While most attorneys have neither the time nor the patience to worry about search engine optimization (SEO), it is important that you learn the basics about how to improve your website. There are a number of costly SEO-related tools on the market and, fortunately, also numerous free tools that, in many cases, are just as good as the paid ones.

The tools out there generally do the following:

• They Help You Understand Keywords. Keywords are very important because search engines will generally refer traffic to your site based on the keywords that are on the pages of your website. For example, if your website talks about “personal injury”, generally you are going to be competing with hundreds of thousands of other websites seeking the same traffic. If, on the other hand, your website talks about “Glendale, Arizona personal injury attorney” (and several other related words) then Google will know that (1) you are in Glendale, Arizona, (2) you practice personal injury law and (3) Google will be more likely to refer related traffic to you. Content tools will help you identify the keywords that should be in your content and also the “related keywords” that should be in your content as well. To read more about this see:


• They Help You Review the Content You Are Putting on Your Law Firm Website. Google is very concerned with the quality of content that is on your website. Because content is so important, businesses have sprung up that would “spin” others’ content to make it appear original. Google has caught this and now penalizes sites that do this. Before spinning, many people out there got into the practice of actually copying others content and putting it on their website. There are a variety of tools that can help you catch spun content and copied content. There are also tools that can assist you in getting more of your own content on your site easily.


• They Show You if Your Law Firm Website is Working Properly. There are lots of free tools to assist you with various issues related to your law firm website and making sure it is working properly. These tools are useful and can show you how to improve your website and make it more effective at attracting search engines so that you can get more traffic. While these tools are technical in nature, they can be used and easily understood by novices and experts alike.

Tools That Help You Identity the Most Relevant Keywords

1. Ubersuggest (ubersuggest.org)

This tool utilizes the “suggest” data that comes from Google. This is a great tool for seeing alternate phrases that people are searching for online (that come up as suggestions when people are doing searches):

2. Keyword Eye Basic (keywordeye.com)

This tool allows you to visualize the competitiveness of various keywords:

3. Word Stream (Wordstream.com)

It is important to know the words that people are searching for when looking for an attorney. Word Stream helps you identify the most profitable keywords in your niche.





Word Stream also offers a free trial that you can use to help identify the best keywords for your law firm.

Tools to Help You Review Content You are Adding to Your Website

4. Copyscape (Copyscape.com)

This is a tool that checks for plagiarism and is very useful if you are having others write your content for you. All you need to do is insert the URL you want checked and the tool will tell you if there are copies of your webpage anywhere else. Verifying if your content is original is something that most websites generally do.

5. Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML (word2cleanhtml.com)

This is a useful tool for attorneys and others who do not understand code to rapidly convert Word documents to HTML to put on their website.

6. Removeem.com (Anchor Text Over Optimization Tool)

One of the most important components of a website is how anchor text is used. Anchor text pointing from one page on a website to another can increase the traffic the page getting the link is receiving from Google. Read about links here. Because links are so important to rankings, law firm websites often “overdo” the number of links they put on various pages of their websites, and this results in search engines penalizing them. This tool helps you see if your law firm website’s content has too many links in it:



Technical Tools

7. Yellowpipe.com (Robots.txt generator)

A robots.txt file allows search engines to easily see what is on your site (and what information you want search engines to ignore). Every website should have one.

8. SEObin.com (a title and meta tag description optimization tool)

The title tag is one of the most important SEO factors. This is a title description of your page’s content. Here are some examples of title tags:





Meta tags are descriptions of the content on the page. Here is an example of how meta tags look in a search:



SEOBin.org will assist you in getting title and meta tags that are ranking the highest for the content you are also trying to rank for:

9. Feedbot.com (An Image SEO Tool)

This tool will allow you to review various images on different pages of your site and verify the images are following best practices:

10. Tools.Pingdon.com (Website Speed Test)

Your website speed is very important to how your website is ranked. Google wants to send users to sites that are faster because it improves the user experience. This tool will help you identify if there are any issues with your website speed. You can also set up alerts so that you receive an immediate notification if there are any issues with your website speed.

Conclusions

These are some of the more important tools you should be using to make sure you are attracting traffic to your law firm website. Another great tool is the Free SEO Toolkit from Microsoft that you can download for free here