Law firm SEO using the Yoast SEO plugin

Yoast for Law Firms

I have a few essential WordPress plugins that I use such as the Yoast SEO plugin. It has an amazing amount of features that can help your law firm’s website, such as:

  • Manage title and description tags
  • Integrate social media
  • Adjust site permalinks
  • Easily control robots.txt
  • Easily control .htaccess
  • Edit your RSS feed
  • Handle canonical issues via Place rel=”canonical”

Strategically implementing some of these features can have a very positive affect on your ability to get your WordPress site and or blog to rank.

You can use the plugin to optimize your pages content but I do that using a combination of other tools like SeoMoz. As always make sure not to over optimize, especially after Google Panda and Penguin. We live in a time where you need to use discretion when optimizing and getting links rather than jam in keywords and get links any way you can. The days of easy seo are long gone which is why having tools to help you is essential.

One premium addon is available for sale that helps with Video SEO. The News SEO addon is free and a Local SEO module will be available soon according to the Yoast website.

Who or What is Yoast?

The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress was developed by Joost De Valk, and he created what is now considered to be the best SEO WordPress plugin. His plugin is designed to improve what is called the on-page SEO of your law firm website.

While there are many plugins out there you have to be very careful installing too many because they can be a way for hackers to break into your site. Make sure that whatever plugins you use come from trusted sources that are respected by the SEO community.

3 Essentials of the Yoast Plugin for Attorney Websites

  1. Titles & Meta Tag adjustments – Title tags are an essential part of optimization as they let the search engines know what a page is about and descriptions give you more control over what the user sees in the serps so don’t miss out on this great seo opportunity. There are a couple title & meta features using the Yoast plugin that are useful to any law firm website and will increase traffic and greatly help SEO. You can use the WordPress SEO meta box to tweak your post title and meta description and then use the handy snippet preview function to see what it will look like to the user in the search engine results pages (serps). Titles and meta descriptions, since they can be seen in the serps, are a great place to include both keywords to make it relevant (The title is key for this, both for seo but also to make the result obviously relevant to what the user searched for) and some kind of value proposition in the description, to increase click through rates.
  2. Permalinks – In the permalinks section of the Yoast SEO plugin there’s one feature that’s awesome and that is removing /category/ from the URL string. You must make sure to do a server side 301 redirect after though, from your /category/ to just /.
  3. Social Media Optimization – There are two things that I use in the social section, which are integrating Facebook and Twitter easily with your blog. Once you commit to blogging, why not get the extra mileage out of sharing each post automatically on Facebook and Twitter? That way you will have at least some activity on those channels as long as you are active blogging.

Joost de Valk created a quality plugin that I use for my title tags, social media integration, and permalinks at the very least. The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress is highly recommended to make various optimization tasks easier for your law firm.

What other plugins have you had success with and how you like the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress?

Peregrino Will Reign via photopin cc

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