Blogging for lawyers

Blogging is good for business. A good business blog will raise profile, showcase expertise and communicate with your audience in plain English; it will make your business more approachable; it will generate business; and it will dramatically improve your performance in the search engines.

Blogging provides an inexpensive, efficient and effective way to publish web content and to expose that content to the search engines. With blog software you can easily create and update new pages on your website without any technical knowledge. You think and write; the blog software does all the rest out of the box.

How blogs help with SEO

There’s much more to blogging than just pushing out content, but for present purposes let’s concentrate on a huge benefit of blogging — its built-in SEO effects. SEO should never be your primary purpose in blogging, but it is a compelling reason for you to start a blog, to use a blog service rather than a custom CMS for topical content, to blog better and to blog more frequently.

How does blogging provide SEO? First and foremost, blogging generates great new content. As each new item (blog “post”) is published, your site content is enhanced: new pages are created with page titles, headings and content that include many keywords relevant to your audience, so your presence in Google increases for all those terms.

Google loves blogs. It likes the fact that your website is being frequently updated and places a higher value on your pages than it does on otherwise equivalent pages on more static sites. Google knows a lot about blog structures and crawls and indexes new content surprisingly quickly: you get onto Google ahead of the more pedestrian competition.

Blogs also automatically generate RSS feeds which effectively distribute your latest information to those who choose to subscribe to the feeds. As more and more people adopt RSS reading, this distribution channel is becoming increasingly effective and will drive more traffic to your blog. In addition to the indirect SEO benefits of increased traffic, other bloggers and sites may also “pipe” information from your RSS feeds into their pages, creating links to your blog.

A good blog will also establish connections and conversations with your peers and readers by providing comment and analysis, linking to other bloggers and encouraging user comments. These connections and conversations further enhance your visibility and reputation, leading to networking and consequent linkage with others of influence.

These factors — good content with keyword relevance, frequency of updating and quality linkage to (and from) your site — are the key metrics used by Google and other search engines in determining your page rank.

Without question good blogging will dramatically improve your visibility in the search engines by improving your score on all counts.

How infolaw can help

Nick Holmes of infolaw is a leading blogger and expert in blogging for lawyers and search engine optimisation. He comments frequently on these issues on his blog Binary Law. He has written widely on these topics and enthused and assisted many new law bloggers.

For an initial discussion, please contact nickholmes@infolaw.co.uk, telephone 020 8878 3033.

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