To begin, a small confession.

My job is to spend my days helping lawyers with technology and other aspects of starting and building a law firm. Two of the frequent topics I discuss with lawyers are building websites and the importance of those websites being visible to search engines.

Search engine optimization is impenetrable alchemy to me, like quantum physics or BCS rankings. I don't get it and it hurts my head to think about it too long. My strategy has been to make friends with SEO genius types like Steve Matthews of Stem Legal and pester them for information in return for the promise of free beer at TECHSHOW.

Since I work mostly with lawyers in solo practices and small firms, I am acutely aware that most of them can't afford to pay SEO geniuses like Steve. At least not at the outset. Yet, search engine optimization is no less important to a brand new lawyer than it is to established, ongoing firms. 

That's why I was so excited when I read about WooRank on TechCrunch the other day. WooRank is a new service that lets web publishers perform a quick SEO-friendliness check of their website. For free. All you do is enter your domain name and push a button, and WooRank delivers a concise summary of the major SEO factors and a numerical grade of how your site did.

You can also have the report emailed to you as a pdf via an export button.

Receiving this report isn't going to turn you (or me) into an SEO guru overnight. But what it does is give you a nice, short rundown of some of the key variables that affect the SEO performance of your website. If you take the time to read the report and then go back to your website to fix some of the places highlighted where improvements can be made, it provides a nice table of contents for things to learn.

Sort of a syllabus for SEO 101.

Give it a look-see to determine if it can help you. The price is right and Google is watching.

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.