At this point there is a call for speakers… they want local speakers before people from outside the NYC area I believe but if you want to speak contact he NYC WordPres Meetup group at: http://2012.nyc.wordcamp.org/2012/04/05/call-for-speakers/

Google is looking for certain indicators or “signals” to help them rank web pages. Their goal is to provide the best quality search engine results to users. So when a website in a very competitive genre gets to the top 10 or the top 3, they are doing a lot of things right.

WordPress helps attorneys get higher rankings on Google

WordPress does a lot of things that Google recommends and that old style HTML sites don’t do very well. One of those things is interior linking or getting your pages linked together internally in an intelligent way. WordPress also makes it easy for attorneys to add their own content. This is so important in today’s laundry list of items that Google is looking for in terms of positive signals.

Building a Law Firm Website Correctly is Half the Battle

The big box vendors will tell you that the website costs as much as a new automobile because they sell links from Lawyers.com or Justia.com or Findlaw.com as part of their package. Well you don’t have to drop a fortune buying links from the big box vendors to have a great site that ranks well – or in this case better than the more expensive competition. It’s because the “on page” SEO factors that Web Design WorkPlace can build for you are more than half the battle to good rankings.  And the content is even more critical in today’s ranking environment. Do the big box vendors links help the clients that buy links from them? Yes to a degree… but not as much as before. Google looks first at the on page factors and then on the external factors like links to rank sites.

Remember these words of SEO Wisdom from Web Design WorkPlace founder Mal Milligan

“If you build it correctly, the Google Spiders will come.”

Diablo was trying to build a new site from scratch after loosing their last site. They needed to ask lots and lots of questions and they looked at web design firms that offered prices between $200 and $10,000. Unfortunately none of them was able to spend much time answering the questions. Many of them actually could not answer web design questions – lol. So to work with Web Design WorkPlace was a perfect fit. We answer any and all questions.

There were almost a hundred previous newsletters that we wanted to incorporate into the site and there were 15 different areas. I offered a number of layouts and the club picked the StudioPress BackCountry Theme as a base. It took around 80 hours from the initial email to getting the project launched so starting with a solid Theme and the Genesis Framework for WordPress, it saved a lot of time.

We used NextGen Galleries for the photos with the CoolIIris slideshow feature. LiveShare is the parent company that makes the CoollIris feature used by NextGen and they are really pushing the boundaries with photo sharing and web experience… check out this video:

Here is what their main photo page looks like with a big NextGen Gallery…

And when you click the link “View with PicLens” you get into the CoolIris slideshow that is really popular for WordPress websites. This slideshow automatically re-sizes images on the fly and it can be set to go full screen to make a real crowd pleaser.

Besides this main photo gallery we are building 15 additional galleries for the different activities the club has. The site launched with around 100 photos but it might grow to thousands. This is a great website and it was fun working with their great Project Manager Matt.

You can report them with Google Webmaster tools and sometimes Google will remove them. Here’s an example:

I typed this search string into Google:

What color is talc?

And the #2 response was an artificially high ranking page from “Answers.com” that was 80% advertisements above the fold. That website uses BLACK HAT SEO techniques to manipulate Google rankings because the vast majority of the page is advertisements that they get paid for. Google is trying hard to provide high quality relevant results for your search queries but sometimes a cheater like answers.com slips through the cracks and constantly beats Google’s system. Look at this page:

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_color_is_talc

Example of Black Hat SEO

You can see the answer to the question is only 8 relevant words. An entire page full of PPC advertisements from “Ad Choices” and only 8 words of content. Wow. The page has a Google PageRank 1 and SEO’s immediately wonder if Google is profiting from all the ad deliveries this black hat page is getting. Or if it’s just artificially manipulating Google’s Algorithm and they are cheating the system.

I want garbage like answers.com off the first page of SERPS (search engine results pages). It’s pure SPAM. It takes up a lot of bandwidth on the internet and what a terrible waste of my time. To have to sift through this is one step away from dumpster diving. Here’s what I’m going to do about it. Report them to Google with a SPAM REPORT like this:

If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport.

Google Spam Report

I’ve asked Google remove many pages from the index in the last 3 or 4 years using Spam Reports and all of the pages I reported were removed. The Spam Reports work. I also write a nice article about the offender on my website to help educate the public about SPAM and how to take the trash like this right to the garbage can. I’ve been fed up by the constant manipulation from answers.com for years and now I’m doing something about it. I’ve found it’s a pure waste of time to ever click on any search result that points to that domain and I hope Google makes them rank at the bottom of the barrel where they belong.

We’ve worked with hundreds of law firms and lawyers over the years.

After building websites since 1996, Web Design WorkPlace now only sells law firm websites. We decided to stay exclusively in this genre because we stood out from the rest of the field in the legal marketplace.

The Big Box legal marketing providers are book publishers.

The “Big Box” vendors in the legal marketplace became giants in book publishing long before computers took over. They made their own “legal directories” and sold them to attorneys who used them mostly for business to business. And those companies have struggled to stay alive as the books and directories they published became obsolete with old data even before their pages were printed. So they started to phase in building websites. Web Design WorkPlace started building websites right from the beginning and we don’t have thousands of employees left over from the publishing years generating huge overhead costs. Those huge overhead costs at big name legal marketing companies are transferred directly to you – the client – when you buy a website from them.

Do you want to pay their sales person’s salary on top of buying a website and SEO package?

In most cases their salespeople are on commission or even full commission which means they only care about selling you the highest dollar amount they can. They have a laundry list as long as your arm when it comes to what they call “up sells” or added services that they will try to push on you that you may or may not need. That’s what commissioned sales people do. Web Design WorkPlace has a lot more integrity than they every will. We won’t nickle and dime you on anything ever. We make our money providing the best possible products and services for a select group of distinguished clients. We are proud of our customer satisfaction level. We have 100% client retention on 2nd year support contracts. A figure the big box providers will only dream about.

You Can’t Tell It’s WordPress

Web Design WorkPlace can convert any website you’ve ever seen into WordPress and you won’t be able to tell the difference. It can look like anything you’ve ever seen on the internet or anything you’ve imagined. There are a lot of styles that are standard such as the “blog” style. That style has blog pages that act as articles on the home page and it may have a sidebar on the right or left sides… or both. Some people think all WordPress websites have to look like the original “blog style”. Not true. We’ve used WordPress to make hundreds of individual and unique looking websites.

WordPress Gives You Control of Your Content

With old style HTML sites you needed a programmer to change any of the content. Then you had to use an FTP program to upload the new changes up to the server. Who wants to do that? The person who wants to do that obviously is the person charging you money for every change like that. It’s a waste of time going back and forth with a programmer as well. WordPress lets you add / change / or delete content by logging in, editing the page or post, and clicking the “publish” button. It’s as easy as that literally.

WordPress Ranks Better on Google

The structure of a WordPress website is exactly what Google likes to see. Many of the pages are interlinked and there are easy to follow pathways for Google and other search engine spiders to follow. WordPress websites make it easy to alert Google when new pages are added. And they work with Google Analytics flawlessly to exchange data between your hosting company and your website and Google. Google loves WordPress and they usually show their love with PageRank.

We Could Talk All Day About SEO

We were there building websites in 1996. And as each new feature was added to the internet and to web design theory, we tried it out and got it to work. SEO evolved from primitive beginnings to a very complex and sophisticated system in place today. And Web Design WorkPlace is on top of the game. It’s an expansive subject but the basics are that there are things we can do to a web page to make it more attractive to Google or Yahoo and Bing. That’s what we refer to as “on page” SEO. Then there are other things we can do that are refered to as “off page” SEO. Link building and comment dropping are some of the practices in that category. So with the on page and off page SEO together, we can get individual web pages to rank higher for particular search phrases. Being in a #1 position on a search engine results page can be lucrative. The #1 ranked web page can get up to 40% of the clicks and the #2 ranked result can get from 8 to 20% of the clicks. All the top 10 entries on the first results page get clicks. Being on the first page of search engine results puts you in the scoring zone. Everyone gets clicks on the first page.

SEO is Good

The fictitious character Gordon Gekko said “greed is good”. Well we’re not so sure about his rationale, but what we are sure about is that “SEO is good”. Google has Webmaster Guidelines where we can see exactly how they want us to structure a web page to make it rank better for a particular search phrase. We follow those rules because Web Design WorkPlace is a totally white hat SEO firm. We have to admit, we were a little more like Gordon Gekko 10 years ago as SEO was evolving. In the old days, SEO’s tried all kinds of tricks to see if it would have an impact on ranking. Some were more “grey area” than others. But that all ended when Google made it clear to SEO’s what they expected and from then on, it was an easy path to follow and we got better results staying true to Google’s Guidelines. There is no need to break or even bend the rules anymore. So in the SEO business, the best white hat companies also spent time wearing the other hat. As SEO evolved, the Gordon Gekko’s of SEO all got beat. Our advice to you is this… your interests will be better served sticking to the Google Webmaster Guidelines. That’s what we do, and it works because SEO is good.

Not too bad really. I build it using Dreamweaver CS3 using one of their built in CSS templates. I got all the graphics from one of my favorite free and public domain spots: the NASA image gallery. So every page was hand tuned for SEO manually where I inserted the tags myself like old school. And I had some text on every page and some links to the site… and I used it thousands of times myself during each year to purchase and maintain way over 1200 domains that I bought through the site. But there was a nagging problem. The fat zero I always got from Google for my PR.

A couple weeks ago I built a new site for it on WordPress using a great Nick Roach Theme called Chameleon and it had an optional “roundabout” slider. Really beautiful to look at. I used the all-in-one-seo plugin to configure my SEO and I only manually configured the homepage. I even added 4 or 5 affiliate links on the sidebar for my favorite themes and hosting partners. (Not that I will ever make a penny from them – lol). Just as an experiment for some laughs. The end result…

I went to Google PageRank 1 within 24 hours.

That’s service for you. That’s one of the many powers of WordPress and that’s why I switched to building WordPress sites commercially in 2008. One of my favorite things to say in the business is that “Google Loves WordPress“. Yeah, so true. One of the biggest reasons I instantly was promoted is that the interlinking on a WP site is so good. It’s got what some in the business call “linky goodness“. Plus the site looks incredibly good. This is a top professional theme right now. Take a look here:

So my point is that WordPress is better than old style HTML for dozens of reasons but this is clearly one of the best. Google rewarded a site that had been online for 7 years with PageRank just because I converted it to WP.

Thanks WordPress !!

I highly recommend StudioPress Themes and I’ve purchased 3 developer licenses from them since 2008.

http://StudioPress.com

I also have a developer license for Gravity Forms. I’ve used Contract Form 7 on about  50 sites but the captcha on Gravity Forms is better as is the setup.

Gravity Forms: http://www.gravityforms.com/

I’ve purchased about 5 themes from Woo Themes at: http://www.woothemes.com/

I’ve also used ThemeForest twice and I recommend checking them out at: http://themeforest.net/

I’ve also had a developer license for Elegant Themes for 3 year and I’ve rolled out a couple of their Themes on production sites. Check them out at: http://www.elegantthemes.com/

For all my attorney friends looking at the Big Box offerings… here are links to their portfolio sites. This is great food for thought if you’re a developer or you’re looking for ideas for your own site:

Paper Street     http://www.paperstreet.com/portfolio.php
LexisNexis    http://lawlinks.com/our-work/
Justia    http://www.justia.com/web-site-portfolio.html
Einstein    http://www.einsteinlaw.com/html/showroom.html
Scorpion    http://www.scorpiondesign.com/Our_Portfolio.aspx
Findlaw New Portfolio    http://www.findlawdesign.com/#/work/
Findlaw Personal Injury     http://www.personalinjury-websites.com/
Findlaw Criminal Defense     http://www.criminallaw-websites.com/

Alter Hall
1801 Liacouras Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19122

Click the image below to go to Google Maps…

Temple University Alter Hall

I just signed up to attend and I’m looking forward to my first WordCamp since NYC in 2010. On my last WordCamp I helped Steve Bruner as an organizer. I got lots of great “GeDunk” from Jane Wells and Steve for helping out. And a lot of my friends showed up to harass Corey Eulas who was doing his first Camp speaking session.

So this time it looks like Corey is going to speak and another mutual friend “Sam I am” Sam Napolitano is speaking, and another mutual friend Brad Williams too. I hope they are all scheduled for different times.

Here is a link to the speakers page: http://2011.philly.wordcamp.org/speakers/

I’ve seen Brad Williams speak at 2 NYC WordPress Meetups and also at one of the NYC WordCamps. He’s a very engaging speaker and his knowledge of WordPress is incredible. In March I watched him describe the process for creating a WordPress Plugin. After the Meetup I went in and fixed a plugin I had been using where the original author was unresponsive.

Brad wrote 2 books that are great sources for anyone who gets under the hood building WordPress websites. I bought the first one (Professional WordPress) and last night at the meetup I won the next one (Professional WordPress Plugin development) !! I’m one of those guys who buys a copy of every book ever published about WordPress and this is the first time I ever got a great brand new book that I was going to buy anyway for free.

Don’t get me wrong, I love reading books and everything, but I don’t just read books, I sort of abuse them. Every page gets written on, I underline and write blocks around key parts, I earmark and fold pages down for super important information. Then I go over them again a couple months after I finish them to do lookups. And I throw them out after 2 or 3 years when they are dated. I’m much kinder to Lynda.com video training… lol.

Here’s a link to the WordCamp page and hope to see you there… Regards Everyone !!

Mal

WordCamp Philly 2011