Building Your Blawg and Driving Traffic to Your Site
by Patricia Jordan

Now that you have decided to create a blawg, there are a few matters to consider. Does your firm have a blogging policy? Will you focus on one or two areas of law? What topics will you write about? How will you find those topics? Most lawyers who are blogging spend a few minutes each day scanning news headlines for the next hot topic.

One hot topic is anti-violence video game legislation. Chris Bennett, a partner at Davis LLP and the head of the Trademarks Practice Group, has been blogging at www.videogamelawblog.com since 2005. On January 7, 2008, he posted a blawg on “Why do politicians keep proposing anti-violence video game legislation?” In that blawg he linked to reports on Fox, First Coast News, GamePolitics, and Gaming Today. This was a smart move, as searches for those sites could generate hits on his blawg.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS)
Feedburner, an industry leader, provides media distribution for blogs through RSS feeds. An RSS feed is commonly referred to as a feed or web feed. RSS is an easy to use method for content distribution that allows you to read news headlines from your desktop without having to browse the Web. RSS content can be read by RSS reader software or a feed reader aggregator. There are more than 2,000 RSS readers that will allow you to review a large amount of content in a short time.

I asked Chris Bennett what RSS has done for Davis’ blogs. “Using RSS is very easy (really simple, in fact!). For incoming content, RSS helps us organize the information we receive regarding new issues in the video game law industry. And for outgoing content, our blog software takes care of everything for us, making it easy for people who read our blog to receive and organize our posts.”

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a term used to describe a process of improving the volume of traffic to a website or blog from search engines. Bloggers use SEO to measure the quality of visitor traffic and to identify how often specific tags or keywords are used. Often law firms mistakenly use tags that are firm-centric and not what a potential client might use in an online search for a law firm. Tags are keywords, categories, headlines, summaries, and content.

Choosing tags carefully will attract search engines to your blog. Most search engines use algorithms to measure the strength and vitality of links to a blog. Linking to other blogs and encouraging bloggers to link to your blogs will help to quantify your site as a useful site, resulting in a higher search result ranking. Davis LLP has chosen its tags well, as their Google search ranking for “video game law” is consistently ranked at #1. Visit www.davis.ca/en/blogs to view a complete list of tags used on its three blogs.

Notice to Mac Users: Mac has user friendly blog software as part of the iWeb program with iLife.

Site Du Jour
Read about RSS at www.cba.org/cba/media/main/rss.aspx and www.feedburner.com.

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

This article was published in the February 2008 issue of BarTalk and is subject to the copyright by the British Columbia Branch of the Canadian Bar Association, 2008, all rights reserved.