Publicizing A Law Firm Web Site

by

Jerry Lawson

Your site will not help you if no one knows about it. Very few people are likely to stumble upon it while "surfing the Net". There are a variety of ways you can make your site visible. 

Conventional Promotion Techniques

You should include a reference to your web site in any of your conventional advertising. Add it, and your e-mail address, to your:

If your site is just a "cyberspace billboard" for your firm, the equivalent of a vanity press autobiography, with no substantive content, few print publications are likely to be interested in it. If you have substantive material at your site that will be useful to your target market, you are more likely to get a positive reaction in hard copy industry newsletters and other potential client referral sources.

If your firm distributes a paper newsletter to clients, make sure the URL is listed in every issue.

Promoting Your Site On the Internet

Send announcements to World Wide Web indexers and search engines like Yahoo or Lycos. This can be a time consuming chore. There are services that will take your announcement and remail it to many indexers and search engines. The Open Directory contains a list of promotion services.

Sites like those save time, but if you are serious about promoting your site, they may not be the best way to go. While the "multiple listing services" like Submit it, etc. (Yahoo lists over 40) are convenient, if you want maximum exposure for your site, it's best to submit it manually, at least to some of the key sites. At Yahoo, for example, you might be able to have a site cross listed in more than one relevant area if you post it manually. The better multiple submission sites allow some flexibility, but they are probably not as effective as visiting the indexes and submitting the information yourself.

Announce the site in appropriate Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists. The newsgroup comp.infosystems.www.announce is an obvious choice, but it should merely be your starting point. Do not limit yourself to newsgroups and mailing lists with obviously "legal" topics.

In addition to formal announcements of a new site, look for opportunities to pass along the word about your site in newsgroups and mailing lists not devoted to WWW announcements. Tie the information about your site to a topic legitimately discussed in that forum. For example, you could answer a question by noting that relevant information is at your web site.

Include the URL of your site in your "signature block" for e-mail and Usenet newsgroups. If there are any mailing lists or newsgroups that are particularly relevant to your firm's site, someone from your firm should participate, so others will frequently see the signature block (along with an appropriate disclaimer).

Some firms hope they will be more easily found if they are listed in "mall" areas with other law firms. The Seamless Website is an example of this approach. If there is little or no extra charge for inclusion in such a listing, it can't hurt, but it would be foolish to rely on such a listing instead of aggressively promoting your web site in other ways.

Making your page easy to find

All the sophisticated WWW search engines use numerical scoring systems to rank sites by relevance to a typed in request. If someone does a search for documents containing "(toxic AND tort) and (attorney OR lawyer)" hundreds of results may be returned. The scoring system would decide which results appeared at the top of the listing. A particular scoring system might weigh how many times key phrases appeared at your site, and where they appeared. When designing your page, you should keep these search engines in mind. Think carefully about the key words that someone trying to find a law firm like yours would use, and make sure that these key words appear repeatedly and prominently at the appropriate parts of your law firm's site. Don't overdo this technique, though, because it will annoy sophisticated Internet users, some of whom have taken to referring to listing extraordinary numbers of repetitions of key words as "web spamming."

This essay may be reproduced and distributed freely, so long as no fee is charged, the text is not modified, and this copyright notice and the following addresses are included:

Internet Tools for Lawyers: http://www.netlawtools.com.
Author -- Jerry Lawson: lawson@netlawtools.com