Congratulations! By now you have created your web site and gotten it on the Internet. Your "cyber-office" is open for business. What next? The most informative web site in the world will do you no good if potential clients cannot find it. Imagine opening a new office in the center of a busy city and putting no address or sign over the front door. While you may get the occassional visitor wandering in, it's unlikely that you will get much traffic from people looking for your specific expertise. There are a number of simple (and some not-so-simple) steps you can take to help potential clients find your web site.

Recent studies suggest that 85% of Internet users find the web sites they're looking for by using a Search Engine and entering keywords related to the information they're looking for. If you've ever used a search engine, you know that a simple search might return thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of results, and you also know that nobody ever gets past the first two or three pages of these results before giving up. So being among the top 20 returned results is important. There are literally hundreds of search engines available on the Internet. Some of the more popular ones include:

If you already have a web site, use one of these search engines to see how your site ranks. Click on any of the links above and enter some keywords related to your practice into the search box.

Did your site come up on the first page of results? Yes No Was your site on any of the first three pages of results? Yes No Next, try putting your name (or your firm name) in quotation marks in the search box (e.g. "John Smith"). Did your site come up on the first page of results? Yes No Was your site on any of the first three pages of results? Yes No If you answered "No" to any of these questions, contact Internet For Lawyers to arrange an audit of your web site to determine why and a web site tune-up to improve your rankings.