Is your firm's web site as effective as it could be? Learn how to avoid and correct the most common flaws in law firm web site design.

I've been puzzled by a number of common, but flawed, practices that seem to exist exclusively on Web sites in the legal industry. These mistakes range from ill-conceived site architecture to poor usability, with some search engine optimizing errors thrown in for good measure. Most of these mistakes can be avoided, or at least easily corrected. You should be particularly interested in this list if you are in the process of creating or redesigning your firm's Web site.

Article Grouping

Article grouping (my term) is the practice of placing multiple articles on a single Web page or in a single linked file (like a PDF) with just one link that takes a visitor to the articles. In the days when only print newsletters existed, the practice of including multiple articles in one publication made perfect sense -- that's what made a newsletter a newsletter. That concept morphed its way onto the Web, but it's now nearly anachronistic. It's a bad practice for a number of reasons, including the potential harm it can do to your search engine ranking, but I want to focus on another, more concrete issue -- Web analytics.

Your Web site is not just a means to disseminate information! It's also an extremely important analytical tool. You can learn nearly as much from your own publications about those who visit your Web site as they learn about your practice areas and lawyers.

In the past, when you sent out your newsletter, you had only one solid metric: subscribers. You had no concrete data on whether anyone was reading the newsletter or found it useful unless you heard back from a client or prospect. That's all changed. Using the right tools, you can now learn extremely important information about your site visitors, including:

• number of readers
• number of pages viewed
• depth of individual visit (number of pages views while on site)
• length of visit (by site and Web page)
• most visited content
• frequency of visits
• new vs. returning visitors
• bounce rate (i.e., % of visitors that leave a page after first finding site)
• top exit page (i.e., from which pages visitors commonly exit your site)
• visitor navigation paths (i.e., how visitors travel through your site)

This information might seem trivial to most lawyers, but collected correctly and over time, it can provide a clear picture of those using your Web site. By using this information, you will have the ability to allocate your marketing dollars to your best advantage. Analytics can give you answers to all of the following questions:

• Which articles are being read the most?
• Which lawyers generate the most traffic?
• Which practice area generates the most traffic?
• What types of articles attract readers? Are they short "case blurb" articles or lengthy pieces that provide practical advice?
• Is it more important to produce a short article on a timely topic quickly or delay it until a more thorough piece can be developed?
• Do clever titles actually work?

Most importantly, I would want to know:

• Which articles send people to a lawyer's profile
• Which lead people to become subscribers, and
• Which articles lead to someone using a contact form

So what does analytics have to do with article grouping? When you improperly group articles onto a single page or file, you blind yourself to this information. If one link leads to a newsletter with ten articles -- which particular article led to the click? You just don't know. Placing each article on its own page with an individual link to that page can give you this information.

Link Apathy

Link apathy (my term), the practice of providing one, non-descript link to a page or file that contains more than one article (ala article grouping), is one of the most prevalent of all law firm Web site flaws. It might also be the worst. It can be found on hundreds of law firm Web sites, usually in one of the following forms:

>> Current Newsletter

>> Archived Alerts

>> Click Here To Read

and the big-daddy of them all:

>> More

This practice is the cause of great concern to an optimizer. It's generally agreed that search engines (like Google) use the text of the link to determine how highly a Web page ranks for searches. If the words that make up the link (called anchor text) don't convey any meaningful, distinguishing information, Google is less likely to rank that page highly for searches that use those words. That's true for both links pointing to your site from other sites (external links) and the links on your site (internal links).

Always be sure to use anchor text that describes the article's content. To determine the content of the anchor text, ask yourself why the article is important to your clients or prospective clients. The anchor text should include that answer. The anchor text for an article on the new Supreme Court decision on employer liability for hostile work environment sexual harassment should read, "Supreme Court Issues Decision on Employer Liability for Hostile Work Environment Sexual Harassment." Refrain from using unnecessary terms like "Update" or "Alert". As a basic rule, if you don't think some one would use that type of word to search for an article on a particular topic, don't use that word in your link.

Hard Copy Mentality

Publishing on the Web is still in its infancy; however it is growing up quickly. It's now faster and easier to read a newspaper online than it is in hard copy. Unfortunately, many law firms still have a print mentality when it comes to their Web site publications. The most common offenses include:

Inexact Dating: Your publications must be dated! Some publications are not dated at all, or if they are dated, a seasonal period, i.e. Winter 2006 is used. This is an archaic practice. People need to know the date, and generally the exact date, on which an article is written in order to place it chronologically among other competing pieces of information. This is particularly true when it's easier to find older information on the Web than new information. Your visitors should not be forced to verify your information because you forgot to provide a date!

I would imagine that some firms hang on to this practice because articles may not be drafted in a timely fashion. The assumption is that an article on a recent Supreme Court decision in your Summer 2006 Newsletter is timely if the decision was also handed down in the Summer -- even if two months earlier.

Publication Panoply: What exactly is the difference between a "Newsletter" and a "Bulletin?" Are "Alerts" newer than "Updates?" Some law firms publish up to five different categories of legal information: Alerts, Articles, Bulletins, Newsletters, and Updates. There are more, but those are the favorites. This practice on a Web site makes no sense whatsoever -- it's all just information. It wouldn't be a problem, except that on some sites, visitors are forced to click through a maze of links in order to find the information they need. If you must, keep these categories in your print publications, but drop them online. To provide ease of use, your publications should be coded in a database so that they can be sorted by date, practice area and industry, not by some arbitrary, meaningless publication title.

Poor Search Functionality: Categorizing information is always useful, but it's being replaced by robust search capacity (if you think that's not true, calculate your time spent on your favorite search engine vs. the time you spend in directories like Yahoo!). Despite the importance of search functionality, many firms don't seem to value it; very problematic in an industry based on information expertise. There is a problem if one of your articles cannot be easily located when searching on a few words in its title. I'm sure that nothing irritates visitors more than zero search results when they know the article actually exists. If you can't get accurate search results on your site, at least make sure that a contact person (or email address) is listed when no search results are returned. I think you'll be surprised by the number of inquiries you get.

Under the Hood

A word of caution: These topics might seem too technical to be easily corrected, but they're not. If they don't make sense to you, discuss them with your Web design team, particularly if you're in the process of designing your site -- it's a lot easier to avoid a mistake than to correct one after it happens.

No Redirects. Law firms redesign their Web sites all the time. I would imagine that most of you reading this have gone through at least one major redesign. Nearly every major redesign results in new URLs for the information located on your site. (URL is the acronym for Uniform Resource Locator). For example: your-law-firm.com/article.html becomes your-law-firm.com/newsletters.php?article_id=1234.

You're always going to see a URL change when a site goes from providing static information (the first link) to one that provides dynamic, database driven information (the second link). That is, the pages are coded so that the code pulls the relevant information from a database and generates the page on the fly. In the case above, the link sends the variable "article_id" to the programming, which then locates the correct information based on the variable's value (here "1234"). That's a complicated way of saying, "script, get me article number 1234."

Of course, the new dynamic link works, but what about all the links pointing to the old addresses (the first URL above)? They're still out there -- in search engines (even if only temporarily), on blogs, in directories and in surfers' favorites. What happens when someone clicks on those links? In the worst case, they get the dreaded "404" error (the requested page could not be found). This should never happen! Your designers should make sure that the old links continue to work using redirects -- a programming mechanism by which the old link takes you to the correct, active page.

If you can't redirect to the exact location of the information, you should at least redirect to a page that explains that your site has been redesigned and the information likely has moved. As always, provide a contact name or form on that page so that visitors can make contact if they're looking for information.

Article Archiving. This is pet peeve of mine and, with the advent of database driven Web sites, exits much less today than it did a few years ago. However, some law firms still move articles from a Web directory they see as "current" to one that they name "archive." That is, an article appears on your site here:

http://www.your-law-firm.com/publications/article.html

and after a year (or some other period) moves here:

http://www.your-law-firm.com/publications/archive/article.html

Unless you're actually giving an article the exact same name, there is no good reason to move articles within your directory structure. Like a site redesign, it only serves to harm your search engine position and create inactive URLs.

Unfriendly URLs. Have you ever had to read a URL to someone over the phone? If so, you know what a bear that can be. It's hard enough when the site includes a few variables (like article_id?=653&cat=7834), but try reading this one:

www.big-law-firm.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/newsletters.xtedslies/id_object/avelk2ad5e0-5031-4563-96f4-dad426d9a7cd.cfm

(An actual URL, with the identifying information changed to protect the innocent).

The danger isn't just the lost traffic due to a few phone calls. Many consider URLs to play an important part in search engine ranking. You should make your URLs as search engine friendly as possible by eliminating as much code as possible. At minimum, make sure the URL doesn't contain characters like question marks, percentage signs or spaces -- these can stop a search engine from following that link.

Universal Title Tags. A title tag is the name give you give to a Web page. Generally, it's also the name search engines use for the page. It can be anything you want it to be, but from an SEO perspective, it should accurately describe the content of the page. Too often law firms simply duplicate the title tag for each page that makes up their Web site, for example, Jones and Jones, Attorneys-at-law. That title might make sense for the site's home page, but not be very effective as the page title for your employment law page! Again, ensuring that you have well written title tags will positively affect your search engine traffic -- and it shouldn't take more than a few hours to correct.

JavaScript Pop-Ups. Despite the dread they arouse for most users, pop-ups are still alive and kicking. Many law firm Web sites still use pop-ups to launch their articles in a new window. Often the pop-up is activated using JavaScript (a scripting language that runs on your computer). There are two big downsides to using JavaScipting to activate article links. First, some search engines don't spider JavaScript, meaning that the information on the linked page will not make it to the search engine index. That's bad if you want people to find your articles using search engines. Second, some users turn off JavaScript, making the link inactive. That's probably a small percentage of users (and something that can otherwise be overcome with minor programming), but with no real upside to using JavaScript, why do it at all?

I hope these suggestions help you evaluate the effectiveness of your Web site. One change might not make a difference, but taken together you're sure to see an increase in site traffic, which should lead to more clients!