What happens when you google your name? What shows up?

For a lot of lawyers, the answer to that question is that a random series of links appears in the top of the search results: 10k race times and court dockets, school boards and bar association committees. It's not a disaster, but it also isn't very helpful if you are trying to build a law practice. It's inescapable: a hugely significant portion of your online identity depends on what search results appear when someone types your name in Google.

A lot of search engine optimization experts, like Steve Matthews of Stem Legal, get paid big bucks to help lawyers and law firms effectively manage their visibility in Google searches. But what do you do if you don't have the financial bandwidth to pay a search engine expert?

Ground zero for a lawyer on search engine visibility is to have a professional presence highly visible when her name is searched in Google, and that presence really needs to be at or near the top of the results. If you're not on the first page of results, you may as well be invisible. Sure it would be nice if your firm is visible when potential clients search on terms that involve your geography and practice area (such as Raleigh NC real estate attorney). After all, that's how most of us use Google -- we define the generic thing we are looking for and then sort through the possibilities.

For a lot of lawyers whose practices are sustained largely through referrals, though, it is less critical to be highly visible in a search engine search. Once a referral has been given your name he is less likely to care whether you show up in a search for "Raleigh NC real estate attorney" and more likely to Google search you by name. It's during those searches that it is helpful to have a highly visible search result of something you would like potential clients to see.

There are a lot of different ways to make that happen, but one free and easy ones is to maintain well curated profiles on LinkedIn and Google profiles.

LinkedIn, the professionally-oriented social networking community, makes it free and easy to create and maintain a profile. Once you create a profile, it automatically creates a public profile that is visible in search engines even to people who do not have LinkedIn accounts. The public profile (for an example, here is mine) is a stripped down version of your more robust profile that other LinkedIn users can see. It features your basic headline, current job, recent work history and education.

You can, of course, choose how much of this information you put into LinkedIn in the first place. So if you don't want your potential clients to know you spent your summers during law school as a rodeo clown, you can just leave that out. The public profile is basically a bare bones online resume.

Is this as good a solution as having a great professional website? No.

Does it solve all of your online marketing problems? No.

Is it better than having a random and desultory set of facts about you appear when your name is searched? Yes.

Is the price right? Definitely.

Gotta go Google search my name.

LinkedIn has reached the tipping point for lawyers.

More and more lawyers sign up for it every day and recognize that it is low hanging fruit in the world of online networking. It's free, easy to use and safely professional in demeanor. Like most things in life, though, the people who get the most out of the service are the ones who put the most in.

In that vein, here are 3 easy ways to get more out of LinkedIn:

1. Check the LinkedIn inbox regularly.

One of my chief complaints about LinkedIn is that the notifications from the inbox are not as dependable as they ought to be. I have received several messages in my LinkedIn inbox that were never delivered to my email inbox. I verified that they were not caught in my overactive spam filter, either. These emails just did not come through, much to my later embarrassment.

I've learned over time that I just need to double check the LinkedIn inbox manually once or twice a week. It's not a big problem, and is probably beneficial as it keeps me more active in the site, but it is another inbox I've had to incorporate into my organizational system.

2. Send your Wordpress blog posts to your LinkedIn profile.

LinkedIn has incorporated some cool applications to help users get more functionality out of the site, and one of the easiest is to send your blog posts to your profile via the Wordpress application. You spend time writing the content and you spend more time maintaining your network on LinkedIn, why not put the two together? I have recently switched blogging platforms from Wordpress to Squarespace, so I have to (unfortunately) disable this application for myself. If you are blogging on Wordpress, though, this is a winner.

It probably goes without saying that you should only add your professional blog to your LinkedIn profile. If you maintain a personal blog where you rant about religion, politics, your boss and the world in general, you might just want to keep that one to yourself.

3. Use the RSS feed attached for network updates

The home page of your LinkedIn account has a rolling update of what your contacts have been up to. It says who has added contacts, who has made a recommendation, and other adjustments your contacts have made to their LinkedIn profiles. There is, at the top of this screen, an RSS button.

I'm an avid RSS fan and I am far more likely to read the items that end up in my RSS reader than I am to read the home page of LinkedIn. Having all of the updates go to my reader allows me to bypass the homepage when I am in LinkedIn and know that I can quickly scan all of the updates in my RSS reader at my convenience. I normally catch one or two updates that are useful each month, so the benefit significantly outweighs the 10 to 15 minutes a month I spend reviewing that feed.