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…

Click the link to watch:  SEO Internet Strategies for 2010

Sue and I discuss 5 hot Internet Marketing trends you can expect to see in 2010:  Universal Search, Google Caffeine, Social Media, Video Phones, and the new FTC changes.

If you have any questions or comments regarding the webinar, email us at sue.mccrossin@boomtownig.com or erica.ronchetti@boomtownig.com.

Our next webinar will discuss Google Analytics!

Microsoft released a PDF for webmasters about search engine optimization on Bing (the second SEO-related offering). This PDF is called “Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters”. This will help you to learn the new interface changes that come with the new search engine “Bing” and how it will affect your website search engine optimization or what you need to do for optimize your website on “Bing”. Microsoft also launched IIS SEO Toolkit. This toolkit will help developers, web server administrators, hosting provider to increase their website’s ranking on search engines.

Following are some important things we can learn from Microsoft’s release for Webmasters.

Golden Triangle eye-tracking pattern on a Search Engine Result Page (SERP): Now results pages will appear with a Golden Triangle eye-tracking pattern on Bing. This will make your website more attractive on Bing SERP, and help increase importance on Search Engine optimization.

Categorized Result: The new Bing first SERP (the first search results page of a query) will not show the first 6 through 10 results now. The 6 through 10 results will contain “categorized” results on the first search result page of a query. This new feature may impact website owners.
Quick Tabs: Bing quick tab helps you to easily navigate through result pages and find the desired information you are looking for. Top ranking results of each of quick tab will show category wise in SERP, which makes Quick Tabs data instantly available.

Related Searches: Bing provides a list of common search terms related to current search query in SERP titled “Related Search”. The “Related Search” & “Quick Tab” may infrequently become visible similar to each other in SERP.

Search History: Bing provides search history of previously searched terms. Bing also provides option to clear search history or enable/disable search history.

Instant Answers: This is an old feature of Bing but now it’s enhanced. Now “Instant Answers” will be found in organic result and also in categorized result of SERP.

Skip Flash Intro Link: Bing now provides Skip Flash Intro Link on Search Result; this will help searchers to go directly to the content page of flash intro based websites.

Page Translation Link: Bing now provides Page Translation Link on search result, this will help English language searchers to access other language websites in English.

Best match: Bing has included a new feature called “Best Match”. When a search query is entered & Bing is confident about the first result (that the first result is the best result or the best match what the searcher is looking for), the result will be marked as the “Best Match”. This result may contain more pages, contact details or features of the site. Bing will choose the best match when it’s highly confident in the result as said by Microsoft. Best Match is not good news for site owners who are in the first page for a query that show best match on Bing SERP.
You can also remove your site, change display phone number or remove link from best match by contacting bestmatc@microsoft.com.

Document Preview: Another good feature by Bing is Document preview. Document preview provides additional content like descriptions, links in a hover on Bing SERP. This feature helps searchers to find desired information without leaving Bing SERP. Also this will help to increased qualified traffic.

If you don’t like this feature to be used on your website then you can ignore this feature by just adding following simple codes to header section of your web page:
<meta name=“msnbot”, content=“nopreview”>
Or
If you want to ignore this feature from all pages then simply add the following code to your HTTP header:
x-robots-tag: nopreview

Local Listings: Now Bing provides the local listing center results in local business search. Now local searches are very heavily featured in Bing. You can add you business to local search listing by create a listing on Bing Local Listing Center (username/password required).
Enhanced Wikipedia: Bing has made some changes on Wikipedia Results. Wikipedia Content has been added directly to Bing’s index. When you make a search on Bing you will find a link of enhanced view on Wikipedia result. If you want to use this feature then you need to click on the enhanced view link.

Crawler Change: There is no minor changes have been made to MSNBot crawler.

The document provided by Microsoft doesn’t provide a lot of new information that can make effect on search engine optimization. But Bing’s new features may impact website owners through its new thing like document preview, categorized result & replacing the 6th result to 10th result with categorized result.

Finally you should increase your SEO efforts to increase your website’s on-page & off-page and get good rankings on Bing, because of the new ways of thinking about search results by Bing. Search Engine Optimization is the most important thing to get well rank on Bing. To keep your website on the top on Bing SERP, you should follow search engine optimization techniques.