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…

• Logins to your WordPress.
• Go to setting tab.
• Click on Writing Tab.
• Copy and paste this list on the text box given under “Update Services”
• Click “Updates Changes”

Also, as this list is huge (83 services); it may increase the time it takes to save a post. In this case you can use the following short list:

http://rpc.twingly.com/

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.bloglines.com/ping

http://www.octora.com/add_rss.php

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatter/ping.php

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC

http://xmlrpc.blogg.de

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

http://1470.net/api/ping

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://bitacoras.net/ping

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC

http://blogbot.dk/io/xml-rpc.php

http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc

http://blogmatcher.com/u.php

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://coreblog.org/ping

http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt

http://mod-pubsub.org/knapps/blogchatt

http://ping.amagle.com

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc

http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc

http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogs.se

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://thingamablog.sourceforge.net/ping.php

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php

http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b

http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php

http://www.blogoole.com/ping

http://www.blogoon.net/ping

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1

http://www.blogroots.com/tbpopuli.blog?id=1

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://coreblog.org/ping/

http://effbot.org/rpc/ping.cgi

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.weblogs.se/

http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id1

http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://www.catapings.com/ping.php

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

Also, as these list is huge (83 services); it’s sometime occurred that it’s take long time to save your post. In this case you can use following short list:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://www.feedsubmitter.com

http://blo.gs/ping.php

http://www.pingerati.net

http://www.pingmyblog.com

http://geourl.org/ping

http://ipings.com

http://www.weblogalot.com/ping

With that incredible number, you might worry about how people are going to find you, and if you already have good rankings, you might worry about losing them if you were to convert to a WordPress content management system.

If you need an easy platform that’ll allow you to rank well and drive more traffic, consider a WordPress website. WordPress websites are popular due to the ease of use, great functionality, and professional looks. Check out these showcased WordPress sites: http://wordpress.org/showcase/archives/ which showcase how popular and versatile the software platform is, and about its search-ability and large-scale usability.  If National Geographic and The Wall Street Journal are using WordPress, that speaks volumes about using it as a possible platform for your site.

If you’re still thinking of Wordpress as a personal blog, you should know it’s so much more—an excellent tool for small or medium sized websites, host for galleries of videos and photos, forums and online communities, corporate portals, and of course blog posts. Most people who have blogged are familiar with the convenience and usability of WordPress, which makes it a logical choice for using as your main website too.  If you are already used to blogging with WordPress imagine how easy it will be to maintain your own site pages using the very same tool.  So we know WordPress is easy to navigate, easy to administer and maintain, and very versatile.  The question is whether WordPress is SEO-friendly as well.  Converting your website into Wordpress could be scary if the software destroys your hard-won search rankings.

In our experience at Boomtown Internet Group, WordPress is an ideal solution for the websites of smaller businesses. It can be set up quickly, easily publish content, and quickly 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.

So How SEO-friendly is Wordpress?

If possible, design your WordPress style sheet to have your content close to the top of the page, for better readability—most search engines only scan the first half of web pages. Wordpress can also keep sidebars, footers, and other page elements towards the bottom and out of the way.  This design will allow your visitors easy readability as well.

The WordPress default installation doesn’t allow for strict control of page titles and meta tags for keywords and page descriptions—but there is a really great plugin called The All-In-One-SEO Plugin that’ll take care of it for you.  For more control, it lets you add page titles and meta tags manually, as you’ll get the best results that way.  Don’t forget to optimize with regional spelling and supply the search engines with information specific to your website for the best results.

Since blogs publish the same content on many pages such as archives and category pages, you can be penalized for duplicate content.  For instance, if a blog post is placed in more than one category, the post content can appear on the individual pages for each category.  If Google sees the content on more than one page of your site, it can be downgraded as duplicate content.  However, with the All In One SEO Plugin, the post is only accessible to search crawlers in one place. The other links to it will not be followed, which takes care of the duplicate-content problem without messing around with the Robots.txt or other workarounds.

So you’ve got great content, now you need great links. The quality and quantity of your links are important and play a role in search engine favoritism.  Who is linking to you?  WordPress makes this easy, with trackbacks, pingbacks, and blogrolls.  You’ll know who’s linking to you and you’ll easily be able to link to other people, giving both them and you search engine credit. Consider installing the “Related Posts plugin” and have your articles link to other similar articles you’ve written.

Not only text can be optimized for the Search Engines:  WordPress allows you to optimize your images as well. Taking the time to write alt tags and mindfully name your files will drive additional traffic to your site.  It’s important to take advantage of image optimization—even if your visitors can’t see your image tags, you’ll still get traffic from different engines.  I recommend that you take the time to do this yourself, but if you don’t have the time, use one of the available WordPress plugins to do it for you.  The plugin is called “SEO friendly Images” and can add titles to images in posts and pages.

One experience we recently had while in development mode on a website convinced us of WordPress’s innate SEO-friendliness.  We were designing the website www.rcdtechnology.com which had a section on RFID UHF Wristbands.  We forgot to disable the xml rpc ping notification feature on WordPress while we were in development, and the same day we put up the page on UHF Wristbands, the client got a call inquiring about them.  This sort of looked bad for Boomtown because we were still in development, but it really accentuated the complete SEO-friendliness and quick rankings which can be achieved by using the WordPress CMS software as the basis for your website.

For many businesses WordPress is a very robust CMS platform that will allow you much more flexibility and administrative control over your content, while giving you the added benefit of inherent SEO-friendliness.  You don’t have to know HTML or CSS to use a WordPress website or blog.  WordPress offers a built in editor, pre-existing customizations, tutorials, and how-tos. Although WordPress may not be the most perfect CMS solution, it’s so easy to set up, run, and maintain a great website and if you put in a little time, it’ll deliver great search engine results.

If you’re interested in learning more about Wordpress, email us at sue.mccrossin@boomtownig.com and we’d be happy to answer any questions.

UPDATE: It appears this is broken again when upgrading to WordPress version 2.9.2.  Currently working on a fix.

The Problem

I was developing a custom WordPress theme for a client in a shared hosting environment when I ran into a problem with the WP Post Thumbnail (WPPT) plugin.  When editing a post in the WordPress admin, the loading spinner image next to the Preset1 tab never disappeared.  It just kept spinning and spinning.  To troubleshoot, I enabled the console panel in Firebug to examine the AJAX request/response data.  As is common in the AJAX paradigm, the response is sent back to the requesting page as JSON.  But the Firebug console reported a JSON parse error when trying to evaluate the AJAX response.

WPPT makes use of PHP’s json_encode() and json_decode() functions to encode/decode data.  The JSON extension is bundled with PHP >= 5.2.0 by default, but a lot of shared hosting environments have older versions of PHP where these functions are unavailable.  The WPPT plugin accounts for this and bundles its own versions of the functions to be used should native PHP functions be unavailable.  In wp-content/plugins/wp-post-thumbnail/wppt.php, it checks for the presence of the JSON extension and includes it’s own file if it doesn’t exist:

if ( !function_exists('json_encode') )
	require_once( dirname(__FILE__) . '/includes/json.php' );

Unfortunately, the functions bundled with this plugin do not produce 100% valid JSON and you’ll still get the parse error.  So what to do?

A Real Replacement For json_encode() and json_decode()

For a true json_encode() equivalent, I turned to PHP PEAR.  There is a Services_JSON package available.  You can donwload this package and get the source code or just copy and paste the code here.  Simply replace the code in the wp-content/plugins/wp-post-thumbnail/json.php file with this code.  But you’re not done yet.  Keep reading.

Avoid Conflicts With Other WordPress Plugins

There are other WordPress plugins that use this code for their own json_encode() substitutes.  Twitter Tools is one.  If you have Twitter Tools installed and include this code with the WPPT plugin, your whole WordPress installation will break because you’ll be declaring the classes Services_JSON and Services_JSON_Error in two places which isn’t allowed.  To avoid this, I namespaced the class names in the json.php file by prepending Wppt_ to the class names.

Do a search and find all instances of these lines:

class Services_JSON
class Services_JSON_Error

Replace with these respectively:

class Wppt_Services_JSON
class Wppt_Services_JSON_Error

Final Step

Add the following code at the end of the wp-content/plugins/wp-post-thumbnail/includes/json.php file so that when the WPPT plugin calls json_encode() or json_decode(), these functions will be called:

function json_encode($data) {
	$json = new Wppt_Services_JSON();
	return( $json->encode($data) );
}
 
function json_decode($data) {
	$json = new Wppt_Services_JSON();
	return( $json->decode($data) );
}

That should do it.  The WPPT plugin should work without any errors.  One thing to note is that any subsequent plugins that rely on the PHP’s JSON extension will also use the functions you just defined above.  I’m willing to live with this since the Services_JSON package is vetted by virtue of being part of PEAR.  Should the client’s web host decide to version up PHP, all plugins will start using the native JSON functions and mine will simply fade into obscurity.

There’s a handy step-by-step guide in the documentation for moving your WordPress installation to a new server.  The usual stuff is covered.  Back up your database, replace any hard-coded references to the development URL in your template files, move the files to the new server, edit your config file with any appropriate changes to the database credentials, etc.  But there is one thing in particular that isn’t mentioned.  All the hard-coded references to the development URL that are stored in the database.

You’ll probably have posts or pages with uploaded images and links to other pages within the blog.  WordPress will store all of these in the database with your development URL.  Most people, myself included, won’t feel like going through all of your posts and pages manually to update any references to your development URL.  When researching this problem, I came across a really helpful solution and wanted to share it.

You’ll need access to the database to execute some SQL that will find and replace all references to the development URL with the new production URL that you provide.

UPDATE 
   wp_posts
SET
   post_content = REPLACE(post_content, "www.dev-url.com", "www.live-url.com")

You need to execute a similar statement for a few other fields in the database:

wp_posts.guid
wp_options.option_value

Additionally, if you have any custom fields associated with posts or pages, you’ll want to do the same update on:

wp_postmeta.post_value

Check the database for tables used by any installed plugins.  You may need to update fields in those tables as well.

Even though you have to scan and examine the database, this method is much faster than updating references manually.