Website URL Submission: Lawyers Should Listen To This

Attorneys today are all looking for a way to get an edge on their competitors. With over 85 percent of legal clients doing online research before even having an initial consultation with an attorney, online marketing techniques are becoming the single most vital part of lawyer marketing strategy. One part of your online marketing that you should never neglect is website URL submission. Free website URL submission is one of the easiest ways to get your website out there in front of people, and this guide will teach you how to do it.

Why Your Law Firm Site Needs Website URL Submission

When you make your website “live” by publishing it, you may be surprised to learn that you can't find it using Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine—at least, not right away. These websites all use programs that “crawl” the web through existing links, trying to find new links through connections made by the old ones. But maybe you don't want to wait for a web crawler to find your website—that's where website URL submission comes in.

Free website URL submission is slightly different on every website, but once you've submitted, your website will become part of a search engine's index. This means that you'll actually be able to find yourself in search results—and, more importantly, after your website URL submission, other people will be able to find you.

Keep in mind that the process isn't instantaneous, and that it will take some time for your free website URL submission to start showing up in actual searches. When you do your website URL submission to Google or Bing, for example, it can actually take four to six weeks to see your initial rise in rankings for your site's keywords. While it's possible for this to happen more quickly—say, within two or three days—it's generally better to underpromise and overdeliver.

Finding Places for Free Website URL Submission

The best places to start your website URL submission spree are search engines. If you want to, you can start to build a list of search engines so that you can get both obscure and common ones on your list of places to do a free website URL submission. However, keep in mind that over 85 percent of search traffic comes from search algorithms made by just two websites: Bing (owned by Microsoft and responsible for about 20 percent of search traffic due to delivering results for both bing.com and yahoo.com) and Google.

By submitting to Bing and to Google, you'll be making sure that your free website URL submission reaches the most people possible. If you only have minutes to do all of your website URL submission, those sites should be your first stops. However, keep in mind that 15 percent of traffic is nothing to sneeze at—think of what a big deal it would be to see a 15 percent boost to your overall revenue numbers! Doing free website URL submission to more obscure search engines, like Ask, can be very useful if you want to capitalize on the searches other people (like your competitors) aren't paying attention to.

You can also do website URL submission on directory sites. You can use either general web directories, or more specific directory listings that only list attorney websites. Both are good choices, and there's no reason not to diversify where you do your free website URL submission.

Avoid Placing Your Website URL Submission in These Places

Diversifying your free website URL submission locations doesn't mean that you should just insert yourself into every directory, though. Some directories are completely without rules, and allow just about anyone to put their website in—even if it doesn't meet basic quality guidelines. These directories generally aren't a good place to do website URL submission.

Why? Because Google actually keeps track of these unselective directories and devalues links coming from them. This means that even though your link from a directory will still potentially give you some direct traffic, it's very unlikely that you will actually get any real authority, or link juice, that helps you move higher in search rankings.

Preparing to Make Your Free Website URL Submission

There are some things that you should do before you do any website URL submission at all. For example, you may want to work on your website's design and content first. A website with poor web design may not meet Google's quality requirements for an acceptable free website URL submission. You should make sure that it can display on several different browsers, including mobile browsers (or you can have an automatic redirect to a mobile site for mobile users).

You should also make sure that your hosting has relatively high speed. Low speed can actually hamper your rankings, and when you do your website URL submission, Google will check out the speed your pages are delivered at. You may want to run a test on your website before your free website URL submission to verify that page load times are low enough to avoid penalties from search engines.

Automating Website URL Submission with Software

If you don't want to do free website URL submission on just one website at a time, there is software that can help you to get it done more efficiently. Website URL submission software makes it easy to, with a single click, send your website to many different search engines and directories. You'll just need to fill your information in once, and then it will be saved and given in the proper format to as many different websites as you like.

Once you've gotten automated free website URL submission software, you should also make sure that your sites include a site index. This will greatly increase the efficiency with which search engines will index your various web pages, and will make it much easier for people who are looking at your website to find the page they're looking for if they become lost or confused.