Technical Terminology
Legal Analytics addresses all of the following through its optimisation service. Unlike many organisations purporting to provide an SEO (search engine optimisation) service, we do not limit the work to submitting the site to large numbers of search engines and to finding large number of links. It should be noted, in any event, that there are only relatively few search engines worth submitting a site to and also that it is the quality as well as the quantity of links that is important. As is explained below the work we undertake goes far beyond the issues of linking and submission to search engines.One-way Links
The quantity and quality of links from other websites (incoming links) is a major factor that contributes to high rankings on the search engines, especially Google.The quality of a link depends on the reputation and overall quality of the web page that sources the link as well as the text that makes up the link. The text making up any link should ideally comprise keywords which are relevant to the web page that the link is directed at e.g. family solicitors rather than www.ksjones.co.uk. Although it is up to the owners of these external websites how they place their link and whether they want to link at all, the SEO service can influence the quality of new links gained.
In order to build one way links to a site, we research good quality internet directories and submit the site to them. Other sites, besides directories, are also researched as potential sources of links. The link building is performed as an on-going phase, over 3 months, in order that links are built up gradually which is important to be effective on the search engines.
There will be no disruption to your normal work and your use, and your clients’ and potential clients’, use of your website. We will liaise with your IT department and/or your website designer in order to access your site and to carry out the necessary work.
Optimisation of Content
We will either provide additional search-engine-friendly pages and/or optimise existing pages, based on the search phrases listed in Section 5 above. We concentrate on ensuring that the search phrases occur in search engine-friendly places such as in headings and the clickable text that makes up a link (link text) so they are more likely to be taken notice of by the search engines when they visit the site.Link text: Link text, the clickable text associated with links, is given considerable significance by the search engines e.g. ‘click here’ would not be considered to be search engine-friendly due to lack of keywords. It is also beneficial to make sure that all text that reference sections of the site are made to be links to those sections.
Legal Analytics also improves page titles, page descriptions and alternative text.
Page titles: Page titles are written into the underlying code of a page and are not a part of the visible text. However, they are picked up by the search engines.
Page descriptions: Similarly to page titles, page descriptions are written into the code and their contents, especially the first 155 characters, are important to the search engines. The search engines may choose to use the text of a page description in the search results’ site descriptions, so their content is also important to make sure any appearance in the search results sells the site well. See Figure 1.
Alternative text: When you hover the mouse over a site’s images with the Internet Explorer browser, you often see text appearing that provides more information about the image (called alternative text).
The wording of the titles is important for a page’s rankings. Page titles are used in search engine results, so their content is also important to make sure any appearance in the search results sells the site well. To illustrate this, a couple of examples are shown below. If you imagine you are looking for a solicitor who specialises in divorce, then Figure 1 shows a good presentation on a search engine’s search results page. The keywords divorce and solicitor are present in the title and page description and the entry has overall high impact. Compare with Figure 2 where it is less clear that Joe Watson specialises in Divorce Law.
Figure 1 : Search Engine Results Good Presentation Example
Figure 1 : Search Engine Results Poor Presentation Example
Code Optimisation
This entails the optimisation of the code (as opposed to content) of the client’s pages, for leaner pages (i.e. pages which are not heavily laden with unnecessarily complex code). Search engines favour such pages and will give you even better rankings.Architectural improvements such as fixing broken links and coding errors (compliance with W3C, the World Wide Web consortium’s standards - see definition below) are also performed.
World Wide Web consortium (W3C): The W3C defines and develops the protocols that ensure the universality of the Web. A web site that is engineered in conformance with these protocols will be verified as being accessible by the visually impaired and it can also help ensure that the search engines can crawl the site, picking out the keywords.
Broken links: A broken link is a link to a non-existent page and may result from a web page being deleted or moved, or by making an error when creating the link.
Code: Websites are made up of textual content and code. This code wraps around the textual content and tells your web browser how to display it (e.g. headings, paragraphs and links) and also provides any functions of your website.
Reporting and Maintenance
During the 3 month contractual period, we will provide:- Monthly reporting on site performance (where the site is ranked).
- Maintenance and improvement of ranking status by re-optimisation and/or resubmission to search engines.