Most new website owners are eager to apply what they already know about direct response marketing to their new Internet business, and there are an abundance of ways in which they can do this, however many believe the offer you make on your site is the most important aspect. In truth, knowing how to get customers or clients is a very valuable talent, both in the “real” world and in cyberspace. If you’ve always been great at bringing people to your business, then you know that there are many similarities when bringing people to your website and getting a conversion out of their visit.

First, Arouse Emotions

In order to get your potential customer to the point where they will actually read and consider your offer, you first have to grab their attention, and hit them in a way that brings their emotions into play. You must be able to tell your story in a way that is not only fascinating, but totally believable, therefore the highest quality copy is essential. You will then offer some sort of incentive that coaxes the reader to take the action you are leading them toward, and finally you will make your final pitch—your offer—and make it as easy as possible for the person to take that action and accept the offer.

Make Sure Your Leads are Highly Targeted

If you have designed your website for maximum SEO, have filled it with the highest quality, extremely targeted copy, along with the most relevant linking system, then the odds that the people who land on your site will find exactly what they want or need is high. In the “real” world, you know that you never advertise to anyone who isn’t likely to become a client or customer in the very near future. On the Internet, your goal is to only lead those who are highly likely to buy your product or read and pass along your informative content, to your site. Adding a component to your site which essentially says, “Let me tell you more,” is good marketing tactic no matter where it’s used. You can do this via e-mail marketing, or having people sign up on your website for your newsletter, or any other enticing offer which will bring them back to your site time and time again.

Your Reader Wants to Know What’s In It For Them

In our incredibly busy world, the time spent on any website by any person is incredibly short. This means you must grab their attention immediately and hold it mercilessly until they have read—or at least skimmed—the entire article or product description. Your reader’s primary motivation in reading your site is to find out quickly what’s in it for them—what’s the payoff, what will they gain from remaining on your site? Keep your headlines short, concise and informative, full of your very best targeted keywords. Your headlines should give your reader an idea of what’s to come, convincing them to read on.

The Actual Offer

If you’ve been successful in keeping your reader’s attention focused on your site, your information, your product or your services—congratulations! Now it’s time to reel them in through your offer. Your goal here is to make the offer absolutely irresistible—impossible to resist. You want the implication to be that a person would have to be crazy not to click on your offer, no matter what it is. Offer your potential customer something that has such obvious benefits that there would be absolutely no logical reason they wouldn’t click the “accept” button. The very best, most irresistible offer will have an incredibly high return on investment for the user or buyer, will have an instant summary of your basic offer, and will have the element of believability. In other words, although you want it to be fantastic, it also must not seem too good to be true. Work hard on crafting your offer, and you will be rewarded many times over.

Link building can, in some rather odd ways, be equated to real life. Meaning that if you have ever read motivational books which tell you to build your relationships and connections with others and persevere in your goals, you can see how this can also be a worthwhile lesson in link building strategies. When you are working hard at search engine optimization in an attempt to boost your website up the ranks, you are likely seeking out other quality websites and asking their owners to exchange links with your own site.

Presenting Your Website in a Positive Manner

If you are already in the process of link building and link exchanging, you are well aware that you must, in effect, sell yourself, just as you do in real life. Think about the last job interview you went on, and you will recall how hard you tried to present yourself in the very best light to a potential employer. The same thing can be said about SEO link building—your goal is to present your website in the most positive manner possible in order to persuade other high quality websites to link to yours, giving you higher rankings.

Dealing with Rejection

Just like in real life, you must expect rejections from time to time when you approach other webmasters and request a link, but don’t let that stop you from your goal of garnering links for your site and creating the very best search engine optimization you can. If you do get a rejection, rather than sulk, take an honest, critical look at your site, and make sure it is packed with relevant content which others would be proud to link to. It cannot be said enough that content is king, and without quality content, your link building strategies will be for naught. If you find absolutely nothing on your site which would bring about a rejection, then simply move on. Sometimes there really is no rhyme or reason for a particular rejection, whether from another website owner or from a person in your “real” life, so don’t spend too much time dwelling on the why of the situation.

Don’t Be Judged by the (Bad) Company You Keep

Mom really was right when she told you that others would judge you by the company you keep. So it is with obtaining links for your websites. You will be judged, both by search engines as well as your readers, by the reputation of the sites you link to and which link back to you. In other words, don’t get mixed up with the wrong crowd, or you may be inundated with spammers. Never link to a site which is not relevant to your own site, and never link to a site which is not the highest quality. By the same token don’t allow others to link to your site if you are not 100% sure the link is mutually beneficial.

Politeness Really Does Matter

Once you’ve chosen several websites which are complimentary (but not particularly competitive), it is time to contact the Webmasters of the sites and courteously ask them to link to your site—while explaining the benefits of doing so. Generally you will offer to link back to them in exchange, but spend some time outlining the advantages to them of linking to your content. Explain where the link will be, and above all, make sure your letter or e-mail is personal. The last thing you want is for it to sound like a mass-produced letter sent out to huge numbers of webmasters. Most of us receive so much spam on a daily basis, that it’s crucial you distinguish yourself from the riff-raff.

One Hand Washes the Other

Many experts advise that you already have a link put on your own site prior to asking for a link in return. When you send out your personalized letter, give the location of the link—it will be harder for the other site owner to say no, when you provide the URL of where the link is. Give the other webmaster sufficient information to make it easy to link to you, and if there is a link you want particularly badly, use traditional voice mail rather than e-mail for your request.

Check Out the Competition

Finally, just as in real life, take a sneak peak at the link popularity of your closest competitors and discover who is linking to them. Then contact those websites and get a link of your own. There is nothing dishonorable in seeing how your direct competitors are making their way up the ladder of success.

So, use common sense and the lessons you have learned in your own life when attempting to build links for your website—the results will be well worth the extra effort.

Search engine penalties can be bad news for your legal website sending it plummeting down the list into no-man’s land—or worse, being removed entirely. It’s imperative that you check your law firm’s website frequently in order to ensure you are not violating any search engine rules. All the major search engines have their own list of “do’s and don’ts” which tend to change fairly rapidly in an effort to stop black hat SEO and other unethical practices.  If your legal website has inadvertently violated one of these rules, don’t despair, as it is possible to dig yourself out from under these penalties–so long as you take immediate action.

What Causes Search Engine Penalties?

The majority of the causes of penalties by search engines are not ones you will ever have to deal with, as they are deliberate efforts to hustle and con the search engine. Code swapping, also known as cloaking occurs when one thing is submitted to a search engine, then when the user clicks they see something entirely different. This can occasionally be done legitimately in order to prevent others from imitating a successful page of to hide a text-only page for a more visually appealing one. Either way, it will get you a slap on the wrist from your search engine, so it’s important to delete this practice from your legal SEO arsenal.

Keyword and Meta Tag Stuffing

More commonly, websites will be penalized for repeating a word or phrase over and over in an attempt to increase relevancy and move up the search engine ladder. Remember to use  keywords judiciously in your legal website and legal blog, and if you manage your own meta tags, never place your high traffic legal keywords in meta tags when they have no relation to the actual web page. Check your content and your meta tags thoroughly to make sure your keywords are used in a natural and acceptable manner in order to avoid penalties.  Remember that a normal occurrence of keywords in high quality copy writing will be between 2% and 5%. If you repeat your legal keywords to the extent that they make up more than 10% of the words on your page, expect a negative consequence.

Call (769) 218-6099 for a free discussion about your law firm website.

Penalties for Other Practices

Tiny text, page stuffing or duplicate pages and page spoofing are usually done deliberately, rarely accidentally. Those who are attempting to “game” the system will hide keywords by putting them in at a 1pt font—beware, search engines are getting more and more sophisticated and able to spot such techniques. Page spoofing occurs when a page seems to be legitimately developed for a particular keyword, then when the user clicks on it, they are taken to a page with little relation to the original click.

Page stuffing occurs when the same web page is either directly duplicated, or modified only slightly, then submitted to the search engine. If your law firm has multiple legal websites as well as one or more legal blogs, make sure you take extra care not to duplicate content from one to another. This is also known as “mirroring” a site, meaning you have several domains and put the exact same content on each. Whatever the reason, it is considered spamming and can get you penalized.

If your Legal Pages Have Been Penalized

If your legal websites or blogs have been removed for what the search engine considers an infraction, you have two choices. You can get a new domain name and, essentially, begin from scratch, making sure you don’t employ the same tactics which garnered your original penalty. If you had a well-established legal site, however, this is somewhat akin to business suicide. You have likely built your brand name and spent extensive time and money marketing your legal website.

A better idea is to first find out what earned you the search engine’s wrath by contacting the individual help and support branch for each search engine. Once you know what went wrong, then the offending practices or page must be immediately removed. If you have linked to bad sites, get rid of the links. If you have hidden text, remove it, if you have engaged in keyword stuffing, have your content rewritten. You may be required to contact the search engine, admit your mistake, tell them how you have corrected it and beg forgiveness—in other words, fall on your sword. After that, the only thing you can do is wait—it can take as little as a month, or as much as a year for full absolution to occur and the search engine to allow you back into the fold.

Monitoring your website’s traffic should be one of your top priorities as you must determine the scope of incoming traffic on your website. Understanding your users and their particular habits leads to substantial increases in your market profits. Ask yourself why your visitors come to your site? Where are they coming from, and how much time do they spend navigating around your firm’s website? Which pages are the most viewed, and which have valuable content, but few visitors? The answers to these questions can give you truly crucial information to enhance the performance of your website. A statistics tracking program can be an invaluable resource which can enable you to vastly improve your web growth by supplying you with the information you need. The ultimate goal, of course, is to understand your visitor’s needs while generating more revenue for your law firm. There are several types of statistics tracking programs available such as:

• Stat Counter
If you are relatively new to the game, StatCounter is a good basic program which is gives you real- time detailed web stats on your visitors. With a simple piece of code on your web page or blog you will be able to analyze and monitor your website’s visitors. You will have a choice of two levels of
service with StatCounter; the first level is totally free and gives you a fair amount of options to track visitors, however it is limited to 100 pages of counting. You can work around this by assigning sections of your website as projects, then each “project” will have the 100 page limit, otherwise upgrade to the second level, which gives you more pages, but costs a fairly small amount. You can go to http://www.statcounter.com for more information.

• Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the web analytics solution that can give you deeper insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness by allowing you to see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. Google Analytics will give you the tools to write better-targeted ads, thereby creating a higher conversion website. While Google Analytics is similar to StatCounter in that you paste a piece of code into your webpages, but also has some great tie-ins with adsense/adwords. Google Analytics is also free, and has a huge page view limit, so no worries. Google Analytics is a bit more complicated than StatCounter, but not impossibly so.

• AWStats
If you are a more advanced user, or have someone on staff who is, AWStats evaluates your website statistics, providing a full log analysis which includes the number of visits, the number of unique visitors, including their domains and countries, and many other personalized reports which will aid you in your marketing strategy. This is considered to be the best free program you can get
to analyze statistics on your website, but is definitely not for beginners; you will be required to
upload the program to your server, and probably make some minor modifications, depending on
where you load it.

Once you have a statistics program in place, you will be able to see clearly where your visitors are coming from, how long they spend on your website, where they stop to read, (meaning the content definitely caught their eye) and any other information that can help you make the necessary adjustments to your website in order to generate the traffic you want.

Want FREE ADVICE concerning how to set up and interpret your traffic reports? Call the 11 year veterans of law firm website marketing at Lawyer Success, Inc. by calling (769) 218-6099.