IT is not equal to SEO

Computers and information technology came before modern search engines. Likewise, people with educations and careers in IT preceded SEOs.

Somewhere along the way, IT folks started clumping SEO under the IT label.

More than once, I've been on calls with IT professionals (webmasters, admins, etc) that purport to know SEO.

Then we crawl their site...

URLs that differ by a character. Duplicate/missing page titles, meta descriptions, 404 errors, 302 redirects, etc.

Often, when confronted with these issues, the IT professional will largely dismiss them as trivial.

If forced to choose between an IT professional and a marketer to lead the SEO team, I take the marketer every single time.

The IT professional has enough information and ego to crush a site's visibility in search.

Does that mean you can ignore technical SEO? Absolutely not. In fact, in most of the sites that I review, most of the SEO issues are technical in nature.

The point here is that IT professionals need to stop masquerading as SEOs.

Renting Links

One of the most popular strategies in the law firm web marketing vertical (aside perhaps for reciprocal linking) is renting links.

The scheme goes something like this. Law firms pay "SEO" companies to add links from other sites "in their network."

There are a variety of ways in which this is done. One of the most common is by creating several "resources" pages.

This tactic is by no means new, nor limited to the legal vertical. And unfortunately, it appears to work in some limited cases for a limited period of time.

To me, this type of link scheme is a clear violation of Google's Quality Guidelines.

Nonetheless, it's very common.

Assuming you're willing to take the risk of being penalized by search engines, you should also weigh the cost benefits of engaging in this sort of scheme.

You'll likely end up shelling out thousands per month. And if you stop paying, your links are removed.

This is why I call it renting links. You get links so long as you keep laying the rent.

No Content? No SEO

You can optimize web pages. You can build links. But if you don't focus on content development, you're probably not going to be very successful with search engine visibility.

Which, if you think about it, shouldn't really be surprising at all.

After all, Google wants to serve up the most relevant, and well-received content across the web.

If you don't have content, what incentive are you giving Google to serve up your site.

Many lawyers I talk to struggle with content development. Whether it's because they don't have time, or the skills needed to development effective web content, they just don't deliver.

Unfortunately, many of them get sold on link building packages or other "seo" services without a content strategy in place (or an ill-conceived low-rent content strategy).

Regardless, this approach to SEO is completely upside-down.

My Great Google Places Customer Support Experience

The Google Places team has been the subject of a lot of criticism. Whether it's complaints of bugs in the system, a poor user-interface, or lack of people support, there has been much written on poor Google places support.

To the contrary, recently I had an excellent customer support experience with Google Places.

I was assisting a law firm with claiming, updating, and optimizing their places listing. I had updated the their profiles, compliant with Google Places Quality Guidelines, of course. But When I hit submit, I received a system error message.

After trying a couple more times, I thought I'd head over to twitter and see if I could "get someone on the horn."

Knowing about the problems with Places, and having had a couple poor customer support experiences with them myself, my hopes weren't very high that I would actually get a response, but I did.

@gyitsakalakis Follow this thread for updates: goo.gl/pXvls

— Google Places (@GooglePlaces) January 20, 2012

Not only did I get a response, it was extremely fast and directed me to a support thread that was very helpful. I was so impressed, that I shared my experience with +Vannessa Schneider at Google. And to my surprise, I got a response from her too. I hope this is becoming the rule, and not the exception at Google.

First Things, First

When we launch a new law firm web strategy campaign, we spend a lot of time up front taking inventory of what online assets the firm currently has. Many firms are surprised to find out that their businesses already have unclaimed or inaccurate listings on a lot of sites across the web.

Many sites, especially local business directory sites, will populate their databases either by purchasing business data from other sites, scraping data from other sites, or even manually inputting from an offline source like a yellow book directory.

In our experience, spending time seeking out our clients' existing assets, we find great opportunities for visibility from which the firm may not have otherwise benefited. Even slight modifications to these profiles can have a significant boost on visibility both within search, as well as, on the business site.

I've previously written about organizing your business data online. There a lot of great tools that can take some of the tediousness out of the process. However, I have yet to see a really great substitute for manual review of each listing.

We also like to spend some time discussing the firm's messaging, goals, and target clients. I think too many web marketing companies take a one-size-fits-all approach to web strategy. This usually translates into poor results.

If you're going to hire someone to help you grow your visibility online, you need to make sure that there aren't any broken links in the chain:

Person goes online -> They start to look for "something" (could be information, could be an answer to a question, could be shopping for a lawyer) -> Person gets "results" -> Firm appears in "results" -> Person clicks on link or calls firm directly from results -> Person interacts with firm -> Person decides whether or not to hire lawyer.

If anyone of these links is broken, you web strategy won't "work."