I think one of the best attributes of using wordpress for your blog is the inherent SEO properties that can easily be harnessed with a few tweaks.  One of the first things I noticed about this site in particular was that the Title tags on every single page were identical.  There’s lots of good content on this site but none of it was really optimized to be found in the search engines, which to me is the holy grail of internet marketing.  It’s not only free organic targeted traffic, but it also converts into leads, clients, sales and revenue the best.

One of the most important things you can do is optimize your URL’s and Titles.  Always use permalinks so every blog post will appear in the URL itself: http://lawfirmblogging.com/index.php/2006/10/19/are-law-firm-blogs-advertising/  < -- "Are law firm blogs advertising" is IN the URL string

You also want the Titles of the posts to appear in the Titles of your page. This is paramount. With a few lines of code you can rearrange your titles to be powerful and search engine optimized:

< ###title>< ?php wp_title(' '); ?>< ?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' &middot###; '; } ?>Law Firm Blog dot com< ###/title>

Now, instead of every page having the same title:

“lawfirmingblogging.com Helping law firms market on the web”.  

They now show: 

“Blog Post Title” :: Law Firm Blogging :: Legal Blog marketing

That single little tweak will probably TRIPLE the traffic to this site.  You will also notice that I used “Law Firm Blogging” instead of “lawfirmblogging.com”. Unless you’re a huge brand that needs to show off your domain, you should always seperate your keywords to be the first attribute in the title tag.  A search engine spider DOES see the difference.  In fact within a few hours of changing that tag I saw a jump in the serps (search engine ranking pages).  As a test, by also rearranging the existing secondary title keyword “helping law firms market on the web” to “Legal Blawg Marketing” I was able to get the top 2 rankings in less than 24 hours!

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=legal+blawg+marketing&btnG=Search

Today I changed it to a more competitive phrase “legal Blog Marketing”, as soon as the search engines index the new title tag changes, it should start ranking for those keywords. Fortunately this site has a decent keyword rich domain, it has “Law”, Firm” and “blogging” in it which makes things much easier.  Now, if you’re a drunk driving attorney in Miami but your domain is JWSwisserPLLC.com you won’t get any bonus points for your domain.  This makes it all the more important to have your title tags in order, in this case they should be “Miami DUI attorney JW Swisser”, there is absolutely no reason to have the domain name in the titles.  On all blog post articles, titles should read something like this: “New Dade County DUI laws draining bank accounts :: Miami DUI attorney JW Swisser”.

By tweaking the URL’s and Titles to show the prominent keywords of each page to the search engines, the traffic and visibility increases you can acheive are amazing.  You’ve spent all the time writing informative content, why not give yourself every opportunity to let people find it?

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