Webmaster Tips : Web Development, Design & Marketing

Law Firm SEO

5 Steps To Guarantee Your Law Firm’s SEO Will Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

One of the most asked marketing questions from lawyers concerning their business is how they can use SEO to boost the rankings of their website and thus see more visitors land on their websites in the expectation that those visitors become paying clients. In truth, it is a question not unique to lawyers as it is also asked by business owners in every business niche and sector you could possibly think of.

However, it is lawyers and law firms we are going to focus on, and in doing so we want to highlight ways in which SEO can help boost their search engine rankings. If you were to study SEO for any length of time, you will soon discover that there are hundreds of ways that have been suggested as to how SEO should be done or rather hundreds of ranking factors that could be optimised.

That can seem daunting, and whilst we do not suggest you ever not seek to improve your SEO in every way you can, it needs to be done within an overall strategy. Part of that strategy should include focussing on tasks and actions that are proven to play the most significant role in producing results, aka higher rankings.

As such, we are not going to outline dozens of actions you could take but instead highlight just five. These are five steps that every SEO expert will tell you are essential and known to make a large contribution to SEO campaigns and their goal of getting a website ranking on Google’s first page. Incidentally, we recommend you follow these in the order they are presented.

Step #1 – Keyword Research

No improved and consistent search engine rankings are possible without keyword research. Without it you have no idea what searches are being entered by those searching for lawyers online, nor do you know which are highly competitive and which could be ranked for relatively easily. Keyword research can be done using software and online tools, and we also recommend competitor research to see what keywords other lawyers’ websites are ranking for.

Read More

How To Use Local SEO To Send Your Family Lawyers Website To The Top Of Google

How To Use Local SEO To Send Your Family Lawyers Website To The Top Of Google

How competitive is the family lawyers sector that your law practice operates within? If it is in any way competitive, as it is in almost every location you care to think of, then you must find ways to place your family law practice before the eyes of those who are looking for legal representation for family law matters.

You could do this several ways offline such as local advertising in local newspapers or radio stations, but the problem with them, apart from the cost, is that they are not well targeted. Thousands of people will be seeing or hearing your ads who currently have no need for, nor interest in hiring, a family lawyer.

This is one of the reasons that online marketing is favoured by many businesses, including family lawyer businesses because it provides several means of targeting more effectively within your advertising and marketing strategies. One of those methods used by numerous businesses to generate lots of traffic and thus prospects is local SEO.

Read More

SEO Consultant Vs SEO Agency - Which Is Best

SEO Consultant Vs SEO Agency – Which Is Best?

For a business owner who has decided to boost the rankings of their website to increase the amount of organic traffic they receive, the way to achieve that is via SEO. Assuming that they are not an SEO expert, then they have two choices as to who it is they employ to plan, create, and implement an SEO campaign. Those two choices are either an SEO consultant or an SEO agency.

The most obvious difference between the two is that an SEO consultant will be a single person who operates on a freelance basis. Alternatively, an SEO agency will be a business with employees that combine their efforts to achieve what the client has asked them to. There are several other differences, and these will greatly influence your experience of using them.

Read More

Why Optimising Internal Linking Within Your Website Is Essential For Better Rankings On Google

Why Optimising Internal Linking Within Your Website Is Essential For Better Rankings On Google

When a business is trying to implement an SEO campaign, either by itself or by using an SEO agency, the subject of backlinks will inevitably arise. Backlinks are often referred to as the oxygen that fuels rankings, and that is a pretty good analogy given that they are essential for an SEO campaign to deliver high rankings.

Whenever backlinks are being discussed the focus is usually on external links. In other words, the links are all coming from other websites. However, what is often overlooked is the fact that creating links internally can have a hugely positive effect on the SEO of a website and they also offer up other benefits.

The first benefit is that because these links are all going to be within your own website, you do not need to ask anyone’s permission to create them. This means that you can easily generate an effective internal linking strategy that maximises your SEO and subsequently improves your rankings.

One caveat we must highlight here is that there is a risk that website owners go to town with their internal linking and end up doing more harm than good. Simply generating dozens of internal links randomly is not going to produce any benefits at all. Google is wise to just about every shortcut out there and that applies to excessive internal linking. Too many links and links created for no apparent reason are to be avoided.

Read More

Five tips for building your website on a budget

Five tips for building your website on a budget

If you’ve ever looked into building a new website for your business, you might know how expensive it can be. However, creating a new site doesn’t have to break the bank, and there are numerous strategies that you can use to save a few dollars.

In this article, we look closer at building a new website on a budget. We list five of our top tips for saving money when creating your site to help you get the best value for your money.

  1. Use a Cheap Website Builder

If you’re on a tight budget, the chances are that you won’t be able to hire an expensive web developer. Instead, you might be best off taking advantage of one of the many cheap, beginner-friendly website builder platforms that have entered the market in recent years.

Platforms such as Wix and GoDaddy are designed to help beginners get online in a fast, affordable manner. They tend to be very easy to use, and in many cases, they have fully free forever versions that, although limited, can be helpful nonetheless.

  1. Hire High-Quality Freelancers

Employing the services of a professional web design company or digital marking professionals from oxygenmarketing.com.au may be an option for you. You could also utilise platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr to find high-quality freelancers at very affordable rates.

Read More

10 Web Design Improvements That Can Boost Your Website's Conversion Rate

10 Web Design Improvements That Can Boost Your Website’s Conversion Rate

There are few things more frustrating to a website owner than knowing that they have an excellent website design, but it does not convert as well as expected. Often the causes of poor conversion are not major nor require wholesale design changes (though it can happen) but rather that some elements of the web design are not being optimised as much they could be.

If you feel your website is not hitting the heights in terms of its conversion rate, here are some of the optimisations which should get it closer to those conversion targets. If you are unsure how to action any of them, speak to a professional web designer who will be happy to help implement the changes.

Optimised Content Design: Content only helps with conversion if it is formatted in a way so that it can be easily digested by the person viewing or reading it. Check all your existing content and ensure it is so by breaking down chunks of text, adding white space and optimising image quality, for example.

Effective Call To Action Copy: Conversion rates rely heavily on calls to action being clear and specific. The smallest hint of ambiguity means prospects will be confused and reticent to click anything that might take them forward in your sales funnel.

Reduce Number Of Call To Actions Per Page: As well as making your calls to action better, you also need to ensure that you do not have too many on each page as this simply dilutes the message and could even confuse those landing on those pages.

Read More

5 Innovative Content Marketing Strategies Every Business Should Embrace

5 Innovative Content Marketing Strategies Every Business Should Embrace

Ask multiple marketers who is king, and some will tell you it is Google. This is understandable given Google’s dominance of search engine traffic and the fact their ranking algorithm is the one most website owners and SEO agencies are trying to master. However, there is another aspect of digital marketing that many will tell you is the real king and that is content.

For our money, it is probably more appropriate to say that content is the kingmaker as it is content and its quality, relevance, and impact on user experience that Google takes into account in deciding whether a website ranks number 1 or number 100 in its search results.

Most business and website owners might not wish to get too involved in the more technical elements of SEO, but they all should have an appreciation of what constitutes good content. Sadly, much of the evidence suggests that many do not know, or if they do know, they choose not to pursue it. The result is poor content that does nothing to boost their brand or their rankings.

We trust you are in the other category and want to ensure that the content which is produced on behalf of your business is not only something you are proud to put your name to but which also contributes to boosting your website’s position on Google and the other search engines. If so, read on and we will outline 5 great techniques that will take your content to a higher level.

Create Content Which Is More Targeted Towards Your Audience

There was a time when as long as content was of sufficient quality it could be general and speak to a wider audience, but that is changing. For content to be at its most effective in stimulating users into taking action, it needs to be targeted towards a more specific audience. This requires research beforehand to establish what types of content work well within your niche, and most importantly what content converts best when created with your target audience in mind.

Read More

7 KPIs To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Website's Design

7 KPIs To Measure The Effectiveness Of Your Website’s Design

One of the core principles of any professional web design is that before the actual website creation happens, part of the planning for it must include at least one objective for the website, and preferably more than one. This can include increasing brand awareness, lead generation, product visibility and best of all, direct sales.

If we take this forward to the point that a website is live, many business owners struggle to determine how well their website is doing. Often its main objective is not immediately measurable by data. For example, brand awareness is something that does not easily have a number allocated to it, but rather is measured in other ways such as people discussing the brand or showing more trust in the company.

Having said that, there are several ways in which you can assess a website and how effective its web design or redesign has been. These are measured using specific KPIs which give a true reflection of the website and its performance. These KPIs then allow the website owner to arrange for changes and improvements in the web design, traffic sources and content, for example.

Unique / Total Visitor Sessions

This KPI tells you how much traffic is coming to your website as it measures how many sessions, or visits it has had. You need to split this KPI between total sessions and unique sessions as some visitors will return at a later date. Moving forward this indicates if any of your online marketing activities are increasing your traffic as evidenced by increasing sessions.

Visitor Return Percentage

We mentioned in the last section visitors will return and the percentage of return visits can be measured. The significance of this is that if the percentage is low, and your website is one where you want visitors to return it suggests improvements need to be made.

Read More

7 Tips For Moving Your Office Furniture To New Premises

7 Tips For Moving Your Office Furniture To New Premises

As part of any office relocation, one of the elements that need careful consideration is the office furniture. Reasons include the sheer volume of it if you have a large office, the value of it, and the fact that unless it all arrives safely at your new offices, it is unlikely that any of your staff are going to be able to do any work.

So, given its importance, and assuming if you are planning office relocations, that you want your office furniture to arrive in the same condition and the same quantity as leaves your old premises, here are seven tips for moving office furniture that should help.

Create An Inventory Of All Your Office Furniture: The starting point should be to create a complete inventory of all your office furniture, even if you do not plan to take everything with you. This way you can not only check everything arrives at the new location, but it will also tell you what new office furniture is required.

Sell Excess Office Furniture Or Donate It To Charity: Once you have checked it and made an inventory if any of the office furniture is surplus to requirements, then you have options. You can either sell it second hand to generate some funds or, if you are feeling generous, donate it to charities who will put it all to good use.

Read More

The step-by-step guide to choosing the best web hosting provider

The step-by-step guide to choosing the best web hosting provider

How do you choose the best web hosting provider? Do issues of price, bandwidth, server upgrades and disc storage matter nowadays? In this article, we have outlined things you must look for when deciding if a web host provider is good or not. We have divided this article into easy to understand checklist.

Step 1: Understanding Your Site Hosting Needs

Before choosing a web host, you must ask yourself what kind of services you need from a web host. You must know the kind of website you are building, determine if you need window application or a special version of the software and how much traffic you are targeting. If you are a newbie, the general rule of thumb is to start small with a good shared hosting account because it is easy to maintain, affordable and sufficient for new sites. You can also upgrade to dedicated hosting or VPS at the later stage.

Step 2: Consider Sign-Up Fees, Renewal Prices and Refund Policy

Some web hosts offer attractive hosting packages when signing up with them but charge higher renewal fees. You should avoid enticing package sign up prices and consider the entire picture of costs associated with that web host. Unless you want to switch to another hosting company after a year, which is unlikely, you should try as much as possible to avoid companies that charge higher renewal fees.

Another thing to consider under price is the refund policy. A good hosting company should live up to its promises. If you sign up with them as a trial user and decide to cancel your subscription, a good company should return your money in full. Always check if that company is charging any cancellation fee. If yes, how much are they charging?

Step 3: Hosting Control Panel

You should choose a web hosting company with an easy to use and functional hosting control panel. It doesn’t matter whether it is a Plesk or cPanel control panel, the one you choose must come with all functions and be user-friendly. Without an easy to use control panel, you will be left with no choice but to seek help whenever you are performing even a simple server change.

Read More

7 Questions To Answer Before Redesigning Your Website

7 Questions To Answer Before Redesigning Your Website

If you want to have a redesign of your existing website before so much as one line of new code is created, there are plenty of tasks that need to be undertaken first. As with any project that is worth doing properly, and your business’s website obviously falls into that category, effective planning and preparation are essential if success is to be achieved.

There are many tools, methods and processes that can be utilised within the planning and preparation stage of designing a website, and one which we find to be one of the most effective is the asking and answering of some key questions.

These questions go deeper than simply deciding which colours and fonts are to be used (although those questions should still be answered) but instead relate to the aim of ensuring your website is designed in a way that gives it the best chance of success. Here are 7 questions that make this aim easier to achieve.

What Are The Fundamental Objectives Of Your Website?

Every website should have at least 1 or 2 goals because it allows its design to focus on achieving them. At the same time, you do not want to give your website too many objectives as this simple waters downs its ability to achieve its main objectives.

What Are The Positives And The Negatives Of Your Current Website?

Even if your existing website is regarded by you as an unmitigated flop, there are still useful lessons to be learned from it. Identify what elements did not work, and on a positive note, also identify some features which did work. This way your website redesign will avoid previous mistakes, and include successful features.

Read More

15 Indicators That A Website Has Been Designed By Professionals

15 Indicators That A Website Has Been Designed By Professionals

Websites throughout the internet have a multitude of designs, purposes, sizes and applicable to what we will be discussing here, quality. Most business websites will vary too, and there will especially be a significant variation in the quality of their web design.

We are going to give you a means of identifying which websites have been created by professional web designers and which have not. The way this is done is using a checklist of 15 essential elements every website should have, Those that have all 15, were almost certainly created professionally. Those that have many elements missing have not.

#1: The Website Has An Overall Purpose – Great web design comes from excellent planning which includes setting a clear objective for the website, and this objective should be obvious when you visit it.

#2: Optimised For Mobile Devices All top web designers know to design their websites so that they are completely responsive and thus optimised for mobile devices of all kinds.

#3: Easy To Use When you visit a website and nothing on it, including interactive features, confuses you, or seem difficult, then it is a sign that a professional has designed it with users in mind.

#4: Content Is Appealing – Great web design is not just about visuals. It also applies to content included in a website which should be high quality and appealing to visitors.

#5: It Looks Great Not a surprise to learn that websites that look great tend to be those where a skilled website design team have created them.

#6: Images Are Placed In Optimal Positions   When you see images randomly placed on websites it suggests the designer was an amateur or simply did not care enough to position them in optimal locations within the website.

Read More

Seven Joomla Extensions you must have

Seven Joomla Extensions you must have

1. JCE:

JCE is another popular extension of Joomla. JCE is a free content editor that provides the web designers with a set of WYSIWYG editing tools. The JCE is free, extendable and can also be customized according to the requirement of the designer. It makes writing articles for Joomla web design and related things a tad bit easier.

2. Xmap:

Xmap is based on the hugely popular Joomap extension. It allows you to create a map of the site you are designing based on the structure of your menus. It also fixes several bugs that had been reported by many Joomap users in the past.

3. JoomlaXplorer:

JoomlaXplorer is the File and FTP manager. It allows you to edit, copy, delete, rename and archive files directly on the server. Using the JoomlaXplorer is easy and that is probably the reason why it is so popular with web developer these days.

Read More

WMT Youtube Video Gallery - Joomla Component

WMT Youtube Video Gallery – Joomla Component

WMT Video Gallery is a powerful easy to use Joomla Component video gallery, based on the jQuery. Bring your favorite videos from YouTube to your Joomla CMS website and display them nicely inside a categorized gallery.

In WMT Video Gallery you can add short description to the enclosed videos and in each Category, which makes it highly suitable for portfolio websites showcasing video shooting samples as well as personal video galleries.

* Navigate using the keyboard.
* Responsive design

Settings in Joomla admin back-end:

  • Add unlimited number of categories
  • Add unlimited number of videos to category
  • Assign each category to individual Menu Item
  • Set custom player width value for best responsive performance on all devices
  • Set the number of thumbnails to show per page in the navigation panel
  • Lite and dark color schemes available to switch between for smooth design integrations
  • Automatic video start upon clicking a thumbnail
  • Show or hide top pagination links
  • Show or hide bottom pagination links

Read More

Essential Business Tips for Graphic Designers

Essential Business Tips for Graphic Designers

Keep Portfolios Current

Graphic design changes according to trends over time just like any other industry. It is important to keep a design portfolio current. This means adding new work to the portfolio and removing redundant or dated work. New portfolio pieces should be created that address the most current trends. Detecting these emerging trends involves staying engaged with clients and the industry. A current and changing portfolio can draw in new business while also bringing back older clients.

Incorporate New Tools and Techniques

New technology affects graphic design in many different ways. Graphic designers should always strive to incorporate the newest tools and techniques when performing work. New software tools can provide unique effects that make work distinctive. They can also increase efficiency by making composition, layout and publication easier. Incorporating new tools and techniques will keep the business prepared for the demands of the future.

Get As Much Exposure as Possible

Graphic designers must get as much exposure as possible through advertising and marketing in order to attract work consistently. This means getting the name of the designer and some of the portfolio into many different websites and publications. Even small freelance job websites or local venues can help to generate business over time. Additionally, designers should take part in events and competitions whenever possible to increase the profile of the business. Marketing efforts should include both online and offline print strategies. The amount of exposure a graphic designer gets will directly affect the number of clients and leads generated each year.

Read More