Each week, we talk about the various elements that will make your law firm’s web site rank higher in search engines. Google having the highest standards is of course, the search engine we base our law firm web design and law firm search engine optimization practices and policies around. But to truly understand search engine optimization requires an inside look at what Google really wants.

Search Traffic
Google wants more people to use their search engine than any other search engine available. Currently, they get about 70% of search traffic. That means, they have 30% of online users to win over to their cause. All of their webmaster regulations are geared towards making their search engine have the most relevant and highest quality web sites indexed and ranked.

Quality
That brings us to quality. Google wants quality sites with quality content ranked in their search engine. If someone is searching in a search engine and the top ranking web sites are spammy, that lowers the quality of the search engine. Therefore, Google wants to see quality content and a professionally developed web site. Go ahead, do a search on Google and see how many top ranking web sites look like they were made by a “do it yourselfer”. Most high ranking web sites are professionally designed and developed.

One Way Links
Judging the quality of a web site by the number of quality web sites linking into it is referred to (in the SEO community) as the Google democracy. If you look at each quality web site on the internet as a qualified voter, that helps you understand their link philosophy. The most qualified web sites linking to your site, the more “votes” you have, thus a higher ranking.

This simple outline of what Google wants will help you understand the legal marketing strategies used by your search engine optimization company when development a law firm marketing plan.