Most attorneys know their firm's website needs to be optimized so it's appealing to consumers and shows up in Internet searches. But how do you accomplish this when consumers' preferences and the algorithms behind search engines (e.g., Google) are constantly evolving? In a recent post on Attorney at Work, Mike Ramsey provides six tips to help ensure that your website is serving your marketing needs. Here are two of them.

1. Use responsive design. Research shows that a growing number of consumers are accessing websites via mobile devices. For your website to have its greatest impact, it must look good on smartphones and tablets as well as traditional desktop computers. You do this by using a "responsive design" for your website, which means that it can adapt to different devices and look good on them regardless of their screen size.

2. Speed up your site's load time. If your website takes too long to load, you not only risk consumers going elsewhere, but you'll also end up lower in Google's search results. To help speed up your site, Ramsey suggests removing oversize images that "are just wasted space on a website." Google provides a free tool to check you site's speed, which you can access at https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.

Read Ramsey's article for the other four tips, which were summarized in the March Illinois Bar Journal Biz&Tek column.