Want to take a perfectly good DUI attorney website and make it suck a bit more? I've got an easy solution for you: Add a site search function.

If your website has fewer than several thousand pages, there should be no reason to have a search box… at least not if the site is well-organized and easy to navigate. In fact, in my humble opinion, it borders on webmaster malpractice and is a lame substitute for a steady and intuitive navigation structure.

Studies have shown that about one-third of all visitors who come to a website with a search function use it. That wouldn't be a problem, except that I have YET to see a DUI law firm website that has a well-functioning search feature. If a user does not find what they are looking for, they will leave your website and never return. The problem with search boxes on websites is epidemic in scope. In fact, one industry expert, Jared Spool, found that using a search box "can cut a visitor's chance of success in half" (see the paper by Constantine and Lockwood).

If your site's search function transports your visitor off of your page (typically to Google or Yahoo), then you have to fight to get that person back. Some major search engines allow you to embed a site-search function into your site, and they even serve the results for you. However, if in doing so (if not used correctly) you allow your results to be served up with your competition's results, then you are giving business away.

Even worse than the negligent leaking of visitors through an unnecessary search function is an act that I believe borders on criminal… that is, when a webmaster serves ads from your competitors on your search results page that he or she then monetizes through Adsense or other means.

If your site has a search function, it may really help the health of your practice if you sit down with your webmaster and ask some hard questions, starting with "why."

If you are set on having to have a search function, or you buy your webmaster's BS about why it is important, here are some important things to make sure your webmaster does for it:

1. Build a custom search engine.
2. Don't use an out-of-the-box or 3rd party solution.
3. Don't allow users to be transported to another search engine that can serve either organic results or paid ads by your competitors.
4. Spend a lot of time analyzing what your visitors might search for and what terms they might use, and then spend time making sure the search function actually gets them the results they seek. If you have analytics that have recorded a previous search function, analyze the logs to see what search phrases visitors use.
5. All users to narrow results based on easy to figure out variables. For example, if your site features 15 attorneys and 10 area of practice, as in a mid-sized firm, allow users to search by area of practice, or to search by attorneys.
6. Devise a list of synonyms for common words which includes misspellings and incorporate that into your search engine. For example, the "U" and the "I" keys are right next to each other on the computer keyboard. I very common misspelling of the word "drunk" is the word "drink." Your search engine should return the same result for the search "drunk driving" as it does for "drink driving."
7. Make sure to specify only the most relevant result for common search terms. For example, a user might just want to contact you, and might type in "contact" into your search box. If your website features 350 pages, all of which have a "contact" button in some non-intuitive location, most non-custom search engines will return every single page of the 350 page site in a search for "contact." Talk about frustrating.

In conclusion, site search functions for small law firm websites usually suck, so be careful and be mindful.

Have you seen the DUI Science Forum at DUIAttorney.com?

It started out as a quiet experiment and, over the past month, has grown into a viable and vibrant aspect of DUIAttorney.com.

Moderated by Forensic Scientist and DUI Expert Witness Erik Brown, the forum is starting to attract attention and participation from other scientists, including Dr. Ilya Polishuk from Israel.

A recent example is a discussion about whether DUI Laws are discriminatory scientifically.

The forum is open to the public, and any DUI Lawyer or expert witness who wants to participate is welcomed to do so. All you need to do to get started is to register for a free user account, which will give you general access and the ability to post and reply to messages.

For forensic scientists and expert witnesses who would like the ability to add a signature to their posts with a link back to their websites, please register at the forum and then contact me so I can adjust your user privileges.

Are your business objectives well-defined? To get to where you want to be, you need to know where that is.

I presume that your number one goal is to do your best for each and every client. Without first being a great lawyer, nothing else matters. But doing your best on each case is not a useful metric or framework when it comes to planning for long-term growth and profitability. If you don't mindfully approach the other aspects of your business, your legal skills and toil will be undervalued in the marketplace.

If you want to maximize the profits and efficiency of your sales and marketing efforts, you must invest, but you must also refine.

I regularly talk with lawyers who believe that the way to expand their business is to add more websites, more banner ads, more pay per click, more back-links, more directory listings, more features… more, more, more. They focus on traffic for traffic's sake. Diversity and reach are important parts of the picture, but omnipresence for its own sake can lead to a terrible overall ROI.

There are only 10 top-ten organic listings in the search engines. If your firm has all ten of those listings, you win, right?

Not so fast… at least not when it comes to ROI.

Here's why:

Your customers (potential clients) want choices. But not too many choices. If, in the first ten results, they only have one choice, some will make it to the second page of the search engine results, which typically display results 11 – 20. The amount of money and energy you need to spend to completely dominate the first page of the results will ensure you a greater market share, but not necessarily greater profits, and most likely a much lesser ROI.

Your competitor, who might spend 1/50th of what you do each month, who occupies the 11th spot, will "inherit" a small portion of your business by virtue of a percentage of your potential clients wanting a second option for comparison.

What is the right amount of online marketing? What is the point where more is not better (this point has to exist somewhere)? The answer to that question is local-market specific. It is also a moving target.

When it comes to online presence, equating effectiveness with quantity can be misleading. A competitor can always outspend you.

Can you have too many leads?

I believe any firm, no matter the size, can have too many leads. A lead is "one too many" if it is not qualified. Too many unqualified leads, or leads that are shopping around, dilute your ability to close and service the core percentage of leads that produce profit. The more your Internet infrastructure focuses on quantity and dominance, the more unqualified leads you will receive. Every unqualified lead you receive costs you money in the form of your time and staff's time, and increases your exposure to negative reviews (whether online or by word-of-mouth). Unless you spend a lot of time "giving" to unqualified leads who will never pay you anything, chances are their experience of you and your firm's "free" consultation (if you provide one) will not be favorable.

Quality and efficiency are the objectives of refinement online. Over the past fifteen years the Internet has evolved from a random cesspool of toxic waste and BS to… well, a less-random cesspool of toxic waste and BS where the good stuff is starting to rise to the top. The search engines are learning how to tell the difference, and most online consumers already know.

While traffic as a metric of campaign performance used to be the holy grail, the number of visitors is, in reality, much less important than the quality of each visitor.

Suppose your firm's target is to open 25 new DUI cases each month. If you could realize your target by having a total of 100 visitors, or by having 10,000 visitors, which would you chose?

I would always take the lower ratio, in the above example 1 in 4 visitors becomes a client versus 1 in 400 visitors.

In my business, if I could attract only attorneys who actually understand and appreciate quality legal marketing while bypassing those who don't, I would make more money with less effort.

The questions I ask myself every day as I work on DUIAttorney.com are:

1. What can I do today to increase the quality of each visitor?
2. What can I do to make the site and the user-experience more efficient?

The fewer junk visitors I can attract (bounces, spammers, people with DUI cases who are not serious potential clients, attorneys who don't understand Internet marketing), the easier my business runs and the more profitable it is. I gladly sacrifice visitor quantity in exchange for quality.

If you invest in quality, the peaks and valleys in your business will not be as big. You will not waste as much time entertaining dead-end leads. You will spend less time in the "sales" phase of the attorney-client relationship.

Relying on tricks and "black-hat" tactics has become more costly in most cases than building quality. There are still tricks on the Internet that can blast your traffic level through the room in the short term, but the life-cycles of the tricks and fads grows shorter and shorter, and search engines constantly work to eliminate them.

The problems with these "black hat" or low-quality vehicles are that success gives birth to failure. Try a new trick. If it works for a short time, your practice has to react and increase infrastructure to handle the increased business. When the fad fades, you will have to downsize or desperately scramble to find the next fad.

Most lawyers don't have the time to really learn how to determine the quality of their Internet campaigns, even when making decisions that can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year and make the difference between continued growth and downsizing.

We are in a world where quality is the new king, and slow and steady will win the race.

At DUIAttorney.com, our growth strategy is to work with firms that understand that progress takes a commitment to quality. The firms that will be on top in a year from now actively engage in the process of building not only their reach, but their long-term reputation. They involve themselves because they understand that their future success depends on it.

With the suite of tools that have evolved over the past year, we now offer DUI lawyers ways to engage in their firm's future that have never before been available in an exclusive directory.

We are also organizing what promises to be one of the largest and most efficient collaboration tools that will allow non-competing firms to leverage the collective power of group promotions.

For our members, the use of the tools is unlimited and included in the monthly subscription fee. The more attorneys use the tools, the more their ROI will increase over time.

The Internet has to be monetized to exist. But the days of rising prices on finite services are coming to an end. I believe our model of one flat fee for unlimited use is the embodiment of the current Internet evolution. As should be true everywhere online, after the price of admission, the lawyers who participate in the site truly hold the keys to accelerated growth in their own hands.

If you are a member of DUIAttorney.com and have not scheduled your one-on-one training session with me, let's try to get it on the calendar as soon as possible so you can start using the tools to build your practice and boost your other Internet properties.

If you are not currently a member and if we still have a county or state that interests you available (we work exclusively with one attorney per state or county), let's talk and I'll show you how, together, we can strengthen the foundation of your online sales and marketing infrastructure to grow your ROI in a way that truly builds a solid future.

I spend a lot of time analyzing DUI lawyer websites.

In fact, the moment I talk with one attorney in any geographic area about his or her web presence it is a necessary exercise for me to do a complete analysis not only of that firm's website, but of all of the competing firms as well. How can you be competitive if you don't know what you are competing against, right?

There are several typical practices that I see in regards to domain names (the website address) that I want to discuss with you. In this post I give some bad examples and then get to my thesis which is that the domain name is THE most important part of your website. Here are four bad practices:

1. The vanity name: Perhaps the most common domain name type that I see used by firms that are less than happy with their firm's web ROI is the vanity (or ego) domain name. By this I mean a URL that is a version of the firms name. For instance, Dewey Cheatham and Associates, PLLC might choose the domain "DCAss.com." While the domain name may be a perfectly appropriate description of this (randomly made-up and fictional) firm, without knowing anything more about the URL, I'm going to think it's got something to do with politics. It tells me nothing about what the attorneys do. In fact, it doesn't even tell me who the attorneys are. Vanity names are great for business cards, but not so great for attracting new business through search engines or pay per click advertising. If your firm has a vanity domain, chances are you are not getting as much focused traffic as you could.
2. The "public" domain name: There are many places where you can get a "free" blog on the internet. The most popular is Google's Blogger or Blogspot. It's a great platform. And anybody can set up a blog in less than 10 minutes, at zero expense. And they even look pretty good. These are great if you are doing a temporary blog about your travels, or what to show off the collection of cats that you are fostering and trying to adopt out. But if you are an attorney and trying to build your online infrastructure, why would you share a common top-level URL with everybody else (i.e. – "yourblogname.blogspot.com")? You do not own that domain name and you never will. When you want to switch to your own domain (and you will), you will have to start over, nearly from scratch, and build the credibility and trust of the new domain.
3. The general website: By this I mean a general law domain name, such as "thebestlawyersaround.com" in which a firm highlights multiple areas of practice. I think it is a dangerous practice to focus on more than one area in any given website. This is because niche sites convert better than general ones. Your DUI clients will be highly suspicious of any firm that does medical malpractice and DUI. Any educated client will assume that the DUI cases finance the higher-end contingency fee cases.
4. The landing page masquerading as a niche domain name: Ever clicked on a website you wanted to visit and discovered that the site looked robust, with many topical links? But then, when you click on any of the many links, you are transported to a different website? Some firms that have multiple practice areas think that it is sufficient to erect a one page website on a DUI-related domain name that refers people back to their general site. This is like putting a DUI related caption on a motion or brief that you file in a DUI case, but all subsequent pages are about an unrelated divorce case. While I'm sure everybody knows a judge or two who never reads any defense brief, this is still malpractice per se. Not only is it a web strategy that is unlikely to pay off, it is also deceptive to users of the website.

Original domain names are cheap. They can be registered for as little as a buck or two. Then again, you could pay thousands of dollars for a decent domain name (one without hyphens, numbers, that is a dot-com with practice and geographical specific keywords in it).

Whenever possible, it is better to have an exact match domain. This is a domain that is the exact thing that qualified users search for. As an example, in 2002 or 2003 I acquired the domain "duiarizona.com." I got a great deal on it, but in all honesty I would have paid a couple of thousands of dollars for it if I had to. In real-estate, location may be everything. On the web, your domain name is the most important piece of your initial investment in your online infrastructure. While "yourcityduionline.com" may be available for original registration for $7.99, if you can get "yourcitydui.com" (without the trailing "online") for 100 times that price, "yourcitydui.com" is a MUCH better bargain.

Attracting good clients online used to be cheap, or free, when everybody was still under the spell of the phone books, and spending their money there. Now that the smart money has shifted online, a sound investment in a good domain name just makes sense.

In my ten years of DUI practice, I got upwards of 95% of my DUI clients from the internet. Year in and year out one truth consistently confirmed itself as an immutable law of the internet. More good potential clients call than complete web-based forms.

Would you rather have somebody call or fill out a form?

The firms who answer that they would rather have a form filled out usually have an inferior or non-existent receptionist situation. It makes sense that, if you are a solo without phone support, that you would want a form filled out while you are in court. Once the "send" button is pressed, you have the chance to contact, and close, the potential client.

If a phone call goes to voice mail, you are highly likely to lose that potential client. Why?

Potential clients who pick up the phone are motivated, and they want to talk to somebody. Now. Most will not leave voice messages. If they don't get instant gratification when they call you, there is a high probability that they will call your competitor shortly thereafter.

I believe that websites that encourage form-completion rather than phone calls are leaving a decent ROI percentage on the table. I also believe that if you get an equal amount of web form leads and phone calls, more of the phone calls will end up being good paying clients.

There are many advantages to the phone call over the form. A person who fills out a form is not going to get any new information. He or she may still be ambivalent about whether they want to hire you or your firm, or schedule a consultation. A phone call gives your firm a prime opportunity to "talk the person in." It gives you an opportunity to make a good first person-to-person impression.

Why do I use forms on my websites at all then?

Unless you are truly a 24/7 lawyer and you actually have an attorney or paralegal to take live calls around the clock, you will either miss, or piss off, a significant segment of your potential client pool that wants to contact you after-hours. If your "24/7" line is a voice message or an answering service that just takes messages, you are MUCH better off to have a form. Night visitors to websites know that, when they are outside your clearly posted hours of operation, the best and only way to immediately initiate contact is by using the form.

The truth is that most good clients are suspicious of 24/7 service. They look at firms that provide it as either desperate for business or as mills.

In my opinion, most firms are much better off advertising "7 day a week availability" and then clearly defining the extended evening and weekend hours where a potential client could expect a return phone call. (One noteworthy exception is when you have a young associate who actually willing to give meaningful consultations — and make a good impression– at 2am. But then you risk your associate becoming a witness.)

The form is more honest. It works all night for free and never complains. It doesn't get interrupted in the middle of sleep or dinner. If a person who was arrested at 10pm on Saturday, and is on the web at 3am Sunday morning looking for help knows that you will be available to call him at 10am when your "extend hours" start, then he is more likely to fill out the form and actually wait for your call. Combine that with an auto-responder that gives the person your information and confirms your hours, and that person has a decent chance of becoming a client without the headaches that come from 24 hour attorney availability.

Most efforts by attorneys and their webmasters to be seen online start and stop with the giant, Google. In fact, of the 10 or so brazen phone solicitations I got last week, about 9 of them promised me to get my website on the front page of Google.

Yahoo and Microsoft are the second and third. According to most major sources, including HitWise, Google has upwards of a 70% search market share. In theory, it means that 7 out of 10 of your potential clients who are seeking DUI help through search go through Google. In reality, it may be even higher than that, given that people often search multiple sources.

Behind Google is Yahoo, at around 14% of the market, and Microsoft's Bing at around 10%. If those numbers are correct, that leaves around 5-6% of the remaining market to other sources, the biggest of which is thought to be Ask.

While it appears that Yahoo's search market share is on the decline, Bing appears to be heading up. Given that Yahoo and Bing are merging their search business, their piece of the pie looks to be between 20 and 30% in the next year or two. And given the vast amounts of money that Microsoft is spending to compete in search, it would not surprise most people if that share goes up.

So when it comes to evaluating where you website is, and where it needs to go, the first thought should always be about Google. Google's search product is the best out there, and if you optimize for Google, you are probably doing a pretty good job for the other search engines too. But don't forget to check Bing and Yahoo and know what your competition is doing there, and to discover the strengths and weaknesses in your overall online strategy.

Any DUI lawyer reading this probably already realizes that I'm a true believer when it comes to marketing law firms online. A web presence is very helpful in attracting new clients who don't know who you are. But it is essential to have a web presence even if you get all of your business through word of mouth, networking and referrals.

Nearly every potential client that contacts you attempts to find you on the internet before they make the call. If they don't before they make the call, then they do before they come to your office. If not before they come to your office, then certainly before they hire you.

Your website is like you office. Once a potential client visits it, they feel like they have already met you, or at least they should.

For all of the above reasons, you need a web presence. If you don't, some other lawyer in your jurisdiction will take good care of the clients that should have been yours.

But what kind of web presence do you need? Do you need a website? Do you need a blog? What is the difference?

The answers are yes, yes, and a lot.

A DUI lawyer website, in its conventional sense, is a collection of one or more pages that rarely change. They might talk about your firm, your lawyers, your defense philosophy, and even explain a little bit about the law.

A DUI lawyer blog on the other hand is a dynamic and ever-changing publication that talks about anything and everything that might interest your clients and potential clients, and even other lawyers.

If you rely on a non-attorney to update your website content and/or blog that appears to be in your voice, you best check yourself before you wreck yourself. Why? Your clients and potential clients want to know who you are. When they go to your firm's website, it is as if they visited the four walls of your office. They have looked at your diplomas. They have seen your collection of certificates, framed bar admissions, and seen that you have an extensive library of law books. But they don't know you… at least not in your own voice.

Your blog posts should be in your voice, talking to your audience. You wouldn't let your best paralegal address a judge on a phone conference while pretending to be you. Why would you ever allow somebody else to write something that will be seen by everybody who looks for you, and put your name on it? Not a great writer? Don't have time? It bores you? It's beneath you? Your time is far too valuable?

To all of those excuses, I say you can't afford not to. If you don't have time now, you will later as your flow of new cases starts to dry up. If writing in your own voice bores you, what can you do to make yourself more interesting to yourself? There are few greater uses of your time when it comes to marketing that writing content for the Internet. This is because the content is always there, always accessible.

You may spend twenty hours preparing a speech to a CLE or a rotary meeting, but once given, will anybody really hear it again? With a blog, users can access it at 3am when their pending DUI case is keeping them up. Your voice and your words can give them comfort and hope. Write a good article on a good blog, and I guarantee that more people will see it than even the most attended DUI CLE in the history of the universe.

You don't have to blog like crazy. In fact you don't have to even call it blogging. But if you aren't contributing fresh content on a regular basis to the online conversation about DUI law (at a minimum of twice a month), people are going to start to wonder why. It may not bother some people, but others, particularly younger ones, are going to think that you are either out of touch or that you are too busy. Being too busy in the eyes of the younger demographic is not a good thing, and you don't want your potential clients to mistakenly believe that you are spread too thin before they even contact you.

My thoughts about ghost-bloggers: Many attorneys use the practice of hiring ghost writers to do their blogging for them. I'm in no way suggesting that you get rid of any inside or outside copywriters that you have. What I do suggest is to redefine their role. Instead of writing in your voice as if by you, why not give them their own voice? Let them write under their own by-line or blog account. Then the things that they say that are nice about you will be better received. Your blogger will probably appreciate getting the credit. You will never get stuck with something attributed to you that you didn't mean to say. And your readers will love it. They want to hear from you once they get to know you, but they are open to good information regardless of its source.

Have a receptionist who likes to write? Let her blog about things that she can observe that make you and your office look good. Perhaps there was a time when you were running a little late coming back from court, and you didn't want to keep your valued client waiting, so you skipped lunch, ran up the stairs and burst into the office right on time. There's no legal value to such a story, but trust me, your clients and potential clients will love it. They will feel like they are getting to know you and your staff. The more familiar they are with everybody in your office, the more comfortable they will feel and the more likely they are to hire you, and to have good feelings about your firm long after their case is done.

In a future post, I will discuss the various types of blogging platforms. Blogging is easy and for the most part free, but how you set yourself up can make a huge difference in the long-term.

Would you hire a lawyer who has been suspended from practice multiple times for trying the same unethical and ineffective tricks, and then allow that lawyer to employ the same tactics in representing you? Many attorneys hire this sketchy lawyer's "SEO" equivalent when it comes to promoting their websites.

Link spam is highly frowned upon by the search engines. But as bad as it can be for your website's long-term survival online, in this lawyer's opinion, it is problematic from an ethical standpoint as well. In essence, it is fraud.

Link spam comes in several forms, including:

• Blog comment spammers (where a person tries to post a link to their website through a blog's comment mechanism).
• Forum spam (same as blogs, only in a forum).
• Guest-book spammers (some lawyers have stooped so low as to post links in bereavement pages).
• Paid links (which I wrote about last June in the post "Avoid Paid Links").

Every day I delete more than 10 spam link posts from the various pages of my main website, and several more from other websites that I run. Sometimes it is some misguided attorney who doesn't understand how the Internet works doing it directly. Other times I trace the IP address back to a foreign country where, I presume, the "dirty work" has been outsourced on the cheap.

The search engines are looking for reports of this kind of activity. Google is actively soliciting the reporting of such behavior.

It is bad to do. It is dangerous to do. It is clearly a black-hat tactic.

If you or your web person is doing it, cut it out or fire your web person. What your web person is doing to you is the equivalent of you opening a trial with "Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, this case is about the bad choice that my client made when he drank a fifth of vodka, had his 12 year old daughter blow into his interlock device, and then drove them both the wrong way on the freeway at 95 miles per hour".

If I haven't made it clear enough, if you or your web person are engaging in link spam, somebody is committing internet strategy malpractice.

Inbound links from other websites to yours are generally good. But link spam links are definitely worse than no links at all.

Most modern blogs (which is where, in my experience, about 90 percent of the link spam is attempted) are typically equipped with safeguards against link spam. Those include holding posts for moderation, having aggressive spam filters, and adding "no-follow" tags to all comment links.

When you try to post your link on another law firm's website or blog without their permission and in a way that does not add more useful information to other readers of that blog, it is like you are trying to take a dump in their office lobby. No ethical or self-respecting attorney should do it, nor allow it to be done for them. Period.

It boils down to this: If you feel like you are "getting away with something" by posting a link on somebody's blog to your site, just don't do it. In my opinion, one good link is worth hundreds of spam links, and sometimes hundreds of spam links are worth less than no links at all.

Build good and relevant content. Link out to good and relevant content on the subject. Create relationships online. That is the formula. That is the way to be legitimate. Link spam tells the world that you are a fraud.

You can't be both legitimate and a fraud at the same time, so which will it be?

With hundreds of "social media" vehicles online, it is impossible for any human being to use them all. The two elephants in the room are Facebook and Twitter.

Should every DUI lawyer have a Twitter and Facebook page?

Absolutely…with a caveat.

The great thing about Facebook, Twitter and other social media outlets is that they are free. The problem with Facebook, Twitter and other social medial outlets is also that they are free.

All lawyers want to get business for free, but if all lawyers use the free media outlets and are competing for a fixed number of clients, the efforts of you and your competitors should cancel each other out. Right?

The answer, I believe, depends on how lawyers use these free media sources.

Why should DUI Lawyers Tweet?

If you just got a DUI and you are an intelligent and affluent person who is too embarrassed to ask a friend for a referral, you probably go online to look. You want good information, fast. You don't want to have to slog your way through a series of 140 character bursts. Unless you are looking for clients who speak in sentence fragments, Twitter is not the best direct source to get clients. But it is an essential piece of the equation.

If you do nothing else with Twitter, here's what I recommend:

Set up your Twitter account. Set up your blog's RSS feed to automatically post your entries on your Twitter feed. It's that simple. And with 10 minutes of setup, now each blog post you make gets broadcast to your "followers" on Twitter. This is unlikely to get you clients either, at least directly. But what it can do is drive targeted traffic back to your blog, where people can find out about you. If they like what you say, they may link to your content. If they link to your content, it is more likely that you will get more links to your content. After a while, if done right, it can turn into a beast that feeds itself.

Warning: Do not mix a personal Twitter feed with a business feed. Your clients don't want to know that you're sitting in Avatar and it's awesome. They don't want to know the cute thing your kid said, or your prediction for the Lakers-Celtics point spread. Keep it simple, keep it business, and keep it separate.

The same goes for Facebook.

You can set up a "fan" page for your practice and invite your friends to become fans of yours.

Wait a second… Do lawyers have fans? Do DUI lawyers? Huh? Don't despair, you can always learn to play the guitar. And in the meantime, some of your friends will join up to be nice. The benefit of the fan page is that you can run your other feeds through it. Your posts appear on your fan site. Your fans then serve your stuff through their Facebook profile for their friends to see, and it can grow exponentially.

A highly attenuated Facebook friend, perhaps an old girlfriend or somebody you haven't seen since high-school who might not otherwise know what you do for a living might become a person-to-person referral source. That's the real world magic of Facebook.

Once in a blue moon somebody who is a friend of a friend who happens to have a pending DUI case might see your stuff through a feed, become a fan, and even a client. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

Facebook and Twitter are absolutely essential supplements to anything else you are doing online. Just don't rely on them as primary or secondary sources for  client development. And for the love of all that is sane and simple, don't pay somebody to "manage" or set up a Twitter or Facebook page.

You can't afford to not use Facebook and Twitter. Twitter and Facebook are stop-loss measures in today's Internet economy. If you don't use them and your competition does, you will incrementally lose market-share. But understand that only exclusive things, things that your competition does not have and can not get, really give you the edge online and increase your piece of the pie.

Back in the 1990's, the search engines depended a lot on what was included in a web page's meta keyword tags. Meta keywords died off in importance long ago. In fact, although we add or modify dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of pages on DUIAttorney.com each week, we no longer add meta keywords. This article will briefly explain why, and hopefully save you some wasted time or money in regards to keywords.

For those you who are unfamiliar with what meta tags are, they are data descriptors that are not viewable by the human eye in a browser. These tags carry various instructions, mostly to the search engines, about what to do on or with the web page. A "meta keyword" tag contains a list of keywords, separated by commas, that the author of the page wants the search engines to index the page for.

When search engines were much less sophisticated than they are today, they relied heavily on meta keywords to determine which phrases or concepts a page should rank for. Back then the results returned for searches were much less relevant and useful to their human users than they are today. Why? Because the search engines relied heavily on human authors of web pages to tell them what was relevant.

It didn't take much back then for people who wanted to rank for keywords that were unrelated to their site to realize how to do it. Simply put, stuff the meta keyword tag with irrelevant keywords.

Why would anybody want to do that? Here's an example: Say you have a web page that isn't very popular. You want more traffic, but your site is about drunk driving in Apline County, California. With a population of around 1,200 people, not much of a demand for your page, right? Well, what if you stuffed your keywords with phrases like Los Angeles, or New York to attract larger populations, or even with the name of a celebrity to attract a wider demographic? It worked in the infancy of the internet, but today meta keyword stuffing no longer works (thank goodness). In fact, it can cause a web page or an entire site to be devastated in the rankings.

There are three major search engines that comprise the vast majority of search market share. They are Google, Bing and Yahoo. Google has an overwhelming market share, although Bing (Microsoft's search engine) has a good product and may be slowly gaining ground. So when it comes to your web strategy, it just makes sense to look at what Google is doing, first and always.

If your webmaster is still charging you to optimize your meta keywords, it's time you gently break the news to him or her that, frankly, you are not interested. If they try to argue with you (and I have actually talked to several attorneys recently who have been, apparantly, brainwashed by their webmasters), you might point them to an article on the Google Webmaster Blog entitled Google does not use the keyword tag in web ranking. A good webmaster should not worry, because there are still plenty of other meta tags to tend to. Here's a basic list of meta tags and what they do. There are many more than this too.

Here's a video featuring Google's Matt Cutts that explains it:

It's funny, because I have recently seen DUI attorneys stuffing the names of their more seasoned or well known competitors into their keyword tag, presumably hoping to divert people searching for the other lawyer.

I've heard webmasters recently make the argument that keywords should still be used because there is a chance that Google and other search engines might decide to use them again in the future. While that is possible, I don't see why it's worth investing in now. In all reality, your website will be completely redone every two or three years anyways. Plus, it's very easy to go back in and add keywords later should the need ever arise. Why waste money on it now?

If meta keyword stuffing was a problem in the past, and meta keywords were eliminated to return better results, what future purpose could they serve? I could see a potential for sites that are algorithmically trusted to be allowed to pass some weight from the meta keywords to influence search placement. They can also be used for custom searches, but this would be useful only in larger websites. The typical DUI law firm's website with 10 to 150 pages of content should not need a custom search solution.

It's your money and time, and you can spend either or both on meta keywords. But don't be surprised when it doesn't work, and don't let your webmaster make excuses or blame it on you.