Your lawfirm website carries important information that people want to know about. While your law practice is trying to increase business and revenue, potential clients are trying to find legal help. Established clients may have a link to your website from a business card or invoice, but those people who are the most desperate, those who likely already have a case that needs to be handled, will look to their most convenient resource: the almighty search engine. What are companies like Google doing to find your legal website? Say an average person were in need of a DUI Lawyer in Seattle, WA. The keywords that that person enters into the search engine narrow down all the websites on the internet to just those with any mention of "DUI Lawyer Seattle, WA." How does the search engine differentiate between an e-commerce site selling an airport novel concerning those phrases and an actual legal professional? More importantly, how can your legal website rise to the top of those pages and pages of results?

Once your legal website is published to the internet, it is added to the vast database of law-related and un-related sites through which search engines like Yahoo!, Google, and MSN crawl. The programs that systematically analyze websites are called "bots" or "spiders" and they jump from one site to another via hyperlinks. This explains the importance of external links--unrelated websites linking to yours--to boost SEO rankings. "Bots" and "spiders" are programmed with complex codes to analyze the entire html document for the visible and invisible data comprising your legal website. The information that the "bots" find can help or hurt the SEO ranking of your lawfirm's website, but it can also be neutral.

"Bots" index all of the information on all of the websites they analyze into an enormous database that is carefully organized. Every time a search is performed, the search engine must retrieve all of the websites with terms that match the search from billions of sites in the database. The "bots" are always working and frequently check up on previously analyzed sites to add more and more information to the database. During that second or two that a site like Google takes to return pages of results for a query, those billion sites are accessed, processed, and neatly presented in a list form on the computer screen.

The list, as you may already well know, takes on a particular order, depending on what the "bots" have determined to be the most and least relevant to the search terms or phrase entered in the query. The more frequently that, say, the term "divorce lawyer" is mentioned, the more the search engine will index that website as a legal website for a divorce lawyer. The less frequently it is mentioned the less relevant, as in a Chinese restaurant's website that shares a parking lot with a divorce lawyer and states it twice on its website. A search for "divorce lawyer Raleigh, NC" will return all sites mentioning "divorce", "lawyer", and "Raleigh, NC". To leave the quotes around the entire phrase will return only results with that exact phrase, narrowing the search and returning less irrelevant results.

These functions are only a scratch on the surface of the complex system of SEO and search engine bots. Lawfirm SEO Marketing recommends that you read more on this site to learn how to increase the traffic and success of your legal website.