They call it the World Wide Net, so why just concentrate your firms search engine submissions on U.S. search engines?

The main reason to get your real estate website listed on the foreign websites is: Good foreign search engine rankings will generate new clients!

This is especially true if your firm is located in a major metropolitan area. Here is some of the actual business created directly from our top foreign search engine rankings: Potential new immigrants, business persons considering setting up a business office, foreign nationals considering immigration, and a foreign couple whose son got arrested in Orange County and they needed to contact a local Orange County attorney to help.

Why heed my advice? Well, lets add some real world credibility to back-up my advice. So how does our own main legal website rank on foreign search engines? We have many number one page placements. Below are just a few of our PAGE ONE foreign search engine rankings for the very competitive phrase Orange county attorneys on our Los Angeles-Orange County legal website;

http://www.la-orange-county-lawyers-attorney-directory.com

AOL-UK - Sympatico (Canada MSN-UK MSN-France MSN Germany Google Mexico - Google UK - Google Germany - Google Japan

Check today to see if your website is listed on the top foreign search engines. A good starting point is to check the engines hyper-linked above. Perhaps the best way to obtain high foreign search engine standings is to first achieve top ranking on the major US search engines.

Proper submission to the major directories is critical. One of the most significant changes in search engine marketing in recent years has been the rise in popularity of human-reviewed directories and catalogs like LookSmart, Yahoo, and Open Directory. You can recognize directory listings since they are often called "Web Site" results rather than "Web Page" results. Once you submit to a directory, it's difficult to go back and correct mistakes later. Some of them like Yahoo and LookSmart charge you for the privilege of simply being reviewed for inclusion. Therefore, it's of utmost importance to get it right the first time.

Get listed with the human-powered directories of Yahoo, LookSmart and the Open Directory. If this is all you do, you'll get plenty of traffic. Both get lots of visitors or "power" other sites that get plenty of visitors. In addition, getting listed with them helps crawler-based search engines locate your site and perhaps help it rank better, because of the link importance these sites provide to you.

Check log files for user country location and most often used keywords in search engine search. This may demonstrate the need to offer the site in another language (or to provide a link to Alta Vista's Babelfish) if there are a lot of hits from another country. Knowing the keywords used to arrive at the site helps to decide on variations and changes to the site theme.

Just in case you are wondering if it's all worth your time, Pew Internet & American Life Project says: "As vehicles for finding information, search engines are extremely popular among both men and women. About 90% of men and women who go online use search engines, and about 40% use them on a typical day. Men and women generally use the same kinds of search strategies, using search engines most commonly, but also starting searches on familiar, proprietary websites or following recommended links. Although men and women say equally that they find the information online that they are looking for, men are a lot more confident in themselves as searchers."

Also, search engine rankings are a vital component of an Internet presence: More than three quarters of hits on Internet home pages are directed there via a search engine; and half of consumers research online prior to making purchases.

Before a quest for higher rankings, you should obtain a comprehensive report on your sites current page one through page three search standings. You need a base-line or starting point to see if your efforts are effective. To enhance your reports usefulness, I would suggest that you run the same report for your biggest legal competitor. This report will then give you not only a benchmark but a set of goals to strive for.

The second important report you should run is a link popularity report. Good quality incoming links are vital to top search engine ranking. Here again it is imperative to run this report against your local competitors.

Investing in improving your law firms search engines standings could become the most cost effective career investment you make.

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