03/09/2011 // West Palm Beach, FL, USA // Rene Perras…… Le Buzz // Rene Perras
(Lawyer Web Marketing News) — Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a tricky road to navigate if you don’t have an Internet marketing company who is knowledgeable in SEO techniques and how search engines rank websites. Making one wrong move can quickly kill your website rankings and destroy hard work and investments you put into your Internet marketing campaign. That is what happened to JC Penny, who recently came under fire for using black hat SEO techniques, presumably by the SEO firm hired by the retailer.
Once Google caught on, JC Penny’s rankings were diminished and all of their hard marketing work was back to square one. JC Penny is actually lucky that’s all that happened to them; BMW was caught for the same SEO tricks a few years ago, and Google completely removed the car company from its search results for a period of time.
According to a New York Times report, JC Penny was consistently at the top of search engine result page (SERP) for various apparel, home décor, furnishings and product keywords for several months, most notably through the holiday season. JC Penny was found to be using “black hat” optimization tricks by placing thousands of links on hundreds of websites, which is called “link spamming.” Many of these links were unrelated to the keyword, some were apparently abandoned, but they all led back to JCPenny.com.
So, how does your law firm keep from becoming the next victim of unscrupulous SEO companies? Hiring an experienced SEO and Internet marketing firm that has a proven track record of effective SEO campaigns and successful clients is one way to ensure your law firm’s advertising campaign is in the right hands. An open dialogue about what you would like to achieve in your SEO marketing campaign is also important in ensuring your law firm won’t fall victim to black hat marketing practices.
Lawyers and attorneys must remember that obtaining top placement on Google, Yahoo and Bing and other search engines is not something that can be achieved overnight. Simply building a website and utilizing SEO will not place your law firm on page one in Google; it is something that is cultivated and nurtured over time. Depending on who else is optimizing for the same terms and seeking the same precious Internet real estate, will also influence how long before your website is placed on the search engine results page (SERP).
Any Internet marketing company that promises you that your law firm’s website will have hundreds of hits and rank number 1 on Google in a very short time is inflating your expectations, only to have them destroyed when they can’t keep their promise, as I previously reported in “The Law Firm Marketing Confidential: Managing Client SEO Expectations.”
For more information on effective SEO law firm marketing, lawyer web marketing campaigns or any other of our attorney Internet marketing programs contact Rene Perras.
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