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6 Ways To Maximize Your Law Firm’s Google Places Listing

September 13, 2010 By

Now that you’ve got a Google Places listing, you’re probably wondering what the heck to do with it.  Is it the online equivalent of a Yellow Pages ad, or is there something else to it?  Of course there’s more stuff you can do with it, but what’s the point?  After all, you want to know the key factors to making the most of this thing – right?

Google Places is just about the easiest, fastest, way to market your law firm online.  It gives your law firm awesome exposure, a spot above the organic search engine results, and free (unless you do a modest upgrade, which we’ll chat about later). We’ve talked about setting up your listing but, as with many other things, just being there isn’t enough.  Remember, this is a way for your law firm to achieve a marketing goal, not just to be sitting there like a wet noodle.

So you’ve got to jazz up your listing.  If you don’t then you’re not going very far.

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Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Google Chrome For Mac Makes The Untethered Lawyer Happier

December 11, 2009 By

Google Chrome For MacFor the past few weeks I’ve been suffering from PC envy.  As a Mac user I’ve been very happy with my choice, and dutifully snicker when my PC-using friends experience problems with their computers.  There’s a certain glee in it, and it’s my right as someone who has paid about double what a typical PC user does for a similarly-equipped computer.

My wife’s desktop died awhile ago, and she wanted a laptop.  Windows user to the core, she didn’t feel like getting into whole cult of Mac users.  No worries, I love her anyway.  I picked up a Dell laptop and it arrived about two weeks ago.

One of my greatest joys is setting up new computers, unpacking boxes and tossing out manuals in favor of playing around under the hood.  This was no exception.  Plus, I got to take a spin with Google Chrome, the browser said to be the best thing in browsers since Netscape first came to town.

I was impressed at the speed and stability of this browser, the way it rendered pages quickly and easily.  Firefox isn’t nearly as quick as Chrome, and neither is Safari.  IE?  Oh come on, now.

Why didn’t I load up Chrome on my Mac?

Uhm.  Well.  Uhhhh.

OK, you got me.  No Chrome for Mac.  Yeah, stop smiling at me like that.

Anyway, this past Tuesday Google finally released Chrome for Mac.  It’s a beta version so it’s still a bit leaner than what I get on my wife’s Windows laptop, but I’m happy for now.  Google says they’ll beef it up by the end of January, and I’m pulling for them.

Filed Under: Office Technology Tagged With: , ,

Online Legal Marketing Tip: Speed Up Your Site

December 7, 2009 By

Online Legal Marketing Requires Fast Websites

Last week we talked about some tips for speeding up how quickly your site loads.  Beyond the user experience, there’s a solid reason to ensure your site loads as fast as possible – Google may penalize sites that load slowly.

Google recently released some information about SPDY, a new web protocol that compresses site load times to make them faster. Geeky and totally outside the realm of a legal marketing blog, but it tips Google’s hat a bit to show that they’re interested in maximizing user experience on this front.

In fact, Google’s Matt Cutts told people at a recent trade event that slow page load times won’t negatively impact how well your site ranks, but fast load times may have a positive effect. This all makes sense on a certain level. After all, Google wants people to get what they want as quickly as they want to get it. Fast sites are better than those that leave us drumming our fingers impatiently on the desktop.

Let’s be clear.  Even if it doesn’t hurt your site, if it does help everyone else then you lose by default.

If you’re using Google Webmaster Tools you can download a Firefox add-on to check your site’s load time on the fly review performance in the browser. You can also head over to this tool provided by Pingdom, to see how well things are working.

Photo courtesy of Amplified-Photography.
Filed Under: Legal Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

Saving GMail To Your Hard Drive

November 3, 2009 By

GMail Backup

Lots of lawyers use Gmail for their email needs, be it the standard “@gmail.com” version of the wildly-popular Google Apps. But we get nervous when it comes to keeping all of that valuable electronic data in the cloud. What if the messages are lost? What if I don’t have Internet access just when I need to get that attachment?

You’ve got a few options.

First, just use IMAP to download your email from the Google servers and keep it in sync between your computer and the cloud. It takes awhile the first go around, but if that’s how you routinely access Gmail then it’s pretty quick and reliable.

This is the option I use, and it works perfectly.  I can access my GMail account 24/7/365, and I’m always confident in my ability to get my hands on important messages and attachments whenever I want to do so.

There is, however, a second option.  You could go with GMail Backup, which is free. This is especially handy if you’re bumping up to your storage limit and don’t feel like opening up a second GMail account.

GMail Backup saves and restores a full archive of your Gmail email account. The downside is that though It’s available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, you get a graphical interface only with Windows. If you’re on a Mac or Linux, you’re forced to work through Terminal to get it done.

I’ve used GMail Backup on my Mac, and it wasn’t a big deal to use Terminal and go it without a graphical interface.  But I’m a geek, so I get it if you’re not keen on the idea of tinkering under the hood.

Filed Under: Untethered Lawyer Tagged With: , , ,

Should Lawyers Fear Google Sidewiki?

October 5, 2009 By

Google WHAT?  Before we get into the whole “fear,” thing, let’s talk about what Google Sidewiki is and is not.

Sidewiki is basically an add on to the Google Toolbar that lets you comment about any site, directly on that site, via the Google Toolbar. Once you download and enable Sidewiki you’ll see a little bubble on the left side of every web page. It looks like this:

Google Sidewiki on Legal Practice Pro

See that little note bubble in the corner? That lets you know that Sidewiki information is available. If you click bubble or the >> tab, the Sidewiki panel opens up like this:

sidewiki

Check it out – what you’re looking at are comments placed onto the web page.  But not all comments are shown, and the ones that do show up are denoted by a special Google algorithm.  For example, some of the signals that Google uses for ranking comments are (according to our friends at Search Engine Land):

  • Use of sophisticated language: “This page sucks” isn’t sophisticated; think complex sentences and ideas. Apparently, Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports.
  • User’s reputation: Are your comments being voted up or flagged down?
  • User’s history: How long have you had a Google Profile? How long have you been commenting?

So Should Lawyers Fear Google Sidewiki?

Sidewiki is a powerful way for people to comment on websites even if there is no place on the actual site for comments to be put in.  That means a lawyer with a website may be deluged with negative comments from clients and other members of the public.  What’s even more interesting is that the lawyer won’t even know about it unless that lawyer has installed and activated Sidewiki on his or her own computer.

Without having Sidewiki installed and activated on your computer, you won’t know if a site has any Sidewiki comments.  So if you keep your head in the sand, you may miss the opportunity to see and respond to negative comments on your online reputation.

For more information, check out this video on Sidewiki:

Filed Under: Online Marketing For Lawyers, Social Media For Lawyers Tagged With: ,

Google Doesn’t Care About Your Keyword Metatags

September 22, 2009 By

Search Engine Optimization For Lawyers

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.
Filed Under: SEO For Lawyers Tagged With: ,

Accessing Google Without Your Web Browser

July 20, 2009 By

Lots of lawyers have Google accounts for email, RSS feeds, documents, and more. But one thing that always bugged me was the fact that I had to waste a browser window on Google. I can have a bunch of browser tabs open, but it gets cluttered and makes me feel boxed in.

Enter GMDesk.

GMDesk is an Adobe Air application that lets you run Google without troubling your browser. This comes in handy because it lets me close my browser without losing contact with Google Mail or Calendar or Docs. Even better, it lets me keep my Gmail or Google Reader account front-and-center no matter what I’m currently browsing.

If you don’t know what Adobe Air is, it’s like Java inasmuch as it’s an application that lets you run other programs regardless of your operating system. So this works for Mac as well as for Windows.

GMDesk is free, as is Adobe Air.

Download Adobe Air here.

Download GMDesk here.

Filed Under: Office Technology Tagged With: , , ,

When Your Office Lives On Google …

July 19, 2009 By

gbutts2… it can get complicated. Sure, Google’s free for most of the services you’ll ever use. But there’s so darn many of them, how can you keep them all at your fingertips?

gbutts-settings

Enter GButts, a Firefox addon that keeps Google a click away for whatever service you want or need. Select which services you want to appear in the menu, which is available either as a toolbar or a drop down menu.

Setting it up is a breeze, and the customization lets you do only what you want and not a thing more.

Free, and it rocks. Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing out this cool tool.

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Filed Under: Law Office Management, Office Technology Tagged With: , , , ,