Creating Powerful & SEO Friendly Legal Blogs for Your Law Firm
By: Dustin Ruge
April, 2009
SHOULD I CREATE A BLOG FOR MY LAW FIRM?
Many attorneys ask me if they should create a blog for their law firm. I always respond by asking attorneys the following questions:
- Do you have the time and discipline to Blog on a weekly basis? If you cannot discipline yourself to update your Blog on a weekly basis, than don’t bother creating one.
- Will you be consistency providing useful information on your Blog? People will only come back to your blog if you can provide them with a reason to. Like all web properties, useful websites and Blogs are highly visited and highly linked to – all of which help to improve your search engine visibility.
- Will you use your Blog to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) initiatives? Once of the most important SEO considerations of a blog are the textual linking you can provide to other websites in your blog. Since ALL law firms should pursue a continuous link building strategy, what better place to start than with your own blog.
If an attorney confidently and affirmatively answers these questions, then creating a Blog can be a rewarding and positive endeavor. If they cannot, then they are missing the three pillars of a successful blog.
HOW CAN I CREATE A BLOG?
There are literally thousands of choices when it comes to choosing a blog. The good news is that the most popular blogging system on the market today (http://www.blogger.com) is easy to use, can be setup in less than 30 minutes, and best of all…it is free!
Here is what you need to get started:
- Go to http://www.blogger.com and create a new account (unless you already have an account with Google – who owns Blogger.com.
- From your Blogger Dashboard, click the “Create a Blog” link on the upper-right side of the screen.
- When creating a “blog title” and “blog address”, try to use your practice area keywords in each since Google will be indexing them for search. You can also select a template (or layout) that we will eventually modify.
- Once your Blog is created, you will want to click the “Customize” link to update the look and feel of your new Blog (i.e. colors, titles, pictures, etc.)
- Once you blog is created, create a link on your website/s to the blog and visa versa.
HOW DO I SEO OPTIMIZE MY BLOG?
As previously discussed, using your Blog to further your linking strategy is one of the three pillars of a successful blog. The challenge is, that links are only counted when they don’t have a “nofollow” attribute automatically associated to your links – like Blogger does. We can change that.
Here is how to SEO optimize your new blog:
- Make sure to use your practice area keywords in your “blog title” and “blog address.”
- Try to title each blog posting with strategic practice area keywords. Try to also repeat these keywords in your body text as well.
- Create textual links in your posts to strategic web pages and blogs you wish to promote. Start with your own website/s and try to match the keywords in your textual links to the title tags for each page you link to. For example, I might create a textual link to a page on my website having to do with SEO Link Building. In this example, all I am doing is creating a code link (<a href="http://www.seoconsultantfirm.com/seo-optimization/SEO-Link-Building.html">Seo Link Building</a>) and pasting it into the text. You can do the same thing by simply replacing the http:// address with the webpage you want to link to and replacing the “SEO Link Building” text with your own text. Once published, it will look like this: SEO Link Building.
- Now the most important part: how to remove the “nofollow” attributes in your Blog so your links will be counted in Google. Here is how to do it.
- Click on the “Customize” link on your blog, select the “Layout” tab and select the “Edit HMTL” link.
- Check the box next to the “Expand Widget Templates”
- Click inside the HMTL text box under “Edit Template” and click CTRL+F on your keyword. In the “Find:” box, type in: “nofollow” and delete all results that say “rel=’nofollow’” and nothing else. You might have to repeat this three times until all are deleted.
- Once you are done, click the “Save Template” button. Congratulations – you have now added full linking value to your new blog
If you want to see how this should look when you are done, visit our Legal SEO Blog at http://legalseo.blogspot.com
Source: SEO Consultant Firm