Marketing Your Firm Online – Part 2

by Patricia Jordan

Now that you’ve decided to build a website or improve your site’s performance and return on investment, there are a few essential tools that you will need to develop an effective site. Advanced website analytics can provide you with a complete and accurate profile of how visitors use your site and what acronyms, terms and variants they use when searching online. Search engine optimization will help to ensure your site is successful and produces the results you desire.

Advanced Website Analytics
Each time a visitor downloads a file or requests any other content your web server adds a record to a log file. Web analytic reports contain information on the types of content viewed, the marketing campaigns or search engines that bring them to your site, and much more. That information can be used to determine how well your site is performing by tracking what a visitor actually does. For example, last year www.cba.org/BC received 1,132,172 visits or an average of 3,101 per day. The most frequently visited areas were legal careers, Sections, member services and Dial-A-Law scripts. HR ads in the form of PDF files were downloaded 102,434 times. Here are a few web analytic resources to get you started: www.webtrends.com, www.google.com/analytics, www.coremetrics.com, and www.deepmetrix.com.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a website from search engines. Webmasters utilize SEO in an attempt to measure the quality of visitor traffic and to identify how often specific keywords or terms are used. SEO can also refer to “search engine optimizers.” Search engine optimizers are employees who perform SEO services in-house or are consultants who conduct optimization projects on behalf of clients.

Before you begin to build your web pages, you’ll need to incorporate SEO into the development and design of your site. SEO often involves optimizing a site’s code, hierarchical structure and presentation. Indexing of pages based upon meta data is no longer considered reliable, as most search engines now use more sophisticated ranking algorithms that utilize factors such as:

• alt attributes for images;
• domain name, URL directories, filenames and sitemaps;
• HTML tags and headings;
• on page keyword adjacency, proximity and sequence;
• term frequency, both in the document and globally;
• text within the title element; and
• web content development.

To further complicate matters, most search engines use dozens of algorithms that change frequently, resulting in a web page that ranks in the top five in one search engine while ranking at 100 in another. Yahoo! recommends using a “description” tag and that you write your description accurately so it fits the content of the page. Yahoo! ranks search results according to relevance to a particular query by analyzing the web page text, title and description as well as its source, associated links and other unique document characteristics.

In the June issue of BarTalk, I’ll write about security, site-level search, and more.

Do You Have a Law Blog?
We’ve created a new section at www.cba.org/bc in “Public & Media” under “Legal Links & Blogs” and are seeking links to law blogs. Send your links to webmaster@bccba.org.

Patricia Jordan is the CBABC Manager, Interactive Media. She welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions. Tel: 604-646-7861 E-mail: pjordan@bccba.org

This article was published in the April 2007 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2007, all rights reserved.