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17 Com. L. Bull. 24 (2002)
How to Attract More Qualified Traffic through Search Engines

handle is hein.journals/colaworl17 and id is 330 raw text is: 4 COMMERCIAL LAW BULLETIN Technology HOW TO ATTRACT MORE QUALIFIED TRAFFIC THROUGH SEARCH ENGINES by Gordon Hotchkiss 1. Define Your Success Goals It's important to set some benchmarks to know if your Search Engine Marketing campaign is a success. Ultimately, the measure of success should be the number of converted customers coming to you through your site from search portals. A converted customer is someone who takes further action to contact you, either through a form submission, an e-mail or a phone call. In order to deliver a good stream of converted customers, a number of factors have to be in place. These include good rankings for well-chosen keywords, compelling descriptions, a sticky site, and presenting a number of options for potential clients to contact you. 2. Pick Your Keywords The keywords you choose to concentrate on are the foundation that will make or break any search engine marketing campaign. A significant amount of our time with a new client is in determining which keywords we should optimize for. My rule of thumb is to start with relevant 2, 3 or 4 word phrases and broaden out from there. If a client is looking for a personal injury lawyer in San Antonio, Texas, they won't go to a search engine and search for lawyer' or San Antonio They'll search for San Antonio Personal Injury Lawyer. It's these phrases that you want to make sure you're visible for on major search engines. For a law firm, a good place to start compiling your list is by defining your market area and your areas of practice. A couple of tools you can use to help refine your keyword lists are Overture's search term suggestion tool (free) and Wordtracker.com (subscription based). 3. Review Your Site If you want to see what a search engine sees when it comes to your site, take a look at your source code. In most sites, you'll see a lot of coding that determines how the page will look and function, and a little bit of content hidden in there somewhere. A search engine has to wade through all the coding to find the content. And this is the inherent problem with most sites when it comes to search engines. Here are some of the common problems that will stop a search engine spider dead in its tracks: Flash sites, frame sites, dynamic database driven content, text embedded in images, lack of text-based navigation links, redirects and excessive java or VB scripting. Make sure your site doesn't include any spider traps. 4. Review Your Competitors' Sites It's also a good idea to visit the major search engines after you've determined your keywords and see who's currently ranking in the top spots. Take a look at how much content there is on the main sites and where the keywords appear. Take a look at the page titles that will appear at the top of your browser window And if you're comfortable with HTML, view source code and check out their meta tags. This exercise will give you a quick insight into whafs currently working for your competitors with the search engines. 5. Review Your Content Content is the most important factor in achieving good search engine rankings. You need relevant content that in presented in a format that the search engine spiders can access. Make sure your keywords appear a few times (2 or 3 times) in the body of the content, as well as in headings and navigation links. 6. Write Compelling Descriptions and Page Titles Achieving a top ranking on a search engine is only part of the battle. You also have to convince the searcher that your site is the one link they want to click on! Most search engines will display the title of the page and a brief description about the page, which it pulls from the description meta tag. Its important to be able to think like the searcher when preparing these descriptions and titles. Write relevant and compelling titles that will promise to deliver what the searcher is looking for. When you're preparing your directory submission (Yahoo, LookSmart, DMOZ) avoid marketing hyperbole and slogans. These will be the first things slashed by an editor. Keep the descriptions short, relevant and make sure your primary keywords are discretely included. 7. Use Every Page as an Entry Point Each and every page on your site is a potential front door into your site. Keep this in mind during the site design process. Navigation has to be consistent throughout the site so its easy to get to the home and other main pages. This strategy also presents some significant advantages when it comes to optimizing your site (see step 8). 8. Optimize Every Page Individually Optimizing your site means going through every page and making sure ifs search engine friendly The actual process is far too complicated to get into here, but remember that every page on your site is unique and use this to your advantage in the optimization process. Look at the theme of the page and tie it into one of your chosen keyword phrases. Make sure title and meta tags are optimized for the theme of each specific page, and don't use the same tags on all pages. 24

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