Lawyers Changing Practice Focus To Mortgage Foreclosure Defense

Very interesting article in today’s WSJ about the growing practice area of mortgage foreclosure defense. This is particularly important for New York attorneys since New York is one of 23 states that requires judicial approval for foreclosures. If you are an attorney considering new areas of practice, this could be well worth the read. Here are a few excerpts from the article:

The paperwork mess muddying home foreclosures erupted last month. But the legal strategy behind it traces to a lawyer's gambit in 2006 that has helped keep one couple in their home six years beyond their last mortgage payment.

Lillian and Robert Jackson stopped paying on their home in Jacksonville, Fla., in 2004 when business dropped off at their cleaning company. Eviction might have seemed inevitable when they faced a foreclosure hearing two years later.

But their lawyer, James Kowalski, had the idea of taking a deposition from the signer of the mortgage papers. When a document processor for GMAC Mortgage admitted she routinely signed such papers without being familiar with details of the loans, she was tagged as one of a species now known as robo-signers.

Michael Gaier, an attorney in Philadelphia, switched to foreclosure defense last year after years of representing patients in malpractice suits and consumers who said they had purchased faulty products. His new legal practice "is academically challenging, and I'm hoping it'll be financially rewarding. I'm hoping the banks rewrite the mortgages, cover my fees. That's my end game," said Mr. Gaier.

Mr. Kowalski, the lawyer who in 2006 unearthed a robo-signer before that term was common, said, "I don't think the [mortgage] servicers ever thought that their process was going to see the light of day. It's just that so many of us have taken so many of these so far, that now, in 2010, we finally have some traction."

Read the entire article: click here...

Visit our law firm internet marketing website to learn more about how we can help you grow your practice online and get to the top of Google.

Dustin Ruge Will Be Speaking At the Rainmaker Retreat October 8 & 9th

Dustin Ruge will be speaking on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) at the Rainmaker Institute’s Rainmaker Retreat on October 8-9^th at the New Jersey Law Center in New Brunswick, NJ.

Schedule of events:

Friday 8:00-5:00pm
(Registration at 8:00)
Saturday 8-2pm (Breakfast 7:30)

New Jersey Law Center
One Constitution Square
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
732-249-5000

For more information or to sign-up please go to: http://www.rainmakerretreat.com/

The Rainmaker Institute has helped over 7,000 attorneys from hundreds of law firms generate more and better referrals and fill their practice. Combining your Internet presence with their cutting edge legal marketing strategies and proven steps will help you take the guesswork out of creating a financially and personally satisfying law firm.

If you would like to discover how to develop a comprehensive marketing plan that you can successfully implement, then I encourage you to attend an upcoming Rainmaker Retreat.

The Rainmaker Retreat is a 2-day law firm marketing boot camp for small and solo law firms. FindLaw has partnered with The Rainmaker Institute and will be presenting at their upcoming event in New Brunswick NJ on October 8-9.

If you are a FindLaw Customer, you are eligible for an exclusive discount of $300 off the regular registration fee. We hope that you will be able to join us.

More information is available at www.RainmakerRetreat.com. Please use the discount code FINDLAWNJ when checking out. For a sneak preview and to gain a few current marketing tips, please join one of The Rainmaker Institute's upcoming complimentary weekly teleseminars: http://www.rainmakerretreat.com/teleseminars/preview/.

New York City #1 for Nursing Home Abuse Searches Online in 2009

New York City (NYC) finished 2009 strong for "Nursing Home Abuse" searches online by leading the nation for all cities searched in Google. A good Nursing Home Abuse Attorney can help provide representation with issues stemming from: Bed Sores, Poor Nutrition, Falls, Neglect, Medication Errors and Assault.

To learn more about website search engine optimization, please visit our website at www.seoconsultantfirm.com

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

The Impacts of Google Instant

By now, we are all used to seeing the effects of “predictive search” in the Google search box when we type words and phrases - the more common the word or phrase typed, the more likely the chance it will display prominently in the suggested terms and phrases. In many ways, this acts similar to auto-word typing on your PDA but it goes one step further through suggestive search.

So how does Google Instant impact all of this? Well, the average search today takes around 9 seconds and typically involves three steps: 1.) Type the word or phrase, 2.) Hit the search button below and 3.) Reviewing the displayed search results pages. With Google Instant, the goal is to cut-out step 2 and display the results as you type below the search box. Google claims this will cut the average search time down from 9 seconds today to 2-5 seconds with Google Instant.

Why the Need?

Google generates over $30 Billion a year on their paid advertising and it is all predicated on search starting and ending with Google. Recent ComScore reports show that the market for search is not showing an increase for Google while other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing are growing…albeit very slowing in relative terms. Another and arguably bigger challenge is coming from alternative search vehicles lead largely by PDA’s, social media, and the like. In short, Google needs to protect their search market revenues and the best way to do that is to try to create the best search experience for users. Google Instant is their way in which to try to provide that.

The Impacts on Search

By providing displayed search results below the search box as one types, it is fairly obvious that there are two major impacts as a result of this new search display:

1.) Impressions for both organic and paid search results will increase due to the increase in times a results page is displayed in the search results screen. In short, the frequency of content impressions per search will shoot up dramatically – especially for those pages that score well on the more singular and shorter search terms. For example, if I start typing in “personal injury” in Google Instant results, I am going to see all results before I ever get to adding the geography part of that search. Whatever pages typically score the highest for ALL “personal injury” searches nation-wide will see a dramatic spike in their impressions as a result. The same applies to those firms also paying for Google Adwords campaigns. More impressions for Google Advertisers ultimately translates to more money for Google.

2.) Short search words, phrases and terms (commonly referred to as “head terms”) will outperform the long tail searches. This is analogous to somebody interrupting you while you speak and suggesting an answer before you have finished your statement. The main benefactors here will be the larger more established websites and blogs at the expense of smaller companies and firms with fewer resources to compete. Coincidence? Not when you realize who the biggest spenders on Google paid advertising are.

In summary, we have seen two sweeping and dramatic changes in the Google search interface starting with the May Day release and now Google Instant. This all reminds me of the recent 10 year birthday of Google when they released their search engine interface from 10 years ago with what at the time was a simple search interface and very limited “interruptive” advertising – my how things have changed.

I recently looked up the definition of Google and found this as the #1 result: “a widely used search engine that uses text-matching techniques to find web pages that are important and relevant to a user's search.” I continue to wonder with the recent changes to Google whether or not “important and relevant to a user's search” may need some changing as well…

Bad "Tweet" Could Land Hilton In Jail

As we all know by now, Paris Hilton was arrested last week for possession of Cocaine...in her "borrowed" purse of course. Now it turns out that the same "borrowed" purse had suddenly made a previous appearance on one of Hilton's previous Tweets in July when she stated that "Love My New Chanel Purse I Got Today :)" - with a picture of what appears to be an identical purse to the one she "borrowed" last week.

The moral of this story is that social media tools like Facebook and twitter have created an unprecedented paper trail when it comes to the courts...much to the chagrin of people who are so destitute to have to resort to "borrowing" identical purses I guess.

Read more: http://www.radaronline.com/exclusives/2010/09/radar-exclusive-paris-owns-purse-identical-one-she-claimed-was-borrowed-night

Long Tail Search And Website Authority

The following is a great analysis on the impacts of long tail search and how it relates to the authority of a website...

You're about to build a new website from scratch. You have great content. You have a search engine friendly website architecture. You have plans for a great link building campaign, and you're ready to get active in social media.

So how long will it take to start getting great traffic from search engines, and, what will that traffic look like? Great question!

The reality is that it takes some time. The time is quite variable, however.

Trust and Authority

If you have a great PR campaign that gets you exposure to, and links from, lots of trusted and authoritative websites, things will go faster for you. If your PR machine isn't powerful enough to do that for you, and you have to rely solely on other types of link building methods, it will take a bit longer. Six months is a figure many in the industry have suggested, and that represents a pretty good working estimate for when you'll first have interesting levels of traffic after launching a brand new site.

There are many reasons for this. One key underlying reason is that search engines have a bit of a wait-and-see attitude to determine whether they can "trust" your site.

This used to be referred to as the "sandbox." It was believed that you wouldn't see material gains in traffic for a fixed time. These days, it doesn't seem so binary, but there's continuous evaluation of how trusted a website is, which can be affected by the rate at which you add links from other sites, and how trusted each of those sites are.

The notion of evaluating trust was first well defined by a Yahoo published paper, and then later updated and patented by Google. Although both documents focus on the issue of trust, they are different in several ways. The important takeaway is that the search engines evaluate how much they trust a site.

What Will the Traffic Growth Look Like?

Even with the recent Google May Day update, which affected a less trusted website's ability to get long tail traffic, the early stages of a new site will get most of its traffic from long tail terms. Over time, as the website adds links, the traffic will grow, and start spreading into terms that are "not so long tail" (a.k.a., the "chunky middle") (i.e., a bit higher search volume terms). Later still, with quality marketing and link building efforts, traffic will start to come from some of top terms (a.k.a., the "head terms") related to your space.

This chart captures what the distribution between types of search terms might look like:

Of course, the specifics of the shape of your site's performance may vary significantly, but the general shape of the curve is correct for most sites. The key point is that with SEO it will start with the long tail, and only evolve into other types of search terms over a period of time.

This doesn't mean that you should optimize only for the long tail. You should build a website that can capitalize on the levels of trust that the site experiences over time.

Keeping in mind that cash flow is strategic (it gives you money to reinvest), it's a great idea to make sure your site has the right elements in place to get long tail traffic early. However, to see optimal traffic growth over time, you need the right site architecture and a broad range of keywords that are addressed on the site. Also, you only move through this type of progression if you're marketing (and building links to) your site effectively, so don't skimp on that part of your marketing efforts!

Source: http://searchenginewatch.com/3641262?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sew+%28CLE New YorkSearch+Engine+Watch%29&utm_content=Google+Reader