Suppose you are the best family law attorney on earth. Suppose you are interested in spreading the word about your expertise and the superior quality of your work. Suppose you are not totally satisfied with the results you have been getting from the thousands of dollars you have been spending on that “yellow” book. Suppose you decide to take the plunge and enter the internet age. So, you build a beautiful web site! Now what? Here are some tips to make your site pay off.

Chances are if you do nothing more than build your site, you - and your relatives and friends - will be its most frequent visitors. Although you might get an occasional inquiry, and even an occasional client, you will need to achieve three goals to make your site a true success: 1) bring lots of visitors to the site, 2) get them to stay for awhile and 3) give them something that makes them come back on a regular basis, so that they eventually become familiar and comfortable with and confident in you.

The second and third goals are the easiest to achieve. Your site must be friendly and easy to use and must provide valuable and fresh content. Otherwise, potential clients will most likely view your site as nothing more than a commodity on a large and ever-expanding world wide web.

Putting your web and e-mail addresses on business cards, letterhead, brochures and, yes, even in those yellow page ads, will help publicize your site. The most effective means, however, are on-line methods, especially search engines and links from other sites.

Over 85% of internet users use search engines to find sites. Intuitively, the higher a particular site ranks in a particular search, the more likely a potential visitor will see it. While it is assumed that the most relevant sites are ranked the highest, this is not always the case. Each search engine uses its own (secret) algorithm to determine rankings and most search engines change their algorithms on a regular basis. An increasing trend is to have paid listings. This affects the presumed objectivity of these searches, i.e. sites with the “deepest pockets” tend to have the highest rankings.

You can purchase software to facilitate your rankings, but it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to try to do this yourself. “Search engine positioning” has become big business. There are tens of thousands of companies currently offering this service, often at a cost of hundreds or thousands of dollars a month.

Relying too heavily on search engine positioning also presents other problems. For example, although you may be looking for clients in New York City, visitors will largely come from Los Angeles, London and elsewhere. Also, your content may not match a potential visitor’s inquiry. For example, what if a potential visitor is looking for information on “child custody” and you only have information on “child support.” While you might be able to trick a search engine to point to your site, if you have no information about child custody on it (even though you might actually be a child custody expert), a visitor will quickly leave and an opportunity to introduce yourself to a potential client will be lost.

Interestingly, although over 85% of internet users use search engines to find sites, only 7% of site visits occur through search engines. The reason for this apparent anomaly is that internet users may use search engines to “find” sites, but they don’t use search engines to go back to sites they have already found.

The above discussion is the primary rationale for the organization and development of Divorce Interactive. As discussed, one of the most frequently used methods by which visitors find sites is through links from other sites. Divorce Interactive is just such a link. It is rich in relevant content. It has numerous features that encourage visitors to stay for long periods of time and to keep coming back. Its content is geographically oriented and organized to point visitors toward Members whose offices are in their vicinity. Because membership dues are pooled, Members of the Divorce Interactive community can easily afford search engine positioning strategies and other off- and on-line marketing methods.