In reality, these tips apply across the board but since we work with law firms / practices more frequently we are addressing this post to them!

1. Write search engine friendly content.

Writing for the search engines used to be just about keyword density, the number of times a certain keyword was found on a page in relation to the other words. This is increasingly becoming less of a factor. Now, the search engines are taking many more factors into account and writing content is changing to how it should be. Write your content for what a human being might want to see, not a search spider / robot.

2. Make your content titles stand out, make them headers

If your post or article is about bill 198, then within your article you should have section headers like “How Bill 198 Affects You?” or “Bill 198 Explained” and ensure that with the editor you are setting these headers to an H2, H3, or H4 tag.

3. Be kind to others, link out

Creating links to other sites in the same field / niche as you will help establish your search engine context as well as encourage others to link back to your site.

4. Page rank doesn’t mean much

Sometimes there is talk about how important it is to be a Page rank 6 in Google’s eyes. Page rank is valuable, just not as much as you might think. The more important metric you want is your position on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). If you are a personal injury lawyer, then getting on the first page of search results in Google for the term “personal injury lawyer Toronto” means a lot more than being a page rank 6.

5. Trade links with other websites in your field.

Be careful with this one. You want to avoid link-exchange-only websites as Google is very good at finding and punishing websites that are obtaining links via paid submission or deliberate link-trading scams. However, you can speak with other websites and blogs in your field and see if they might be open for a link exchange.

TIP: If someone is going to give you a link, ensure that the link “text” is something you want to rank for. For example, if you are a personal injury lawyer, get the other site to link “Personal Injury Lawyer Blog” on their site instead of just your firm name.

6. Create NEW content on a weekly basis.

There is no magic number as to how often you should update your site, but the more the better. I suggest weekly as a bare minimum, but if you can’t find quality content to write about on a weekly basis then do what you can. The point here is that Google has recently added the ability to filter content by how recent it is. Just look at the following screenshot: