One of the things I teach my lawyer students is search engine optimization, and how to increase their position in the search engines. After all, where you show up in Google is a critical element of your online legal marketing efforts. Optimize your website properly and you’re way ahead of the game – focus on the wrong stuff and you’re spinning your wheels.
One of the wrong things that most lawyers focus on is the concept of “keyword metatags.” Those are the words that you stick in the top of the website’s code to (theoretically) let Google and the other players know what the site is all about. Lawyers obsess over the keyword metatags in their law firm websites and blogs, they hire expensive search engine optimization “experts” (and I use the term lightly) for thousands of dollars a month to help in their efforts.
They spin their wheels.
Meanwhile, my websites and blogs contain the most generic keywords. Why? Because I’ve long maintained that Google does not use the “keywords” meta tag in its web search ranking. Red herring, says I.
Now, Google comes out with the truth. And I’m pretty happy to report that I was correct all along. On the Google Webmaster Central Blog, the definitive statement (there’s a video to go with it) is as follows:
Our web search (the well-known search at Google.com that hundreds of millions of people use each day) disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.
…
About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.
So next time some fancy-pants legal search engine optimization “expert” corners you at a convention or bombards you by phone, remember – it ain’t the metatags that do the trick. It’s the content.
Photo courtesy of Danard Vincente.
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