Google's Long Awaited Page Rank Toolbar Update

Google assigns a Page Rank to every web page on the web from a scale of 0-10 (with 10 being the highest). Most good law firm websites will typically have a Page Rank between 2 to 4 - with 4 being a Maginot line that very few law firm websites ever reach or cross. Many people involved with law firm search engine optimization commonly use Page Rankings as one of the key measurements of how websites stack up.

So Why Is Page Rank Important For Law Firms?

Page Rank is literally a grade that Google provides web pages based largely on the quantity and quality of the links each page receives. Notice how I said web pages and not websites – there is a difference. Since most people get the majority of their inbound links into the home page of their website so they naturally assume that this Page Rank (which is commonly the highest for the site) is for their entire website – which it is not. Even though the home page is the anchor of your website and links to your subpages, its Page Rank is only important in so far as the link value it is providing your subpages. If you find a website with high Page Ranking subpages, this is typically the result of a process called deep-linking whereby links go directly to the sub-pages of the website and not the homepage.

The Google Page Rank Tool Bar

So how can you track the Page Rank of your web pages? Simple: download the Google tool bar for your internet browser. When downloaded, you will see a green horizontal status bar that when you hover over it, it will display the Page Rank for that corresponding page. The problem with the Google Tool bar however is that even though Google will internally update these page ranks on a daily basis, the Google Tool bar will commonly get updated much less frequently.

The History of Google Toll Bar Updates

Looking at past updates to the Google tool bar, we can see that system-wide updates were commonly made around every 3 months (give or take). Here are the last reported updates:

• April 2010
• December 2009
• October 2009
• May 2009
• December 2008
• September 2008
• …

Anybody see a problem here? Based on my calculations, Google is now 6 months overdue (9 months since their last update) in updating their tool bar! Since Page Rank as reflected in their tool bar are important measurements in determining such things as: link page-source value, inbound linking impacts on pages, authority of domains, etc. In short, Google’s recent lack of tool bar updates are not providing website owners with the critical measurements that they need to gauge their progress relative to other websites.

Why Google Has Not Been Keeping Up With Their Page Rank Tool Bar Updates

Why Google has been neglecting their updates to their own toolbar is anyone’s guess. Personally, it is my opinion that Google’s recent “summer of change” as well as increasing competition for social media giants like Facebook is causing Google to shift their priorities and ignore some of their core services. Google’s famous motto has always been to “do no evil” but they have left many to wonder with all the recent sweeping changes over the past year that the devil may be in the details. Why Google continues to “do no evil”, many of us are waiting for them to start updating their Page Rank toolbar so they can do the same for us. It might also help why they are at it to have live bodies to help provide support requests for their “paying” Google Places customers…but I devilishly digress.

Dustin Ruge Will Be Speaking At The Essex County Bar Assoc. On Law Firm Social Media Marketing

Effective Social Media and Blogging for Law Firms

We are pleased to present a continuing legal education program* on Social Media Forums and why blogging is the quickest way to gain visibility online and manage your firm’s image on line and in the virtual marketplace. A panel of experts will discuss in detail, how social media, facebook page optimization and blogs are important tools for growing your practice, improving your law firm internet marketing, managing your image and ensuring that the proper and accurate information regarding you, your experience and your practice are available online. In today’s Internet savvy environment, understanding how to reach more people and build a credible reputation online is increasingly important for law firm marketing. Dynamic content and participation in forums will allow you to showcase your expertise and will attract more clients.

Join us
January 19, 2011
8:30‐10:30
Essex County Historic Courthouse
470 Martin Luther King Blvd Room B01
Newark NJ 07102

Panel:
Yale Hauptman, Esq., Hauptman Law Firm, Livingston NJ
Dustin Ruge, SEO Consultant, New York, NY. Dustin has his own SEO consulting firm.

Registrants will receive a FREE AUDIT of their current website and a light breakfast.

Please register via email at wsdeer@essexbar.com or online at www.essexbar.com and click on the event on January 19, 2011 on the calendar page by January 17, 2011.

The Essex County Bar Foundation
Essex County Historic Courthouse
470 Martin Luther King Jr #B01
Newark, NJ 07102
973‐622‐6207

* This program has been tentatively approved by the Board on Continuing Legal Education of the Supreme Court of New Jersey for 1.5 credit hours. CLE credit applications for 1 CLE credit are pending in NY and PA.

Big Property Tax Increases Coming To NYC

Below are some pretty eye opening property tax increases coming to NYC in 2011. If you are a property owner and would like to appeal my property tax assessment, please contact Brandt Steinberg & Lewis for help...www.bsl-taxcert.com/

WSJ: Co-op and condo owners will pay sharply higher property taxes next year, under a preliminary assessment roll released Friday by the Bloomberg administration. The city attributed the tax increases, due to take effect in July, to higher market values placed on apartment buildings by tax assessors.

Tax collections are expected to rise by 7.5% for co-op owners, and 9.6% for condo owners across the city, according to a summary report released by the Department of Finance.

Owners of single-family homes would pay 2.8% more.

Taxes on rental buildings, often passed along to tenants, will also increase significantly, the report said—by 9% for rent-regulated apartments and by 8.1% for unregulated apartments.

This translates into an average tax increase of $384 for co-ops, $490 for condos, and $107 for single-family home owners. In Manhattan, the tax bill will go up an average of $594 to $9,351 for co-ops and by $970 to $11,348 for condos.

The new assessments are not final. Taxpayers can ask the Department of Finance to make corrections, and can appeal new assessments to the city Tax Commission. The deadline for appeals is March 15 for owners of one- to three-family homes, and March 1 for others.

Under state law, valuations of co-ops and condos are calculated as if they were similar rental buildings, though they are entitled to co-op and condo abatements, usually 17.5%.

Tax collections on office buildings were due to rise by 7.25%, according to the report. In total, city revenue was expected to rise by $900 million under the new assessments, Mr. Stone said.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703959104576082450659330260.html

ABA Journal Releases New Top 100 Blogs

For the forth time, the ABA Journal has a newly released list of their favorite legal blogs. This year's list is broken down into categories that include: Court Watch, Torts, Labor, Law Biz, News, Law Prof, Criminal Justice, IMHO, Niche, IP Law, For Fun, and Legal Tech.

If you have an existing blog or would like to start a new one, these are very active legal blogs with a large audience and well worth the look.

Link: http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_2010_aba_journal_blawg_100/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=ABA+Journal+Magazine+Stories&utm_content=Google+Reader#When:08:05:04Z

Mobile Browsing Trends and Law Firm Search

I increasingly get questions involving how mobile browsing is affecting attorney searches online. At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, many industry experts are pointing to the mass proliferation of smart phones as the “death of the PC” by 2013 – when mobile computing is expected to surpass PC’s in total use

Looking at the numbers provided by Gartner, by 2013 there’s expected to be 1.82 Billion smart phones in use compared to 1.78 billion PC’s. What further complicates this number is that Forrester Research is predicting 82 Million Americans will be using tablets by 2015 – a number not included in either of the two buckets. Now that is a lot of mobile computing!

Looking further into the numbers, we also find that 59% of Americans accessed the internet on their mobile phones last year – which works out to roughly 180 Million Americans in 2010…a 25% increase from the previous year. All of this would seem pretty impressive until you realize that over 300 Million Chinese did the same thing. Now you can see what Google can’t ignore the Chinese market despite their problems with censorship.

Android Is the Fastest Growing Mobile Operating System

Many people assume that the explosion of mobile browsing focuses mainly on the use of Apple applications. As the chart shows, this was initially correct only a half a year ago but as you can see, Google has been catching up rapidly with the increasing adoption of their Android operating system. With Apple’s the recent announcement of adding Verizon as a carrier of their IPAD (it’s about time folks!) I expect to see some uptick here but again…but the trend is undeniable and favors Google.

So what if you don’t have an Android phone but have a website? How do you know how your websites looks and operates in the Android interface? If you are curious, you can download an Android interface for your PC (if you still have a PC that is) to view your website and others in the same interface as you would see it on your phone. Pretty cool tool but requires a few steps to fully install.

What Visitors Are Searching For Through Mobile Smart Phones

In looking through my current customer’s websites, I am not seeing a particularly high number of mobile searches that exceed 5% of their overall traffic…yet. But the trend is undeniable and therefore it is important to consider the following:

• Mobile visitors currently tend to conduct more intentional searches when online. In short, they often know what they are looking for such as phone numbers, addresses, maps, and attorney profiles - so make sure that each are easy to find and access on the mobile views of your website.
• Mobile devices provide much less real estate to display data so the more cluttered your website in a mobile view, the more difficult it will be for people to find your site useful for their search.
• If you have a graphics heavy website, you may want to consider adding a new mobile web version of your website for mobile users to see when they come to your site. In the example provided here, you can see a much more scaled down, useful and easy to use version of this law firm’s website.
• If you currently run PPC, the top two positions in Google play just as prominent of a role in mobile search as they now do with the recently changes involving Google Places displays.

The bottom line when considering improvements to the mobile browsing experience of your website is to start by thinking like your potential clients do. I have had numerous attorneys tell me that when their clients found them online through a mobile smart phone, often times it was from a hospital or the scene of an accident or crime. Keeping this in mind, try to think about what is most important and useful for your potential clients when they are in these situations so you know how best to compete for these type of searches and potential clients. If you do plan on providing a mobile site view, it is also important to a prominent link from that view back to your main website in case they need to see more details and information.

Visit our website on law firm website optimization if you would like to learn more about how to better advertise your law firm online.

42% of 2010's Top 50 Highest Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Terms For Attorneys

The following list contains the top 50 PPC keywords in terms of cost for 2010. These costs are what advertisers pay on a per click basis when somebody clicks on their ads in Google (which is the highest cost search engine).

As I had previously written about with the record high attorney PPC spending in NYC, PPC spending is an an all time high and with the recent changes in the Google SERP's, competing for the top 3 positions has become even more critical when Google Places maps are displayed.

A couple of notes:

- 21 of the top 50 terms are attorney or legal related search terms
- 5 of the top 10 terms involved Mesothelioma
- 7 of the top 50 terms involved DUI / DWI
- The highest Attorney PPC's by geography are: San Diego (3), Phoenix (2), Los Angeles (2). Pennsylvania (2), Boston, Austin, New York, Chicago, California, Arizona, Sacramento, and Philadelphia.

Here is the list in order of most expensive terms:

1. Mesothelioma Lawyers San Diego 51.47
2. Secured Loan Calculator 51.35
3. Structured Settlement Investments 50.45
4. Endowment Selling
5. Purchase Structured Settlements 53.48
6. Mesothelioma lawyers
7. Mesothelioma Patients 50.23
8. Mesothelioma attorney san diego 50.07
9. Austin Texas dwi lawyers 50.03
10. New York Mesothelioma Lawyers 50.01
11. Phoenix dui lawyers 50.01
12. Secured Loans 50.01
13. Insurance Auto 50.00
14. Phoenix dui attorney 50.00
15. car free insurance online quote 50.00
16. students debt consolidation loans 49.96
17. Pennsylvania mesothelioma lawyers 49.87
18. data recovery Denver 49.71
19. adverse credit remortgages 49.56
20. bad credit remortgages 49.47
21. data recovery service los angeles 49.37
22. Consolidating Students Loan 49.30
23. Students Loan Consolidation Rates 49.17
24. Boston dui lawyers 49.02
25. memphis car insurance 48.86
26. conference calling companies 48.64
27. Student Consolidation Loans 48.15
28. free quote for car insurance 48.11
29. irs tax lawyers 48.08
30. nj auto insurance 48.08
31. dui san diego 48.01
32. Los Angeles Criminal Defense Attorney 48.00
33. Consolidating Private Student Loans 47.96
34. Personal Injury Lawyer Chicago 47.83
35. Personal Injury Attorney Pennsylvania 47.82
36. Auto Insurance 47.81
37. Lemon Law California 47.63
38. Students loan consolidation interest rates 47.59
39. Los Angeles Criminal Attorney 47.59
40. Arizona dui Attorney 47.45
41. Consolidation Student Loan 47.44
42. Structured Settlement Buyers 47.31
43. sell structured Insurance settlements 46.53
44. College Loan Consolidation 46.49
45. dui attorney sacramento 46.48
46. car insurance quotes 46.47
47. Philadelphia personal injury lawyers 46.37
48. remortgaging 46.20
49. irs tax attorney 46.19
50. Consolidation Student Loan 46.18

If you would like to learn more about law firm internet marketing, please contact us today to learn how we can help you grow your practice online...

Personal Bankruptcies up 9% for 2010

Here are some interesting facts from today's WSJ:

- The number of Americans filing for personal bankruptcy topped 1.5 million last year, as high long-term jobless rates and depressed home prices drove more households to seek court protection.

- Personal bankruptcies rose to 1.53 million, up 9% from 2009, the highest level since a revamp of the law took effect in 2005, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute, an association of attorneys and other bankruptcy professionals, and the National Bankruptcy Research Center.

- Conditions have improved in the Southeast, with filings dropping last year in Tennessee, South Carolina and Alabama. But the Southwest continues to struggle. In California, bankruptcies were up 25% from a year earlier. In Arizona, they rose nearly 24%.

- The 2005 revision of the bankruptcy statute was designed to make it more difficult for consumers to shed their debts. It aimed to steer more debtors into Chapter 13, where debtors work out a repayment plan, instead of Chapter 7, where filers forfeit their assets and their debts are forgiven. But only about a third of debtors file under Chapter 13.

- In all, some four million consumer bankruptcy filings have been recorded in the past three years. Surveys of debtors by the nonprofit Institute for Financial Literacy indicate that while most earn less than $30,000 and lack college degrees, a growing minority are middle-class families with incomes above $60,000 or college degrees.

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576060181631140482.html?mod=WSJ_hp_LEFTWhatsNewsCollection