How Blogs Can Help Attorney Websites Perform Better

There has been a recent explosion in the creation and use of blogs for law firms. Many want to write and publish their work while others want to continue to expand their content net by which they are fishing for new cases with. But what many law firms don’t fully understand is how the technology behind a blog is different and how it can provide them with a strategic advantage online.

The latency of website indexing

Websites get crawled by search engines spiders that will index and categorize your websites content much like a librarian does in a library. The challenge for all websites is that search engine spiders are sent out on their schedules – not yours. The only traditional way to increase the frequency of your crawl was to create as many inbound links as possible from many different sources that will send spiders your way during their own indexing process.

Google will also provide a PageRank to your website pages based largely on these links using a scale of 0-10 (10 being the best). A web page with a PageRank of 5 will typically be crawled on a weekly basis with an even higher number being indexed more frequent and visa versa. The reality is that most law firm websites do not have a PageRank of 5 or higher and therefore do not get crawled as frequently as they would like. This is especially important for class action, medical malpractice, mass tort, and high-level news firms where timing can be everything.

The value of the blog ping

The question most law firms want to know is the difference between a website and a blog. The simple answer is that a blog is a very easy-to-use extension of their website for publishing content on a regular basis. However, the other more critical difference is how the content is treated by the search engines. Since a blog is a more dynamic platform, the search engines need to constantly update their indexing based on the content that is created in a blog. In order to do this, most blogs will send out a signal (or ping) to a ping server that in turn aggregates the pings and makes them available to third parties and search engines like Google to come index the new content.

The most commonly used ping aggregators are Weblogs.com and Ping-o-matic. Since Google owns the Blogger.com platform, they are also directly pinged by BlogSpot blogs as well – a nice added bonus. In many cases with major blogs, you will find the indexing of your blog entry and subsequently linked pages from the blog can be indexed within a matter of hours and even minutes. In short, YOU through the use of a blog, now have the ability to control the indexing of your own web content through the power of the ping.

Faster indexing of new sites and content


The rapid indexing through the use of blog textual links to targeted web pages is not limited to just existing pages and sites. Although these are great ways to gain exposure for deep pages, new website indexing can also benefit as well.

When a new website is launched, typically at a new URL address, the search engines will go through a propagation period of many months before you start to build authority and visibility in searches. Often times, the initial indexing of your site may take many times to reach all of your pages depending on the depth of your site and the search engine crawl. This is where blog entries can help. Whether your law firm blog resides within your URL or outside of it, you can add textual links to each entry and point them to your specific pages to help speed up the indexing process of your new website. The inbound textual links will also benefit your new website as well – especially if your blog sites outside of your website domain.

Rapid indexing for breaking cases and events

In the past, the fastest way to syndicate content rapidly beyond the website was to publish press releases through the major news wires. This is still an effective tool but so are blogs. In both cases, you want to create content with textual links in your content back to the pages on your website but this can become an expensive and time consuming process with press releases. Alternatively, a simple blog entry with the same textual links can now be indexed typically within an hour or two and that link leading to a drug liability or mass tort page can get that page indexed rapidly as well. This is the power of the blog – proactive and timely indexing of your web content.

Contact the SEO Consultant Firm if you would like to learn more about how blogging can help with your law firm's SEO strategy. Author: Dustin Ruge