Great Content Starts with the Title

When writing content for the web, the first place to start is with the title. This is the single most heavily weighed on page aspect of SEO. Google and other search engines rely on the title as a big part of determining what the page is about, so it's important to think about your title from the perspective of a search engine. Better yet, when determining a title, think about the types of keywords for which you'd like to see your page show up.

Keep Your Title Short and to the Point

When choosing a title, try to keep it short, and include only those keywords you really want to go after. Better yet, use a phrase that you would expect someone to punch in to find what you're writing. As an example, if you want to write something on Why your Should Hire a Lawyer to Help with Foreclosure, think about how someone would use those terms in a search engine. They might search for "how to stop foreclosure", or "foreclosure help". It's actually pretty unlikely that that the term lawyer would appear in the most common search phrases, so incorporate those search term in the title. You can write something like, "How a Lawyer can Help Stop Foreclosure", or "Get Help from a Lawyer to Stop a Foreclosure". Alternatively, you can use a colon to help target an exact keyword phrase; "How to Stop Foreclosure: Get Foreclosure Help from a Lawyer".

Don't Forget Your H2 Titles

After you've got your title, make a quick outline of your article or guide. Use that to structure the flow of your article, and make sure you have subtitles (H2 and H3 titles) that are directly related to your page title. In the above example, your subtitles might be something like, "Negotiating with Your lender", "Legal Options to Prevent Foreclosure", "Bankruptcy and Foreclosure" and so on. The sub titles are another thing that major search engines will use as a guide to determine the relevancy of a page to a given search term. Subtitles also function as a great way to organize the content on the page and make it easier to digest for a researching consumer. One of the biggest mistakes we see lawyers make when writing content for the web is to write a long, unbroken string of text. While the content might be great, a webpage with nothing but long paragraphs can appear intimidating and "unfriendly" to many people. Web pages should be well organized an "scannable" so that people can find information quickly.

If You're an Experthub Contributor, We've Got Some Ideas for You

The SEO team at Experthub recently did some keyword research, as well as researching the keyword strength and page rank of pages on the Experthub Legal Network, and created a list of titles that would make for great legal guides, and have an excellent shot at getting indexed quickly, and generating more traffic to your profile. Take a look at our Wanted Page, and see if there is anything that you'd be interested in writing.
As always, these pages will get some SEO massaging and back-links from related, ranked pages to make sure they get indexed and ranked quickly, and get you more visitors to your profile page.

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SEO is Easy

Just not for you.

I've overheard so many lawyers talking about spending thousands of dollars to pay some SEO firm to get their website ranked in google. Most lawyers don't even know what that means. Do you have to pay to be included in Googles search results? No. Will Google find your site and include it in it's search results if you don't do anything? Probably, unless there is absolutely no way for Googles spiders to find it. As long as there is one link on a page that is being crawled, your site will be indexed and included in the results page for relevant keywords.

What SEO is Not

All too many times I've heard lawyers explaining how, thanks to some SEO consultant, they're the #1 result for their firms name. This is not what SEO is all about. Showing up on page one when someone searches for your firm is just Google doing what it's supposed to do; Show people what they're looking for. Plus, if the search traffic coming to your site is composed of people looking for you, whats the point? Obviously they want to talk to YOU, or hire YOU already, so what purpose does your site serve other than to give them your number?

Real SEO Delivers New Traffic

The real purpose of SEO is to drive new people to your website that otherwise would never know your name. This consists of (1) designing an SEO friendly site, (2) publishing quality content and (3) promoting your site by getting good, relevant, inbound links from other websites. The first two steps are the relatively easy part. The hard part (and the thing that really gets Google interested in your content) is getting good quality, relevant sites to put up links to your content, with good anchor text.

Why SEO is Easy for Experthub and Hard for You

One of the things that Experthub does extremely well is get our lawyers' contributed content indexed, and ranked highly in Google for relevant search terms quickly. For example, this article on medical malpractice law in Maine ranks in the third spot for that term after only a month. The reason is all the lawyers on Experthubs network enjoy free SEO services in the form of optimization of, and inbound linking to, all their contributed content. This is that hard third part of SEO mentioned above. Owning an entire network of legal sites makes it easy to promote new web pages and get them noticed by Google quickly.
I overheard one attorney who was actually upset because he had spent a lot of money paying an SEO consultant to get him to the top of Google for his very specialized type of legal practice. After publishing a legal guide on Lawfirms.com about the subject, his site was actually pushed down to the second spot, and the top spot was taken by his contributed article published on our network. After realizing that he now owned the top two spots, he wasn't so upset.

Moral of This Story

If you're a part of Experthub, take some time to publish quality legal guides and enjoy getting even more traffic at no cost.

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