actually measuring your success. Ok so your client is ranked on the first page of 'Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer' now, but what were they ranked when you started? What I do whenever I begin working with a new client is to take all their keyword phrases and see what their current position is. Then on a weekly basis I will run that report again and see our progress. How do we do this? Well we don't manually search Google fo reach keyword instead we use a great little program to do the work for us. Lets take a look

]]> The major problem with finding out our Google ranking on our keywords is that Google really doesn't give us an easy way to do this anymore. Once apon a time Google had a great SOAP API that would allow us to query Google directly from Perl and return the results easily. In fact that is exactly what my program does. Unfortunately Google has stopped issuing SOAP API keys. Why? Well instead they have an AJAX API but it doesn't come close to offering the same functionality. The only other method would be to scrape Google which is a bad thing. Scraping is when you write a program to literally act like a web browser and interact with a web site, get your data and do what you need to do with it. Sounds great. Well it is - it really is. However this is against Google's terms, and I'm just not up for going against Google. So for the purpose of this program we'll assume you have a Google SOAP API key.

The goal of giving out this source code is really two fold. First of all if you have a SOAP API key this is a great small program to help you track your rankings. Secondly its a great opportunity to learn Perl. I'll do more posts on Perl and programming and all that good stuff later, for now lets take a look at the program itself.

This program assumes:

You have Perl installed
You have the Net::Google Module installed (download it here)

The Source Code

use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::Parser ();
use Net::Google;
$domainname = $ARGV[0] ;
$filenameis = $ARGV[1];
use constant GOOGLE_LICENSE_KEY => 'YOURAPIKEY';
use constant MAX_RESULTS => 50;

Ok above this comment we have some basic setup lines here. As you can see it loads our modules and retrieves two command line arguments. I made this so when you run the program the first argument is the domain name you are looking for and the second is a test file full of keywords (separated by a new line). You can also see where I have the x's - that is where you should paste your Google SOAP API key.

my $google = Net::Google->new( key => GOOGLE_LICENSE_KEY );
$domain = $domainname;
open(FILE, $filenameis) || die("Could not open file!");
@content=;

Ok so we open the file and go through every single line. This will take each keyword phrase and run it against Google. You can see in the first section we are pulling a maximum amount of 50 results which is 5 pages.

foreach $line(@content) {
my $search = $google->search();
$search->max_results( MAX_RESULTS );

Runs the query against the keyword phrase (variable $line);

my $query = $search->query( $line);
my $position = 1;

This printf $line will print out the keyword phrase we are searching for.

printf $line;

The results are now cycled through a 'for' loop and stored into the $url variable.

for my $result ( @{ $search->results() } ) {
my $url = $result->
URL();

This next line searches through the URL of the result and looks for our domain, if found it prints out the position. If not it adds one to the position counter and checks the next URL result. It'll do this up to 50 results then go to the next keyword.

if($url =~ /$domain/) {
printf "%3d \n", $position;
}
$position++;
}
}

So as you can see its a pretty simple script. Hopefully I explained that well enough. If you have any questions please shoot me an email or leave a comment. Thanks!

Download source code for this script

google-search.pl

How to use this script

The tutorial goes over how it works, but if you don't really want to know how to it works you just want to use it - I'll get you started. Again we assume you have Perl and the required module installed, if not I'll do a seperate post about that. Make a text file and name it whatever you want, for example keywords.txt. Fill it with keyword phrases, put one on each line. So the first line would say 'Maryland Injury Lawyer' (without the quotes), second line could be 'Baltimore Injury Lawyer', etc. You get the idea. Now just start the script and specify your domain name then the keyword text file you just named so here we go.

Linux

google-search.pl millerandzois.com mzkeywords.txt

This will run the program and search for millerandzois.com and use all the keywords found in mzkeywords.txt.

Windows

If you use Windows its the same but you have to start Perl first so for example

perl google-search.pl millerandzois.com mzkeywords.txt

That's it for now I know I'm assuming already you have a lot of things already setup if you don't have those things I promise I will make a post explaining how to setup and use Perl. For those of you not using Perl I highly recommend it. Its very easy to use as shown and can really work well in a bunch of different scenarios.

Getting a conversion number from a percentage

2009-06-01T10:44:15Z

If you are a SEO professional or even if you are just doing SEO for your own web site, you need to track conversions. Conversions are the core of why we optimize sites. Conversions is a successful transaction through your site. Our firm focuses on helping attorneys reach more clients, so a successful conversion is when a client contacts our lawyers via a contact form. If your site is selling sprockets then a successful conversion is when a sale is made. This tutorial assumes you already are tracking conversions. What we want to do is know the exact number of conversions per traffic source. Google will tell you the percentage but not the number. I find this annoying and sometimes my clients want to know the numbers. Its a really easy method and I'll show you how I do it.

]]> Traffic Sources

What we want to do is first click on 'Traffic Sources'. This will tell Google Analytics to show us the traffic we are getting, broken down by the different traffic sources. We then want to click on 'All Traffic Sources'. This will show us the search engine traffic, both organic and inorganic, refferral sites, direct visits, and anything else in between.

Once we are in Traffic Sources lets click on the Goal Conversions tab. This will show us the Goal Conversion percentages broken down by each traffic source.

Breaking it all down

For this day we have 263 visits sent to us by Google and a conversion rate of 2.66%.

Side Note: When looking at percentages, visits - pretty much any SEO data - please take into consideration that really a good week (or more) is needed to really get answers. Don't take a day or two and make a decision. Remember traffic can fluxate during the week and its (almost) always slower on the weekend.

What we are going to do is take this data and put it into an Excel spreadsheet, lets take a look.

What I did was simply multiply the conversion rate by the visits and we get the magic number ... 7. So Google's 263 hits turned into 7 successful conversions!

Using sitemaps effectively

2009-05-27T10:39:58Z

I wanted to talk about an important issue with web sits and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Web site development along with technology itself is extremely fast changing. As a web developer it is extremely important to stay on top of upcoming changes as fast as possible. What was the 'cool thing' last year is now outdated and useless, that's just the way it is. My point? Stay up to date. Let's take a look at using sitemaps effectively.

]]> Sitemaps

Sitemaps is basically giving your search engine (Google) a clearer layout of your web site in XML format. Google offers some amazing tricks in part of their Webmaster Tools site. I'll go into depth on some of the many different features offered in the future, for now lets go to to create our first sitemap.

Ok so you already made your web site and I'm sure you used on CSS and no tables right? We'll save that for another day. I'm assuming you linked all CSS in an external file, same with Javascript? Ok good now lets begin.

Creating Your Sitemap

I prefer just to go to http://www.xml-sitemaps.com they offer a great (and free) service to create your sitemap, just put in your web URL and let them do the rest. Once its finished click on the link to download your un-compressed XML sitemap.

After you do that go to Google's Webmaster Tools and login.

On the first screen just type in your site URL (example: www.ccexperts.com) then click 'Add Site'. You'll have to verify your site by following the simple instructions, just create the file it says to then upload it. This is to show Google you actually own the site.

Upload The Sitemap

After you have verified your site click on Sitemaps, then Add Sitemap and selected 'General Web Sitemap'. Now remember where you saved the XML file we downloaded? Upload that to your web root directory, doesn't matter where but we have to access it from the Internet. So it would be easy to just leave it named sitemap.xml and upload it so you can access it by going to your root directory, for example http://www.ccexperts.com/sitemap.xml

If you followed that example exactly you would just type in sitemap.xml and then hit 'Add General Sitemap'.

That's it! Google will need some time to check out your site, in the next day or so I'll let you know what kind of cool information Google will share with you and how it can help your site function better.

Meta tags - Yes they are still used!

2009-03-27T10:32:13Z

As a quick reminder I just want to go over meta tags. As a veteran with web sites I remember the early days of web design and search engines. Meta tags were the most important SEO tip out there. 'Hey I want to be #1 for Maryland injury lawyers', 'Ok just put in Maryland injury lawyer in your meta tags about a million times, oh yeah and be sure to put in paragraph after paragraph repeating those words over and over.'

Thank god those days are over. However meta tags aren't totally dead. Google's Webmaster tools gives you a lot of great resources and troubleshooting tips for your web site. One of them centers around your meta tags. Each page should have unique keyword and description meta tags. Don't worry if your pages are not all unique its ok - however the best practice is that each page does in fact have unique meta tags. Before you right click on this page I can save you the time - all mine are not unique.

It's still good pratice so if you have a big important site you are working on, it may not be a bad idea and check.

Keywords

There's a bit of debate on the best format for meta keywords. I personally feel they should be a small number and contain one word followed by a comma. For example

This says first things first we are in Maryland. My law clients typically only practice law in one state. So the most important thing we want is location. Secondly we want Google (and the other search engines) to know that my client is a lawyer. From there we go into other details such as 'personal injury'. I would say a good number would be between 7 and 10 keywords. Please for the love of god do not spam it - it won't work. I also recommend not using whole phrases such as

No! One word, followed by a comma then another word. Simple tip but it helps.

Are you making it count?

2009-02-27T11:37:35Z

When it comes to SEO there are a lot of mixed opinions out there. I certainly don't believe I know everything or that may methods are 100% correct. I believe that know one really knows what is the ultimate best practice out there. Not until Google releases their source code for the search engine algorithm, and I don't see that happening any time soon. What I did want to go over is a few techniques that I use commonly. Hopefully they will help you with your websites.

Tell the search engines what you are

Let's say you are a personal injury lawyer and your law practice is in Maryland. You have to let the search engines know that. There are a few places to put this information. First of all is the title of the web site. At the begining of the page inside the tags make sure you tell the search engines why type of service you represent. Don't spam it, but give a few phrases, such as:

Maryland Personal Injury Lawyer - Maryland Car Accident Lawyer

This is your first chance on the page to really tell the search engines who and what your page is about.

Next up - lets put some text at the very top of the page. Did you know that the search engines give extra weight to the very first lines of text in a web page? Think about it - the most important information is typically at the top. Even more weight is even if the top text is an

tag. This is a technique that I use often. Take a look at http://www.foranlaw.com you will see at the top of the page several links to sections on their web page. The links are also carefully chosen. The link text is also a popular search term; 'Maryland personal injury lawyer'.
Tip: Put links at the top of the page that contains text how you want to be found.Link that to pages on your site with text rich with those keywords.
So if you want to be found when someone searches for 'Maryland personal injury lawyer' you better have that phrase throughout your site. In places as I described, title tag, h1 tags, etc. Not only that you need content that talks about those words. More to come, stay tuned!