What is Google Caffeine?
Google caffeine is Google’s new web indexing system, providing 50% fresher web results then the previous index, as well as the largest amount of web content ever offered to searchers.  You’ll now be able to find news stories, blogs, forums, tweets, videos, and relevant content with recent results given greater prominence.  You may find that web pages and other web media will appear much sooner after published.

Why Did Google Develop Caffeine?
Web content is no longer limited to web page form, it’s evolved to include videos, images, news, real-time updates, and other forms of media that all need to be taken into account, especially as web pages are displaying these features as well.  As web content blossoms both in diversity and volume, searchers expectations have changed.  They want fresh, relevant results and they want their recently published content to be found instantly.

How Does Caffeine Work?
Google’s old index was made up of several layers, some refreshed more frequently and quickly then others.  The main layer of index was updated every few weeks or so—creating a delay of when content was published and when it’d become available for searchers.  Caffeine updates Google’s search index globally and continually so information is fresher.  Caffeine tackles the growth of online information and presents it to searchers with greater comprehensive abilities, speed, and relevance.

What Does This Mean For Your Website?
Caffeine won’t have a direct impact on your rankings but you’ll certainly see changes.  To keep up with the ever evolving and growing web, your content and web pages will be searchable moments after being crawled.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that pages will get crawled on a more frequent schedule, it means that they’ll be displayed in search results more quickly.  Yes, competition for web rankings is going to get tough.  Why?  Because there’s a lot more content that’s going to be competing for top rankings, specifically older content facing fresh and recent content given priority by Caffeine.  Content is also going to be more frequently added to the index.

Philadelphia SEO Strategies:  Success With Google Caffeine.  Is Google Caffeine an opportunity or a possible threat for your web visibility?  While you’ll be facing more competition, Philadelphia Internet Marketing companies provide you with the opportunity to compete with websites that you were once unable to.

Philadelphia SEO  Strategies for Ranking Well With Google Caffeine:

• Philadelphia SEO expands and continually updates site content for better keyword targeting and relevance.
• Consult with a Philadelphia Internet Marketing specialist to effectively use Social Media to your advantage, as you’ll find these results integrated with Google’s regular display.
• It’s crucial that your Philadelphia SEO company monitor your competitors more closely, as their efforts will be taken into account by Google too.
• Long tail keywords are of greater importance.  Philadelphia SEO can re-evaluate current keywords and capture new keyword phrases for you.
• Of course, your web site should have a clean layout, structure, and optimized code.

If you’re worried about your Google rank, Philadelphia SEO companies and Philadelphia SEO specialists deliver value to online customers, and caffeine will do a better job of measuring and delivering that value.

Philadelphia SEO and Philadelphia Internet Marketing makes it possible for you to rank well with Google Caffeine, with strategies that produce content frequently and make good use of Social Media. While Caffeine won’t destroy your current rankings, you’ll find that everything will become a lot more competitive because of the greater amount of information fed into the index.  Philadelphia SEO and Philadelphia Internet Marketing know that while you face more competition, so do your competitors.  Targeted content and good use of social media outlets are more important then ever.  SEO requires regular site maintenance, fresh content, and link building strategies that are ongoing.  Find out more about what an Internet Marketing company in Philadelphia can do for your website rankings.  Contact a SEO expert for further details on Google Caffeine and what it means for your site.

Erica Ronchetti works for Boomtown Internet Group, a Philadelphia SEO company. Boomtown Internet Group is a Philadelphia Internet Marketing company whose services include Web Development & Internet Marketing.

Google today announced the completion of its new index algorithm called Caffeine. According to Google “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”  Read more about this here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html

Many speculate that Google created this new algorithm to compete with Twitter’s growing search share. Twitter delivers real time results for very current news, raising searcher’s expectations about the timeliness of results. Google also said they created the new algorithm in response to the growth of Internet content and different media like video, images, news and real-time updates. With this new media, the average webpage is much more complex. One Google blogger said, “Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.”

Prior to Caffeine, Google indexed web pages every couple of weeks, analyzing the entire web before refreshing the index. The new Caffeine will analyze continuously update the index in small portions globally. As pages are found they will be immediately added to the index, no matter where it was published.

What this means to your website is that there may be a period of change in your rankings as Google results adjust to the new algorithm and also that the results you see when you search may not be the same as the results another person searching the same phrase will see at any given time. In addition, fresher content will probably be indexed above legacy pages in some cases, like when news is searched. Continue to make updates in blogs and social media, continue to add video and podcasts to your pages and video repositories on the web. You will be rewarded with better search rankings for your fresh content.

Google’s “Universal Search” doesn’t just display text and webpage content anymore, but now includes all relevant results for images, video, news, local results, and audio content as well.  Take advantage of this by creating and then optimizing these mediums—a high ranking video on YouTube will show up in results and drive traffic to your site.

If you do decide to explore Youtube, creating personable and informative videos is a great way to get in touch with clients, demonstrate your knowledge, and “connect” with your viewer.  It’s a fantastic way to guide viewers to your website and encourage them to pick up the phone and give you a call.

YouTube is a very effective promotional system and can build trust and connection between clientele and lawyers.  In 2008, approximately 770 million YouTube users searched for lawyer related queries. YouTube viewers and internet users prefer watching concise video clips as opposed to reading technical articles.  Creating simple and clear videos are a very useful marketing tool for lawyers and create a “bond” between individuals and clientele.  When creating online videos, be both professional in demeanor and warm.  A well crafted video can increase the conversion rate for your website and allow clients to make a positive final decision regarding the services you offer.  Your YouTube video can be placed both on your website and on YouTube, Google Video, and other free video host websites.

Creating packages, books, CD’s, multimedia (such as an eBook) for your clients. Writing, promoting, and providing free E-books, reports, consumer guides, and other useful information for your potential clients is a terrific promotion technique.  It may be time consuming, but an informative and personable monthly e-newsletter is generally highly appreciated by clients.  You can take the opportunity to provide industry updates, your reaction to current events, new services you offer, tips, and anything else you imagine would be beneficial.  Your customers and prospects will trust you and your law firm.

Create information packages you can physically send to your clients. Whether this includes free books, reports, consumer guides, CDs, DVDs, and so on, giving your potential clients this free information lets your content do your marketing for you.  And the best part is it’ll save you valuable time if you mail information packages instead of conducting time-consuming consultations and phone calls.

Is your website SEO friendly?  Here’s our Checklist for Making Lawyer Websites Popular With Search Engines.
Read the next blog post on Lawyer SEO/Internet Marketing Strategies…

It’s absolutely crucial to have a blog for fresh content. Google also recognizes and ranks websites that have blogs higher then those without.  You’ll be reaching out to your audience and connecting with potential clients, and you’ll be driving traffic to your website. If visitors find your content compelling, they’ll link to it and increase your site’s PageRank.

Here are a few helpful tips for Law Blogs.  When blogging, remember to:

-Use relevant SEO keywords.

-Write frequently.

-Educate your readers, not “sell” them or promote your services.

A blog will help you reach the kind of clients you want and drive the web traffic your law practice needs.  Fresh and relevant content demonstrates to your clients that you’re a valuable resource.  If you’re consistent in your posting and you connect with readers, you’ll have a popular blog.

Here Are a Few Other Great Tips:

Host a blog on your own domain—WordPress for example is free, and easily customizable. If you frequently publish valuable content, people will link to you, increasing the page rank of your website.   Write content about the legal issues you care about as well as those which deal with the type of cases you want to work on.  You’ll attract the customers you want.

Keep your blog posts simple and discuss areas that are relevant to your practice. Whenever possible, inject as much personality into each blog post as you can to make individuals want to read what you’re writing.  You’ll not only connect with your readers, but your information won’t seem stale.

Establish which keywords you’d like to use—relevant keywords let search engines know how to index your entries and lead new clients to your website. Find out your targeted audience—the demographic you’d like to reach and write about issues targeting them.

When writing articles/blog posts for the web, keep them short and to the point. Blog posts should typically be around 300-500 words—your readers will appreciate this, and the search engines will have an easier time indexing your posts.  Excellent topics include “How To” guides and helpful information that’ll educate and guide your readers, as well as engage your clients.  Encourage them to contact you personally for more information.

Open your blog up to comments and questions, and follow up with people.  If you’re interacting with your readers, they’ll perceive you as a valuable resource and “real” and knowledgeable person.

Of course, the very best way to blog is to do it yourself, since you are the one who knows your business best.  Before starting a blog, consult with an experienced SEO professional and let them inform you how to write specialized content.  With work, family time, and everything else that needs to get done, you may not have the time to create pages and pages of fresh content.  In these cases, you can hire a “Ghost Writer” to create content for you.  Provided with resources and your guidance, they can develop articles and blog posts that you’ll be happy with.

Is your website SEO friendly?  Here’s our Checklist for Making Lawyer Websites Popular With Search Engines.
Read the next blog post on Lawyer SEO/Internet Marketing Strategies…

Almost every law firm now has a website.  Fewer and fewer people consult the phone book when looking for an attorney.

Google displays 24,700,000 total results for “law firm”.

Per month, there are 2,240,000 Google searches for “law firm”.

Here’s one lawyer SEO/internet marketing strategy, guaranteed to make your website popular with search engines:

Your website is incredibly important! You want a website that’s easy to navigate, professional, and able to track success.

WordPress is a fantastic platform.

If you’re still thinking of Wordpress as a personal blog, you should know it’s actually so much more—WordPress is now state-of-the-art publishing platform and an excellent tool for small or medium sized websites. You’ll need to install the software on your own server or with a 3rd party provider to access the many themes and plugins, run advertisements, edit the database, and even modify the PHP source code.

Wordpress websites can host galleries of videos and photos, forums and online communities, corporate portals, and of course blog posts. In our experience at Boomtown Internet Group, WordPress is an ideal solution for the websites of smaller businesses and law firms. WordPress websites can be set up quickly, easily publish content, and be optimized to show up in Google’s search results. Every page can be indexed by Google, which sometimes doesn’t happen in other more traditional CMS (content management) systems. Wordpress has many plugins and applications that make it easy for internal optimization, allowing you to build a website that features an attractive and functional design, and one that can easily be customized and managed yourself—not to mention it’s SEO-friendly.

Maintaining a functional and well-designed website is absolutely critical to your success as a lawyer and necessary when trying to attract new clients. In this day and age, the majority of clients will find you on the Internet and then contact you, and for that reason it’s important to appeal to clientele online.  This entails tracking and monitoring your website and marketing efforts and then following up accordingly.

WordPress is both convenient and useful in that it provides you with the ability to update and edit content instantly, without assistance from a webmaster. You’re able to add additional web pages (not just to your blog) but to any page you wish, and to update your content whenever you’d like.  This is crucial in that it allows you to stay current with all recent news and events.  With other site platforms, this isn’t the case.

WordPress also allows you to upload videos to your site from your computer. Videos are a great form of online media and many lawyers use this as a way to personalize their website.  Many clients expect to see videos and other interactive media when they visit your website so they can feel as if they “know” you before doing business.  With WordPress, there’s no need to pay a lot of money to put a video up on your website.  Shoot the video in your own office, and then upload it to your Wordpress website and to any other video sites on the internet.  Wordpress provides Plugins for flash video players that allow you to host the video directly from your blog instead of YouTube, but you still have the option of uploading to Youtube first and then embedding on your website if you’d prefer.

WordPress allows you to store, publish, and archive your documents and to your website, without help from a webmaster.  If your law practice puts out a monthly newsletter whether online or offline, upload the PDF version to your website.  Google spiders appreciate the additional content, and your visitors will appreciate the collection of archived documents.  If you’re not sending out a monthly newsletter, online or otherwise, consider doing so.  It’s a great way to reach out to potential clients and drive website traffic.

WordPress allows you to track how visitors are converted in to clients. Your web developer needs to be able to help you create a compelling call to action that will provoke consumers reach out and say “I’m interested, let’s have a conversation.”

It is important that your website be well organized, attractive and professional, and also able to be quickly found.

Is your website SEO friendly?  Here’s our Checklist for Making Lawyer Websites Popular With Search Engines.
Read the next blog post on Lawyer SEO/Internet Marketing Strategies…

Why Search Engine Optimization? It’s vital to the success of your business—all entrepreneurial attorneys looking to expand their clientele base should establish themselves as valuable resource and web presence for potential customers.  In this day and age, the success of your law firm does depend on the way you market yourself and your firm on the internet.  In this blog post and the following, we’ll discuss tips and tricks to get your website—and your law firm—found on the internet.

The competition for recognition on the Internet is fierce, especially for law firms.  It doesn’t matter if you have the best looking website around because a lot of web success is based upon SEO practices.  The truth is that if you’re not ranking on the first or second page of Google, you’re essentially invisible to your clients. Getting placed well in Google isn’t a matter of luck nor does it reflect how much money you are spending on your internet marketing efforts.

Too many law practices are stuck in the same old ways of doing things. The following series of blog posts discuss how lawyers can use internet marketing strategies and search engine optimization to establish a web presence, work with Google to rank their website well, drive web traffic, and educate and provide resources for their audience as well as attract clientele.

To kick things off, here’s a checklist for lawyer websites:

Lawyer SEO:  How SEO friendly is Your Website?  Checklist for Making Your Website Popular With Search Engines

Online marketing is essential for any lawyer who wants to grow their practice and attract clients. The best way to attract potential clients to your website is to go beyond the typical legal website.  Of the following, which of these are you applying to your Law Firm’s website?

1. If your law practice has earned any certifications, or supports any causes, are they on the home page/displayed prominently on your website?
2. Does your website attract clients?  How many leads are you getting and how are customers finding you?  Are you tracking and measuring your marketing efforts?
3. Does your website serve as an informational resource?  Does it provide answers that site visitors are searching for?
4. Are you effectively using Social Media (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to promote your website and attract new visitors?
5. Does your website have a “Call to Action”, or prompt customers to pick up the phone or send you an email?
6. Do you have the ability to update and edit your website content instantly, without assistance from a webmaster?
7. Do you have the ability to create a video and then upload it to your website?
8. Does your website have a blog?  Do you frequently create and post SEO friendly blog posts to attract new clients and visitors?
9. Does your website feature interactive media, videos, testimonials, and other downloadable information?
10. Do you have the ability to publish, archive, and store documents on your website?
11. Does your law practice issue a monthly e-newsletter?  Are you archiving copies to your website?
12. Have you optimized your website with relevant keywords and web page content, titles, headers, and meta descriptions?
13. Have you submitted your website to lawyer directories?
14. Have you locally optimized your website?  This includes targeting your law firm to nearby locations to capture new clients there and submitting it to search engines’ local directories.
15. Do you offer clients packages, ebooks, CD’s, multimedia, customer guides or other useful information?
16. To supplement your organic SEO and internet marketing efforts, have you considered paid advertising on Google?

We will flesh out these questions and present 10 strategies to make lawyer websites SEO friendly and attractive to new clientele.

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Image tag definitions:

You can find more technical information about Google image sitemap here.

The Yahoo! Search engineering teams are rolling out updates to crawling, indexing, and ranking algorithms.  Similar to previous updates, you may notice some ranking changes and page shuffling during the process, which we expect to complete over the next few days.

Is this update is all about there Search alliance with Microsoft? Yahoo announced that they received clearance from both the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission for a search agreement with Microsoft on 18th February, 2010. On that occasion Shashi Seth, Senior Vice President of Yahoo! Search Products said:

Most of the things you see on the typical Yahoo! Search results page below will not immediately change as a result of this alliance. What will change is that the basic search listings and ads will be provided by Microsoft instead of our own back-end platform

Therefore, I think this update may be the implementation of these search results. I did not find much discussion about this on the internet, however we might see some significant changes on there search result shortly.

Google has made it easier by adding an option on its website verification page. With this new option (called “Add a User”) a website can have several verified owners in Google webmaster tools without worrying about creating Meta tags & uploading verification HTML files for each user. This new feature of Google webmaster tools looks like this:

To use this new feature of Google webmaster tool, each and every website must have at-least one directly verified user through HTML verification file or through Meta tags & new users must have Google Accounts. It does not require any verification. Once a website has one directly verified owner then ownership of website can be shared with several users, the only thing new users must have is a Google account.

There is one important thing which you should keep in mind before sharing verified ownership with several user.s New owners (users) will have access rights similar to primary owner they can also share this ownership with others. So don’t share ownership to people whom you don’t trust.

Writing for Searchers

Your main objective when writing for searchers is to persuade site visitors to take action on a page by highlighting the best features and selling the experience. Keep your pages focused.  It is better to write shorter pages with links than it is to have long pages that your visitors need to scroll down.  Web pages should be between 250 to 500 words long, as a rule of thumb.  If an article is longer than 500 words, separate it into several pages linked together.  Since readers scan most web pages, you may still want to break them up with headings so searchers can easily find specifically what they are looking for.  Make your headings bold or larger than your normal page font.  You can also use bullets and numbering to make your pages more readable.  Also make sure you edit your grammar and check for typos.  Luckily these same rules apply to search engine programs too.

Writing for Search Engines

Your job is to weave search keyword phrases into the page text so that your site ranks well for them. The hard part is to minimize the awkward nature of this repetition as much as possible, by interspersing the keywords with rich description that matches the tone and style of the website’s existing branding efforts.  Many times you will need to use more than one keyword phrase per page as well. The following points will help you:

• Keyword Strategy. When developing copy, concentrate on the primary keyword first, and then rotate usage of the other phrases throughout the page. Don’t try to optimize for more than three keyword phrases per page so that your results are focused.
• Copy Length. Optimal page length for the search engines is 250 to 350 words.  This length allows repeated mention of keywords without while maintaining focus.
• Meta tags and Titles: As a general rule, the title should be 60 characters long because that is the length of a Google search title. The meta description should be 150 characters long for the same reason.  You may choose to use a meta keyword tag to keep track of the phrases you are optimizing for, although many search engines do not read this tag.  It can be about 250 characters long with no keyword repeats.
• Deep Links. Hyperlinks to other pages within the site – or “deep links” – help boost search-engine rankings, especially when the links contain full or partial keyword phrases.
• Places for Key Word Phrases: Title, meta description, meta keywords, headings, bold print, text links, first two paragraphs of text, last word on the page if possible, and alt tags for images.
• Number of Pages. Most brochure websites will need between eight to 10 pages of optimized copy.  This can include home page (with the most competitive keywords), about page, services or products pages, FAQ page, and contact page.  A news section or blog really helps to develop additional pages and keep content fresh.
• Keyword Density. Strive for between 2% to 5% keyword density.  Here is a free keyword density tool for existing pages: http://tools.seobook.com/general/keyword-density/ Here is a free keyword density tool for text: http://textalyser.net/ In order to get keyword density up, sometimes this means that a page must be split into parts so that keyword phrases can be used about 3 to 5 times on a 200-400 word page. Simply add a link at the bottom of the page to read more about “keyword phrase”, and this link will take them to the next part of the page.
• Single Versus Plurals. Use both the singular and plural forms of keywords.   Research shows that most users search for plural keywords, although it’s easier to insert the singular form when writing about an individual product or service.  Use the plural form in the first heading whenever possible.
• Variation of Antecedent. Make sure to use variation with the word that precedes each keyword phrase.  Without variation, the search engine will read the article and keyword as a single cohesive unit, instead of recognizing the targeted keyword phrase as a stand-alone term

By following these rules of thumb, and editing several times for both errors and clarity, you can develop user friendly content that is also optimized for search engines.