Before getting into the details of this site’s issues, I’d like to point out to those reading this that every problem presented here has it’s solution presented here as well.
Let’s start with the good news:
Now here comes the bad news…
If there was ever any doubt that Page Rank doesn’t effect search results directly this site proves it. I took each one of the practice areas exactly as it is listed in the menu and in the bold heading of the target page, added the words “tampa” and “attorney”, to help focus the search and checked the Google search results through the first 100 listings. The results are below.
Not in list : Alternative Dispute Resolution
Not in list : Antitrust and Trade Regulation
Not in list : Appellate
Position 99 : Business Reorganization and Bankruptcy
Not in list : Business Transactions
Not in list : Commercial Litigation
Position 32 : Construction Law & Government Contracting
Not in list : Eminent Domain and Condemnation
Not in list : Employment
Not in list : Environmental
Position 54 : ERISA, Employee Benefits and Compensation
Not in list : Expert Witness
Not in list : Health Care
Not in list : Marital and Family
Not in list : Personal Injury
Not in list : Real Estate and Lending Transactions
Not in list : Securities
Not in list : Technology, E-Commerce & Intellectual Property
Position 16 : Wealth Planning & Preservation
It doesn’t take a lot of research to figure out why Google doesn’t like Trenam’s site… 90% of this problem is due to extremely poor on page techniques:
- Every page on the entire site has the exact same meta title tag “Trenam Kemker”. The solution: The title tag on each page must be unique and relevant to the content of the page.
- There are NO META DESCRIPTIONS on any of the pages. The Solution: Think of a meta description as a two sentence summary of the page contents, and put descriptions on the pages.
- There are NO META KEYWORDS on any of the pages. OK.. it’s generally accepted as fact that meta keywords have almost zero value these days, but… they still make a great place to put misspellings (ie: trenem, trennam, kemper) because it’s the only place on a page where you can legitimately type something that the user can’t see without getting busted for “hiding” stuff. Use your webmaster tools account to identify search terms that are actually mispellings of you name and put them in the keyword list.
- There are NO H1 TAGS ON ANY OF THE PAGES. Solution: put h1 tags around the header lines of the pages, it’s that simple.
- IMPORTANT FIX…
You own at least one other domain name (TrenamKemker.com) which is pointing to the same content but which is not being forwarded in the correct manner. The multi-domain name game is tricky and can benefit you if done correctly (take a look at the Bush, Ross site to see how it’s done) but it can bite you in the back side if done incorrectly. All of your “spare” domain names need to be 301 forwarded to your primary domain without masks or frames. Get #1 through #5 done and you’ll be in the top 50 for every one of those practice areas and front page for some of them. - Code Bloat: All of the java script on the site is directly included into each page. Java script is cool and you can do lots of fun stuff with it, but when it’s included directly into the page it causes a phenomenon called code bloat. Basically, the search engine has to read through 50 or 100 lines of Java script (which it can’t understand) to get to the one or two lines of actual content on the page. Sometimes the robot get’s confused, or bored and just gives up and moves on to index a different page. The Solution is pretty easyjust move the java script into it’s own file and reference it with an “src=” tag instead of an include tag. Take a look at the source on the Fowler, White site to see how to get tons of java toys running without confusing the search engine.
- Internal linking strategy. Unfortunately, your cool drop down menus are invisible to the search engines. Yes, that’s what I said… INVISIBLE.. you’re making it unnecessarily hard for the robot to find your pages. Notice that when you mouse over one of your upper menu items, you can see the destination page URL in the lower browser window? Now scroll down that menu and notice that you no don’t see any URLs associated with those menu choices. Your menus are written in Java Script and the robots don’t understand Java Script. You can accomplish the exact same effect using a combination of Java Script and HTML and have the destination links visible in the HTML so that the robot can read them. SOLUTION: up to this point everything that has been suggested can be fixed without having to change any programming on your site, however fixing this correctly requires changing the java script so… your next best option is simply to go around the problem and help the robot find your pages, you do this two ways: 1.) internal links within the text of your pages that point to other pages on your site: example… John Smith’s bio page could contain a links to the areas of law that John practices, that way if the robot finds John’s page, it also finds the area pages. 2.) submit a site map to Google via webmaster tools. see below.
- Data, data, who’s got the data? There are no analytics installed on this site, nor does there appear to be even the basic webmaster tools (but I can’t be sure about that). So any reports that you may be receiving about what’s happening on your web site are probably coming from the server logs. The entire world uses Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, both are free products and they install without having to change anything on the site except add about 5 lines of Java Script to the very end of the page. Without them you’re flying blind, with them you know what pages are getting indexed, what pages are being seen, what people are searching for when they find you, what pages are causing the robots problems, and tons more. Server logs are great for finding out who hacked into your site, but not for much else. You can’t get to the top of the index if your pages aren’t in the index.
- Alt tags on the pictures. Once again, basic SEO stuff, but important. Robots are blind. They read text (not Java Script) and they have no idea what so ever what a picture is about unless you tell them. John Smith’s picture should have an alt tag on it that says… you guessed it… “John Smith” or better yet.. “Attorney John Smith Civil Litigator”
This is basic, by the book, everybody knows it, SEO stuff. Fix 1 through 4 and you’ll at least get on the list. While you’re fixing it, see if you can find out who broke it. This site USED TO HAVE page titles and description tags, you can still see the old pages in the Google Site: index. It also USED TO HAVEseo friendly URLs. ie: it used to say: www.Trenem.com/profile/Allan-B-Davis now it says: www.trenam.com/profiles_listall.asp?profileID=22 Friendly URLs aren’t a super big deal, but they help.
There you go… I found your hack and gave you the top 10 hit list.. total cost to you $0.00. Do all to ten fixes all and you’ll own “Tampa Attorney __fill_in_the_blank__” without having to write a single line of code. Of course all of this is based on the assumption that you’d like to be found by something other than just your name… believe it or not some attorneys don’t care at all about being found in the search engines.
One more note: kind of off topic but while I was deep diving I found a really odd refrence on the privacy page of another firm’s site (MDBfirm.com) here’s the quote:
”…The foregoing authorization does not extend to any logo, graphic, sound or image, to the design or layout of the trenam.com website, or to any information or content owned by any third party….”
What does that mean? Well… looks to me like someone copied your privacy page to make their privacy page but didn’t remove all the original references… Not a very good practice when talking about copyrights 