Over 1 million lawyers and attorneys live and work in America today. Each one relies on publicity and visibility of their law practice in order to gain clients. Professional legal websites are the number one way to advertise a lawfirm and boost business. The legal field trails other industries in the online market, but individual lawyers and legal professionals have the advantage of creating from scratch an online presence with maximum SEO power.

What is SEO? Search Engine Optimization fine-tunes a website to be more visible and relevant to search engines, which translates to being more visible and relevant to potential clients. Google and Yahoo lead the search engine industry. Search engines are constantly evolving the complex technology and algorithms that crawl the internet for keywords, metadata, and links in order to determine which sites should appear at the top of a multi-page list of search results. Optimizing a website for search engines requires analyzing both internal and external factors for improvement.

SEO is especially important and relevant for lawfirms and lawyers because of the high supply of their services. Lawfirm SEO takes into account the firm's particular legal practice areas, location and geographical scope of services, and unique and desirable qualities. Legal professionals can easily increase their SEO power and visibility by keeping up-to-date with useful marketing platforms like blogs, twitter, facebook and other social networking sites. Spreading your name and company across multiple areas of the internet increases traffic to your legal practice and is the best low-cost (or free) way to market your business. The three most important components for improving your legal website's SEO power are the content, structure, and established popularity. Most law practices have operated without a website or SEO but already have the material to amplify these three components. Start-up firms have the advantage of relevance and particularity that can also improve the traffic to their site.

Ultimately SEO is a marketing tool and it is worth the time, money and research to optimize your attorney or lawfirm website for search engines. The legal field must recognize that expensive print ads in phonebooks or on door handles hold no weight against a professional legal website design showcasing all the information that a potential client might want to know. And with the knowledge of SEO driving your lawfirm's website, you can be sure that your legal practice sees results in half the time.