He is so good at it that he's been published on Law.com!

Video Marketing Tips for Lawyers: No. 1

Video Marketing Tips for Lawyers: No. 2

Video Marketing Tips for Lawyers: No. 3

Here's a good critique about what NOT to do when creating an attorney video

If you haven’t, pay close attention.

About two years ago, bloggers of the liberal persuasion all over the country made a concerted effort to link the term “miserable failure” with the White House presidential profile page of President Bush.

And it worked. Every time someone went to Google and typed the term “miserable failure” into the search bar, the number one rank on page one was that particular page.

This serves as an example as to how important online reputation management is. If there are enough people at work to harm your reputation on the internet, it takes an equally concerted effort to control the damage.

Follow this link to see how the George Bush Google Bomb even spread over to Barack Obama's White House.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/01/obama-failure.html

That might not make sense to many of you, considering that the YouTube and Google seem like two different things altogether. But really, they aren’t that different.

Google looks for websites , text, news and video, while YouTube looks only for video.

But consider that the younger generation is viewing the internet in a completely different way than those of us who can remember what life was like without it. We can remember going to the library and looking through index cards. That seems hopelessly ancient to the people in their teens and twenties. In fact, to that same demographic, reading multiple lines of text seems somewhat of a chore. When it comes to their homework or projects or how they communicate with each other, video, graphics and short summaries are the standard.

What this means for you, your practice and your site is that another smart way to get a higher impact on the internet is to set up a video presentation. Contact us here at Foster Web Marketing to get started.

While the standard methods of signs, bumper stickers and television and radio ads were used to market both candidates, what made the Obama campaign remarkably different than any other in history was the way in which technology was used to mobilize volunteers and supporters.

The Obama campaign utilized MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, mass e-mails and even text messages delivered to phones.

You should also consider that more than ever before, the Obama campaign used the internet for fund raising and communications.

With technology as integrated into our society as it is, everyone has the opportunity to make the most of marketing their firms and businesses. You no longer have to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for radio or television ads. Existing technology makes it affordable and simple to expand your practice.

Feel free to contact us here at Foster Web Marketing for more ideas as to how to make technology work for you.

                                                                                                                                -Washington Post, 1/17/09

Ok, what does that mean for you? It’s easy to feel jittery these days, what with the economy being in its current untenable state. And the news lately has been loaded with concrete evidence that there aren’t many parts of the economy that aren’t connected with one another, so when one of the biggest technology based companies on earth starts cutting things out of the budget, you have to wonder if this will come back on you.

Will Google start charging people to get listed? Will this cost us money?

It is highly doubtful. In the first place, take a look at what Google is getting rid of. Google Video is redundant considering that they now own YouTube. And will not being able to use “The Mashup Editor” really affect the practice of your law firm? Probably not.

Google’s bread and butter is the search engine business, and all of these cuts are based on either eliminating redundancies or simply conceding the ground to technologies that are already dominating a particular niche.

There is certainly a great deal to worry about with the economy, but a few cuts at Google are certainly not something to concern yourself with.

Broadly speaking, Black Hat means “engaging in ethically shady practices to gain an unwarranted advantage over your competitors on the internet.”

That’s the broad definition, and if you are interested in seeing some of the narrower aspects of Black Hat tactics, then a woman named Ann Smarty has put a pretty good glossary together.

According to the blog entry, there are lots of specific categories involved in cheating. You can engage in Black Hat tactics by focusing on cheating, by focusing on people, or by focusing on skirting search engine guidelines.

Take a look at the blog for more information.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-is-blackhat-seo-5-definitions/8151/

Another thing to consider is that they only hold onto the information for a certain period of time. Yahoo holds on to information that can personally identify you for only 90 days. Google holds onto it for nine months, while Microsoft holds onto it for eighteen. So when you went to Amazon last July and ordered that KC and the Sunshine Band retrospective, nobody will be able to hold it against you after a year or so.

Apparently it hasn’t done so well.

According to this article by Tim Daly, Chrome’s user numbers dropped off the face of the earth after an initial strong opening immediately after the high profile release.

According to Mr. Daly, the problems range from anything from browser crashing to laptops going into hibernation mode while using it. It is rare that Google rushes anything to market before ironing the bugs out (that’s more Microsoft’s angle,) but that seems to be the case here.

Another interesting aspect of the article is that among the various demographics that used Chrome and didn’t like it, a great many of them were people aged 45+ and people without college educations. That basically translates into “Chrome is difficult to use.”

Having groundbreaking software does no good whatsoever for a mass release if people can’t figure out how to use it. So here at Foster Web Marketing, we made it a point to make our DSS system ridiculously easy to operate. You don’t need training in HTML or web design to get your thoughts and case results up there.

Just contact us and we’ll give you a demonstration.

Google Webmaster Chat Seminar Excerpt

Altogether, 11 members of the U.S. House of Representatives expressed support of the pending deal by denouncing a proposed block, the Wall Street Journal reported.

This is yet another sign that Yahoo will be going the way of the dodo bird pretty soon. Even though Yahoo still has a share of the market, the monolith that is Google is still dominating search engine traffic.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10034107-93.html

Mirrors: One site for the regular surfers, and one for the search engine spiders. The one for the spiders has all the keyword cheats. Not a good move.

Camouflage: Putting thousands of keywords on your website and hiding them by making them the same color as the background of your site.

Inbred Linking: One guy sets up three websites. On each website there is a spot where it says "For more information, go to THIS completely unrelated site," which will send you to his other site, where there is a spot where it says 'For more information, go to THIS completely unrelated site.." and so on and so on.

Link Selling: If you have a high ranking site, you sell hard links on your site to other folks who could use a hand. Findlaw has been doing this lately.

There are tons of other sneaky little tricks of the trade, which will do nothing but hurt your site in the long run. Go organic and you have nothing to worry about.

Many of our clients are ex-Findlaw people and have other horror stories about their web design and search engine optimization practices.

Natural or organic search is exactly that. Whenever you "buy" links and try to incorporate that into the organic world, you will get in trouble by the Google police. If you want to buy links to your site, go for it! It's not illegal, nor is it frowned upon by Google - not at all!

It's just called ADWORDS. 

What Findlaw Did Wrong

Findlaw is (or was) allegedly trying to sell links to upset the delicate balance of natural placement by PageRank. 

PageRank is simply how popular your page is to other web pages. It is a critical element to the way Google measures sites naturally and FAIRLY against each other.

Here's another lawyer blog that provides another view of what happened to Findlaw. 

Stick to adding relevant content to your website for the services you offer and you will be fine.

What About DSS?

DSS does not do anything tricky like that. At FWM, we make sure that we do not do anything, or advise our clients to do anything, that will hurt them on the search engines. DSS is designed to be an easy to use tool to update your website in the areas that matter most to Google while still paying careful attention and respect to the natural balance of organic search.

PageRank is a naturally occurring event in that other website will link to your page if it is relevant thereby increasing your PageRank status. DSS gives you easy and fast access to deploy your content and links to others. DSS promotes the social aspect of the web without trying trick the search engines.

But having said that, there is nothing in the article about the importance of good search engine placement. While the article is loaded with good tips on keeping customers and utilizing the communications aspect of the internet, none of these suggestions will do you any good if they don't know you are there.

Search engine placement will soon become THE standard for marketing.

An article in the New York Times confirms what we have suspected for quite awhile now. 49% of internet users turn to search engines to get information. Recipes, addresses, directions, oriental rugs, or anything that you can imagine. And as we definitely know, they are using search engines to find legal help. They look for divorce attorneys, criminal defense attorneys, tax attorneys, and most certainly personal injury attorneys. And the lawyers who are smart about search engine optimization are the ones who will benefit. 

As the population gets older and more computer-savvy, the number of people who use search engines on a daily basis isn't going to do anything but go up. There is no better time to position your website to take advantage of these rising numbers.

Contact Foster Web Marketing to see how your firm can benefit from attorney search engine optimization.

While AdWords might be the simple way to get prominently listed, the costs are more than your average PI law firm can bear. Working the search engines organically is a much more cost effective way of achieving good search engine placement, especially if there are the inevitable crashes and bugs in the AdWords system.

http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/017830.html

Just because someone from Peoria, Illinois CAN access the daily newspaper of Tallahassee, Florida whenever he wants doesn't mean that he WILL. This serves as an example as to why it's important to stick with the immediate geographical area of your firm. While you might get the odd case from the other side of the state, it's more practical to keep your nets closer to your own boat.

Focusing your keywords, content and news updates on your immediate geographical area will bring in much better results.

According to the report, 61.5% of June searches happened through Google. It's nearest competitor is Yahoo, which only captured just over 20% of internet searches. 

While doing well with Yahoo, MSN, Ask and all the rest is nothing to sneeze at, having a solid ranking on Google will do much more to improve the visibility of your site.

To see the story on this report, follow this link:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/markets/industries/technology/comscore-releases-june--search-engine-rankings/

The article also gives some column inches to the importance of time spent on sites by individual users, which we have considered to be an important indicator for years.

To read the article, follow the link below.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6564671.stm

1. Your future clients, who are today's teenagers, use youtube constantly to watch music videos, funny shorts, reruns and all kinds of other stuff that is constantly being uploaded for free.
2. All media and entertainment websites have video – these industries are always first to market. They were some of the first to generate websites. It's always good to watch what these guys do first and see what happens.
3. Attorneys can really be informative through the use of video clips.
4. Video Testimonials from clients are very powerful.
5. More and more attorneys are embracing video.
6. It is very easy to do yourself now without looking like an amateur.
7. The equipment you need to do it yourself is very inexpensive: camera, tripod, your computer.
8. Everyday you wait, you could miss out on a case.

Google "Universal Search," which we are expecting to see in November, lists maps, news, images and books related to a search query. Right now, you can get these returns by clicking on different tabs on the Google search bar. In just a few months, they will be combined into one. Video will be next!

Check out the Universal Search Article

All kinds of stuff!

More to come!

I just added to my library an interesting article about whether Google is all that it is cracked up to be. The gist is that there are always people smarter than you. Google is becoming so big and so dependent on Pay-Per-Click that other smaller search companies have an opportunity if they play their cards right.

Please read this article about Google Search that was in the Washington Post on August 9th, 2007 by Rob Pegoraro. Interesting!!