My office, Mallor | Grodner LLP, is a sponsor of the 2011 Combine. As the systems administrator for a law firm (several actually), I tend to look at everything on a tilt for the legal industry.
I walked away from the Combine with a renewed love of Bloomington and loads of ideas for how to maximize technology in the legal environment.
I was fortunate enough to attend the Tech Cocktail, Ignite Bloomington, and many of Saturday’s workshops including API Hackday.
Tech Cocktail kicked off the events on Thursday night. Lots of elbows rubbed, many beverages drank, many contacts networked.
Tech Cocktail
Dialawg – secure legal collaboration https://www.dialawg.com/default.aspx
Secure your data – Start a Dialawg – Simplify Your Practice
(866) 584-0889 Jeff Goens – twitter.com/dialawg (Pricing available online, free option)
Secure email communication – keep your email address. File sizes up to 1GB each. Compare DOCX files with TextFlow. Personalize presence with FrontDesk. Collect information and view activity in Report Center.
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Sustainability Dashboard
Making sustaining easy and affordable. http://green2sustainable.com/
Want to save on Waste, Energy, Water? Reduce costs – increase profits – engage employees – easy reporting
Katrina Saucier – (207) 416-3815
Sustainability Dashboard Launch Presentation for Greenbuild-2011-final PDF
Sustainability Made Easy & Affordable PDF
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New Story Solar
Solar Leasing – http://newstorysolar.com/
Avery Benjamin – (812) 345-4288
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Form Assembly
Online web forms, surveys, and questionnaires (these guys are looking for a linux sys admin) – http://www3.formassembly.com/
Cedric Savarese – (812) 333-6505
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Saturday Workshop
SEO, in 5 steps
Jesse Laffen – Internet Marketing Professional
C.L.A.S.S. Content, Links, Architecture, Social, Strategy
SEO is improving rank on SERP (search engine results page). Google provides pay options (adwords and paid links). SEO typically deals with “organic searches”.
How does a search engine decide which brand is most deserving to rank one above the other? They use a constantly evolving algorithm to determine RELEVANCE, but preparing your sites for this search is important, and you can go online to find the right resource to help you with this.
Content – from a search perspective. Google can sort / filter searches by reading level. The big G can also determine your sites language level modulation on the fly with a robot. That means pages full of just keywords are penalized for not being relevant. see: Latent Dirichlet allocation
Action:
- Talk about things your company does in plain terms
- Use a copy writer
- Answer “What is [KEYWORD]?”
- Write for visitors NOT bots
Links – Google page rank algorithm simplified (a rather long complex math problem was shown!). The best links are ones that a lot of people want to click. (duh)
Action:
- Ask any industry associates to link to your site
- Make sure all social media profiles link to your site
- AVOID unnatural or worthless links (not related to site or industry)
- AVOID buying links
Architecture – meta tags have nothing to do with ranking anymore. However, they are still an important part of SEO. The meta description will be used to populate the Google search results page. So, add keywords that entice into the meta description (free shipping, legal help, etc). Meta description has a 155 character space that populates the search blurb of the site. Title tags are used to populate the blue clickable links in search results. Title tags are limited to 70 characters and should also be carefully crafted to maximize click through. Google also ranks sites with better page load speeds higher.
Action:
- Use META description and Title tags to help click throughs
- Google load speed tool
- Firebug add-on for Firefox
Social – The big G will index and discovery content quicker when linked through popular social media conversations.
Action:
- Claim social media pages for your company
- Use said social media pages for your company (!)
- Be TOOL agnostic – doesn’t matter if you use Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook. But make sure you move with the industry (probably don’t keep using MySpace in 2012)
- Don’t sell on social – typical twitter and fb user is there to look at cats. Get your brand in their consciousnesses, but don’t force a sell. Increase recognition.
Strategy – google: keywords use analytics and track conversion rates. Track bounce rates, traffic sources. Multi-touch attribution. Google Panda algorithm
Action:
- Focus on user experience, not bots
- Include many, quality links
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API HackDay – my blog writeup of the demos for API HackDay.