A Page on the Web, published in the Solicitors Journal, September 2000

So you’ve enthusiastically entered the new age: at some cost in time and effort and no doubt hard cash producing a website to promote and deliver your services. But no-one is visiting. What can be done?

Traditional advertising

The quickest and most effective way to get yourself on the map is to advertise your web presence through the traditional media.

Quote your web address prominently in all advertisements, correspondence and communications. Overprint existing stock of notepaper with your web address and consider redesigning your letterhead at the next opportunity to incorporate the new name.

You need spend no more on advertising than you do already, though if your aim is to establish yourself as a national rather than a local presence, this needs to be part of a considered business plan and your advertising budget will need to increase accordingly.

Internet advertising

New business is unlikely to come looking specifically for you on the internet (unless so enticed by your traditional media promotions). Potential new clients will be seeking online solutions to their problems and will be directed to your site from elsewhere: from search engines, web directories and other links to your site.

Negotiate links to your site with as many other relevant sites as possible, starting with those with the closest connection and/or which you know receive the most traffic. You’ve a better chance of securing a link if you offer reciprocity, though don’t expect one unless your site is of direct interest to the other’s visitors.

There are many online directories of law firms who will be happy to add your details for free. You won’t get much traffic from these sites unless they are well-known and heavily visited. Consequently, you may feel it worthwhile paying for a listing or a place on a panel on a site which promises actively to promote your services. Needless to say such services need to be carefully evaluated and compared. A number of these legal advice and referral sites were mentioned in April and August’s Pages on the Web.

Search engine ranking

Much new traffic to your site can be obtained by securing a good ranking with the major internet search engines and it is worth spending some time analysing and developing your site to promote its position.

Most search engines compile their indexes by crawling the web and automatically generating entries, others (such as Yahoo!) are the subject of human selection and compilation from submitted details. Results from a search will be listed in order of relevance. Relevance is calculated in many different ways. However, the following guidelines will be generally applicable.

Keywords

First think of the words people are likely to use in their searches (not the words you would use to describe your services). These are the keywords you should use in your site. Thus perhaps use ‘accident compensation’ rather than ‘personal injury’, ‘buying a house’ and ‘moving house’ rather than ‘conveyancing’, ‘faulty goods’ rather than ‘consumer protection’ and so on. Generally keywords should be two or more words long as too many sites will be relevant to a single word.

Make sure that your keywords are used in key positions on your pages:

• The page title is the most important. It is surprising how often this is forgotten, with pages sporting useless titles such as Home Page or Welcome!
• The main heading on the page and first paragraphs should also contain your keywords. Some search engines only index or give greater weight to the top of pages. If your pages are of tabular layout, bear in mind that what appears at the top of column 2 or 3 may in fact be some way down the underlying html page.
• Meta tags are a means of associating keywords with a page which does not otherwise contain them and controlling your site’s description in engines that support them. They should be considered supplementary to the above.

Read the text of the page out of context to ensure keywords are appropriately qualified (eg ‘legal advice’ rather than ‘advice’ etc).

Visible content

Your keywords need to be reflected in the page’s content. Search engines are not able to read pictures, so if your page uses graphics in place of text, ensure that equivalent textual content is included as well (ALT text attached to a graphic is not necessarily sufficient).

Search engines will follow links from page to page in indexing your site. Ensure that there are textual (not just image map) links from the home page.

Some search engines have difficulties with framed sites. Ensure that you include descriptive text and keywords in the ‘no frames’ area of a frameset page and also that appropriate meta tags are attached.

The content of pages generated ‘on the fly’ from databases won’t be indexed by search engines, so consider creating static pages instead or to complement them.

Submitting your site

The crawlers sent out by some search engines will index your pages automatically, and there are numerous services which will offer to submit your site to a number of search engines for a small fee.

However, it’s best to visit the major search engine sites yourself to find out their requirements and submit the two or three pages that best summarize the content of your site. The search engine will index the other pages on your site by following links.

More on search engines

Much useful information and help on using and exploiting search engines is available at www.searchenginewatch.com.