Why are you number 25 and they are number 1 when someone types”Your City Divorce Lawyer” in the Google search box?

There could be lots of reasons including that they are spending anywhere from $100 to $15,000 per month to have an expert manage search engine optimization (SEO) for their site.

But more likely, given the low level of energy expended on marketing by many family law practitioners, is that you’re making some minor mistakes that they aren’t making.

For instance, it’s important to use “Your City Divorce Lawyer” in the title tag for your site. The title tag is usually visible when you bookmark a site (it’s what you see when you save the bookmark). You can also select “page source” in your browser menu and see the HTML code for your site (and their site). You’ll literally see the <title> tag and can see the words used in the title. The title is everything between <title> and </title>.

Lots of attorneys use their firm name in the title. That doesn’t really help you. Some use the term “family law.” That’s not particularly helpful either since most searchers don’t know that term.

Fixing your title should take a few seconds if you have the capability to edit your site. If you don’t, you should be able to shoot a quick email to your web person and have them do it.

Another thing that will cause a difference in your rankings is the number of links from other sites back to your site and theirs.

You can find out who’s linking to any site by visiting Yahoo Site Explorer. Type in the site name in the box at the top. Run the search and then click on “inlinks” and “except from this domain.”  You’ll see who’s linking back to the site.

The more links you have the better. Especially if they are from reputable family law sites with good amounts of traffic.

If your completion has more links than you it’s time to get more links. Use their list as a guide for places to get new links. It’s time to get in touch with the owners of those websites linking back to your customers. You many find lots of local sites that offer links ot local businesses. Often you merely need to request a link in order to get listed.

There a a multitude of tricks for improving your listings and they become especially important if your competition is working hard on SEO. Start making a few changes and see what happens, you’ll usually see a change in a couple of weeks. If you don’t see the changes you’d like then it might be worth bringing on an SEO expert to help. But, fixing a few simple mistakes might be all you need.