With so much discussion about search engine optimization and search engine marketing, some people may forget other traditional methods to get your name and your firm in front of the right people:  media relations.

Working with the media to provide content, an opinion or your expertise can be just as powerful, if not more, as being on the first page Google’s search results or featured in a television advertisement. But of course, as with any other marketing tactic, creating a rapport with the media takes time and a continuous effort.

Here are four tips to help you get started:

1) Become an expert in your practice area.

For most people, the legal industry is confusing and complex. Given it’s the world you live in everyday, you are in a unique position to demonstrate your knowledge by working with the media. You can offer comment on a news story, explain a complicated ruling or offer advice on a legal issue.

The key to success here is to have examples of your expertise at the ready. Whether it’s your firm’s website with resourceful information, your Avvo profile, marketing videos or a blog covering related topics – journalists will want to learn more about who you are and what you have to offer. If you have a monthly newsletter, consider including relevant journalists. The more information you make available, the more opportunities will come your way.

2) Based on your overall marketing goals,  target the right media.

I don’t agree that any publicity is good publicity. You need to make sure you are targeting the right media to get in front of the audience you seek to reach. Depending on your practice area and location, this can vary – newspapers, online outlets,  television, blogs are just a few of the possible types of targets.  Ask yourself, what are your clients reading? Where are they getting their news and information?

Unless you have a media database, you may have to do some digging around to find the right people. However, most outlets have an editorial page with contact information. LinkedIn is another good source. And the site MediaOnTwitter.com as well as Listorious provides a comprehensive list of journalists on Twitter.

3) Actively seek, and create, opportunities.

When it comes to media relations, it’s easy to be reactive. For example, there’s a story about a celebrity couple going through a high profile divorce. If you are a divorce attorney, you could be the local expert to offer your opinion on the possible outcomes of the case. Another example, a large company sues another for stealing a patent. If you practice business or copyright law, again you could provide a comment on what the stakes are for each side. It’s all about getting involved with a story you know the media will already be covering.

Being proactive requires more work, but is often more rewarding with the types of opportunities that will come to fruition.  Examples of this include offering to write a column for a news outlet or answer a readers’ questions. Or perhaps you’ve noticed a trend or growing problem among your clients – such as more foreclosure cases or more younger people filing for bankruptcy.  Put together a list of tips or advice that can help people and pitch that to the right people.

Lastly, take advantage of an opportunity when you have a high profile or unique case with a client also willing to share their story. Realizing this does not happen often – if at all for lawyers – in the event it does, allow the media to help you publicize the situation.

4) Remember who you are working with, and your audience.

Media outlets run on a 24-hour news cycle. Constantly on deadline, working in a very competitive environment, it’s important to be responsive to their requests and flexible to their schedules. Make your contact information easily available. Also, once you have the opportunity for an interview, remember to speak to your audience, which is most likely consumers – every day people – not lawyers. Use simple language and take time to explain complicated topics. It’s also important before every interview to be prepared with your talking points – three are best – and make them quotable and dynamic.

Interested in hearing more? Join us for a free webinar – Public Relations for Lawyers – with Avvo’s Mark Britton on Thursday, August 19th at 10:00AM PT.

Photo: Seattle Personal Injury Attorney, Chris Davis, of the Davis Law Group.

Liberty Mutual recently produced a short film about two lawyers “in love, but not in sync.”  The film makes dating a lawyer look almost as appealing as eating glass.

With one push of a button, Google can make or destroy thousands of of businesses all over the world.  As a result, a recent New York Times editorial suggested that perhaps such power warrants government regulation.  But is talk of regulating Google’s algorithm a reasonable response to unchecked power? Or a short-sighted, knee-jerk reaction?

Tweaking Google’s algorithm

Every so often Google tweaks its ranking algorithm, the formula that decides which websites rank highest.  When such tweaks occur, they can be a disaster or a windfall to certain businesses.  Google’s official rationale for algorithm tweaks is to improve results and to therefore give users a better experience.  But some aren’t buying that explanation, particularly as Google expands its lines of business and endures increasing pressure to show shareholders a profit.  In any event, Google’s keeps the details of its algorithm ultra secret in the interest of staving off competition and spammers.

It’s all about free speech

I would think Google has a First Amendment right to rank whichever website it wants however it wants, free from government oversight or intervention.  Isn’t the American way to let the marketplace of ideas work these things out, not regulators?

Granted, Google has mind boggling power to influence the destinies of thousands of businesses, but so what? If Ebert and Roeper can make or break movies with their reviews, are we going to have Congress investigate them? Besides, no one forces any business to be dependent on Google, although it can be tempting to enjoy (or become addicted to) the “free” traffic, if you can get it.

The competition

When it comes to algorithm tweaks, I believe competitors like Bing will keep Google in check much better than the government ever could.  To the extent that Google’s rankings serve Google at the expense of users, then that creates an opportunity for competitors to steal market share. And to the extent that Google’s rankings serve both Google and users, then Google will thrive.  The point is that for Google to survive over the long term, it has to align what’s good for users with what’s good for its bottom line — something it’s done very well so far.

If someone thinks there’s a fairer, better way to rank internet search results, then let them compete directly with Google.  It’s easy to think Google is unstoppable, but it wasn’t too long ago that Google came out of nowhere and took down then entrenched players like Yahoo, simply by doing a better job.

It may not happen tomorrow, and there will probably be more than a few Cuils along the way, but Google is not immune from someone building a better mouse trap.

With all the ups and downs in the U.S. economy, how has your law practice fared in the first half of 2010? Please take this brief  survey to let us know! No really, it will only take two minutes.  Thank you!

In case you missed last week’s guest webinar, Cloud Computing for Legal Professionals, with Larry Port of Rocket Matter – not to worry! Here is the video:

Larry has also provided a free cloud computing resource kit that includes a white paper, a compilation of articles from mainstream legal technology press and the full text of the North Carolina proposed ethics opinion on using the cloud in law firms.

Avvo’s involvement in the legal community isn’t just through our ever-expanding online presence – we also participate in CLE seminars, legal networking forums, and tradeshows across North America.  Take a chance to enhance your legal presence, knock out some CLE hours, and meet your Avvo Representatives at these upcoming events!

July 15-17 in Vancouver, WA:  WSBA Solo & Small Firm Conference

The 5th annual WSBA Solo and Small Firm Conference – happening this week – will feature excellent netowrking opportunities, marketing tips and provide 14.75 CLE credits for Washington attorneys, including 3.5 Ethic Credits.  Avvo’s Benjamin Brown will be providing Avvo information at this event.  Stop in and meet Washington’s Avvo Account Manager.

August 1-3 in Duluth, MN:  Minnesota CLE – Strategic Solutions for Solo & Small Firms

Described by Minnesota CLE as the “absolute can’t-miss event of the year for solo and small firm attorneys,” this seminar features various national presenters, 40 optional sessions to choose from, and is even family friendly.  Avvo’s North Ad Sales Manager, Bryan Jones, will be providing marketing tips and advertising expertise. Avvo’s General Counsel, Josh King will also be presenting in a break out session about how social media works, and how it can be used in your law practice.

August 5-10 in San Francisco, CA:  ABA 2010 Annual Meeting

With thousands of lawyers planning to attend, Avvo CEO Mark Britton, will be participating in a panel discussion about lawyer ratings and online reputation management.

August 11-13 in Toronto, Canada:  NACDL Annual Meeting & Seminar

NACDL’s 2010 National Seminar features Jon Krakauer (Best-Selling Author of Into the Wild) and Honorable Beverly McLachlin (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada) as featured presenters.  Avvo’s Bryan Jones will once again be providing marketing strategy and Avvo tips at this event.

August 13 in Redmond, WA:   East King County Bar Association Summer Golf Tournament

This event, sponsored by Avvo,  is open to attorney members and non-members for golf.  The 4 person best ball scramble will have an 8AM shotgun start followed by awards BBQ around 12:45PM. Golf entries are $125 and include, golf, riding carts, range balls, BBQ lunch and great prizes and awards. Avvo’s Mark Britton will be playing along with his team of Avvo golf all-stars!

September 10 in Seattle, WA:   Law Seminars International 2nd Annual Social Media Law Conference

This cutting edge conference will explore the evolution of digital social interaction and the unique legal issues that are evolving simultaneously with each new business model. Avvo’s General Counsel, Josh King,  will be presenting: Opportunities and Ethical Dilemmas for Private Practitioners in Social Media.

September 23 – 26 in Monterey, CA:   State Bar of California Annual Meeting

Earn up to 19.5 hours of CLE credit at the State Bar of California’s Annual Meeting. The 157-class schedule features presentations on California Case Management, Social Media Marketing, Ethics and more. Avvo’s South Ad Sales Manager, Shawn Burke, will be there to answer questions about online marketing and how Avvo can help you.



In last week’s “Smart SEO for Lawyers” webinar, I emphasized the importance of link building for SEO.  Naturally, someone then asked for practical ways to build links, with an emphasis on “practical.”  I can certainly understand the sentiment, because common advice like “have great content that people want to link to” isn’t very practical at all.  So here are five practical ways that a lawyer could build links to his or her law firm website.

1) Create a blog on your domain

Let’s be honest, the average Joe doesn’t care about law until he’s sued or arrested, which is why link building for lawyers is so hard.  One way around this is to have a blog where your main audience is other lawyers.  However, with enough dedication and writing talent, you could expand your audience to anyone (just be aware that the 5,325th article on “what to do in a car accident” isn’t going to get anyone excited).  The more you participate in the blogosphere the higher the odds of your blog posts attracting links.

That said, a blog is no magic pill.  It’s just a platform, and unless you write stuff people actually want to read, a blog won’t help you.  Whether blogging is practical really depends on how much writing talent and free time you have.  If blogging isn’t a good fit, then move on to the other options below.

2) Do guest blog posts in other people’s blogs

Want to benefit from blogging without fully committing to blogging? You can.  Offer to write guest posts for other people’s blogs (where you’ll get links back to your website embedded in the guest blog posts).  You could do guest blog posts for legal blogs or even non legal blogs.  For example, if you’re a wills, trusts & estates lawyer, there are hundreds of gay and lesbian blogs that would be interested in having an expert lawyer write free guest posts talking about GLBT legal issues.

Here’s how it works, and you don’t even have to waste time writing before you secure a guest blog post:

• Think up a catchy title for a blog post like “7 Laws GLBT Families Need to Know About.”
• Grab a list of GLBT blogs.  Alltop.com is great for this, as it compiles lists of blogs by topic.
• Have an assistant email a form letter to every single blog on the list asking if they’re interested in your guest post. In the letter, give a very short summary of your experience and offer them exclusive rights to the content.
• If you get any takers, then write the blog post and send it to them.  At the bottom of your blog post include a short “About the Author” section with links back to your website.
• Rinse and repeat.

3) Sponsor local nonprofits

Buying links is a big “no no” in Google’s book, but luckily there are ways to buy links without “buying links.”  As far as I know, no one has ever gotten in trouble for sponsoring a nonprofit and getting a link as a thank you.  So do a little research into worthy non profits in your community, and then contact them about sponsorship.  In addition to any SEO benefit you get, you’ll also build good will in the community and help worthy causes.  This is a nice example of traditional marketing blending with SEO.  You might also get a tax break for whatever you donate.

4) Submit to quality directories

There are thousands of junk web directories that are best avoided, but there are still some good ones that are worth submitting to.  Some of these good directories charge a fee, while others are completely free.  Here is a nice list of quality directories.  And, of course, you should look into niche directories that won’t appear on generic directory lists.  For example, Avvo (for claimed lawyers) and Justia will give links to lawyers in their directories.  If you’re a part of any association or school that maintains directories, be sure to submit your site to them as well.

5) Check out the competition

Find competitors who outrank you in Google and enter them into backlinkwatch.com to see where they’re getting their links.  Often times if they can get a link from a particular website, so can you.  The downside to this is that it puts you one step behind the competition, whereas with the other options you can lead, often in a way that’s hard for competitors to copy.

We’re thrilled to have Larry Port, the Founding Partner and Chief Software Architect for Rocket Matter, join us next Thursday as a guest for a free legal marketing webinar.

Rocket Matter is the leading web-based legal practice management and time and billing software for small to mid-sized law firms.

Larry will be covering a topic not yet discussed here at Avvo, but one that is very much moving into the legal industry: Cloud Computing. The ABA Journal wrote a lengthy piece about the technology in its April issue and lawyer Nicole Black is writing the book Cloud Computing for Lawyers to be published by the ABA in early 2011.

But many lawyers are probably still asking,  just what is this cloud that everyone is talking about? From the perspective of the law firm, computing in the cloud eliminates typical IT expenses, management, and headaches. Cloud options are often cost-effective since they forego high up-front costs in favor of predictable monthly fees. Yet many lawyers are concerned about security risks.

In next week’s webinar, Larry will cover it all, including how to carefully select a cloud computing solution and understand the risks.

We hope you can join us!

Date: Thursday, July 15, 2010, 1:00PM ET / 10:00AM PT
Sign up: Cloud Computing for Legal Professionals with Larry Port

Matt Cutts of Google recently came out with a video explaining the wrong and right ways to “sculpt” PageRank.  At the end of the video he confirms that keeping important web pages close to your homepage is a good way to help your rankings.  Read on to learn about the details.

A quick refresher on PageRank

Google operates as a big democracy, where links count as votes.  But all votes are not counted equally, and some votes aren’t counted at all.  Google has an algorithm called PageRank (named after Larry Page) for calculating how many votes a web page has and how important those votes are.  A link from a high PageRank page counts more than a link from a low PageRank page.

One way to think of how PageRank operates is as “juice” flowing through a network of pipes. Every time a website links to your website, it’s sending “link juice” into your website, which then flows throughout your website.  The higher the PageRank of the page containing the link, the more juice the link will pass.

Links are the “pipes” through which the link juice passes.  Web pages that have accumulated large pools of PageRank may rank better in Google.

Sculpting PageRank

Once it became known that PageRank flows around your website, and pages that accumulate the most “juice” may have a ranking advantage, it wasn’t long before people started trying to manipulate the flow of PageRank so that it would flow to pages they most wanted to rank well for.

A common tactic for doing this was to use the “no follow” attribute on internal links to unimportant pages.  Adding the “no follow” attribute to a link tells Google not to pass “juice” to a link (it closes off the pipe, so to speak).  People figured that if they no followed unimportant pages they’d never want to rank well for, like a privacy policy page or a contact page, then more juice would be left over to go to important pages. This was called “link sculpting.”

Why link sculpting with “no follow” stopped working

At some point Google changed the way “no follow” worked such that it no longer made sense to do it on internal links for link sculpting.

Here’s how no follow used to work:

You have a page with 10 internal links (links that go to other pages on  your website) and 100 points of link juice to spread around.  In that case each of the 10 links would get 10 points worth of link juice.  If you “no followed” 5 links, then the remaining links would get 20 points worth of link juice each. The link juice is simply concentrated into fewer links, making them better off.

Here’s how no follow works now:

You have a page with 10 internal links and 100 points of link juice to spread around.  If you “no followed” 5 links, then the remaining links would still get 10  points worth of link juice each, and the 50 points of link juice going to the 5 “no followed” links would simply evaporate.  You haven’t gained anything by using “no follow” to control the flow of PageRank.

This change was a bit of a scandal in the SEO industry because it turned out a lot of firms had been recommending that clients sculpt PageRank with “no follow” after Google revealed it had stopped working, proving that the practice was boondoggle.

Okay so what can you do now?

Most websites tend to attract most of their links to the homepage.  It’s just the way it is.  What this means is that most websites have a big pools of link juice bottlenecked at their homepages.

When you consider that the more times links juice passes through links, the more it “thins,” you realize that by putting an important page 3 links away from your homepage, the juice that finally arrives at that page is less than if you had put the important page 1 link away from the homepage.

So, for example, if you’ve got 10 practice areas listed on your website, but DUI is really important to your business, link directly to it from your homepage.  The optimal way to do it, at least from a PageRank perspective, would be homepage > DUI, rather than homepage > practice areas > criminal defense > DUI.

That said, you can’t be myopic about sculpting PageRank, since it only tries to redirect the juice you already have.  In practical terms, what you probably need to rank better is to attract more link juice, not to play with the juice you already have.  But we do have confirmation straight from Google that putting pages close the homepage can give them a PageRank boost.

Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, recently proclaimed that email is probably going to die. Her rationale is that if you want to know what adults will do tomorrow with technology, you look at what teenagers are doing today, and teenagers think email is kind of, well, “lame.”  They prefer social networking and text messaging.

A little too ambitious?

Okay, social media is changing the world, but will it really kill email? In my opinion, no, at least not in the foreseeable future. There are all sorts of reasons why email will live on, but here are my two favorites:

Teenagers don’t conduct business

In the future will people use Facebook to send proposals to clients? To send internal office memos to coworkers? To send an invoice? Could you even imagine using text messages for any of this? Teenagers don’t have any of these needs yet, but they will, which is largely why they don’t use email now, and Facebook  seems ill suited for a lot of these purposes.

Besides, even if social media technology renders email antiquated, that doesn’t mean it’s going away, any more than the internet and computers have killed paper.

Teenagers don’t care about privacy

If Facebook kills email, how are you going to sign up for websites (and for that matter, how are you going to sign up for Facebook)? Using your Facebook user/pass instead? Some websites already offer this option, but are you really going to login to your bank, credit card, health insurance or other sensitive websites using your Facebook credentials? Among other problems, this would create a serious privacy hazard — Whoops! Facebook accidentally published every website you logged into and every person you contacted last month, and they sold the info to advertisers!

But do teenagers care about privacy? Absolutely not. Teenagers are famous for publicly posting pictures of themselves with a bottle of Popov vodka in one hand and a stained-glass bong in another, having no concept of how that could impact their careers and reputations down the line.

Adults, on the other hand, care a lot about privacy, which has been Facebook’s biggest problem of late.  I just don’t see adults trusting Facebook enough to make it the hub of everything they do on the web, no matter how sensitive, especially given its problems with privacy in the past.  If for no other reason, email will stick around as a sort of ID card for the web.

The predictive value of teenagers

Is this really crystal ball insight into future adult behavior?

I’m not going to dismiss wholesale the notion that teenagers predict adult technology trends, but certainly there must be exceptions.  It seems that at least with business technology, old habits persist, perhaps even irrationally, and a ton of email’s utility is wrapped up in business.

So if I’m going to accept the “email will die” thesis at all, it’s limited to the possibility that social media will kill social email use, which is already starting to happen.  But I doubt email is going anywhere for business, at least in the near future.

So, do you think email is going to die?