Legal Tech: How to increase website rankings

By Peter LaSorsa You took the plunge, did your due diligence and just launched your website. Now you need the website to show up in the first page of search listings. So how will you accomplish this? First, make sure all of the links out to other sites, a/k/a out links, are not broken and are not duplicated. If you link to the same website more than once on a page, search engines will penalize you. Second, not all links are of equal value. Linking to a website that the search engines deem inferior or unreliable will not help you and even hurt your rankings. So when attorney Bob sends you an email saying, add my link to your website and I will do the same for you and it will be great for both of us — run, don’t walk, run. If the sum total of a lawyers Internet strategy for increasing rankings is to send out emails for cross-links, linking to their website is probably going to hurt you. Third, make sure you update your website daily. What do you mean update it daily, I am a busy person and don’t have time for that!  Well make time because search engines are looking for original content and content that is updated daily. Would you purchase a newspaper that wasn’t updated daily?  You don’t have to write a book, each day add a paragraph or two to a section of your website. You will not only increase your rankings but your website over time will really be robust from the daily updates. Fourth, make sure your content is original. Avoid the marketers that offer to write content for you and update your website weekly for you. They are going to provide this same service — read this as providing the same content — for many lawyers, which means your content won’t be original. The single biggest thing you can do for helping website ranking is original relevant content. Spending 15 minutes every morning will pay off over time and has to be on your daily to do list. Lastly, if you can get solid companies to link to your website you will really move up in the rankings. Easier said than done right?  Well, again you have to be creative and put forth an effort. Look at the bottom of this article and what do you see? My website and Blog right? And I would say the ISBA is a very solid organization to have a link to my website. Put forth an extra effort and watch the results pay off. Peter LaSorsa can be reached at lasorsalaw.com. He also publishes a blog at www.illinoissexualharassmentattorneyblog.com