Blogs are all the rage; actually, they've been all the rage for quite a few years now, but more to the point for our purposes is that they've become quite popular with law firms. There are a couple of reasons why this is the case and why your firm may want to consider jumping on this particular bandwagon. Keep reading to learn a little more about blogs and why it's a good idea for individual lawyers and law firms to have one.

A blog (short for "web log") is a website, usually one built and administrated using what is called a Content Management System, or CMS. These platforms include Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Typepad and several others. There is one important distinction to be made here that you should be aware of if you're interested in starting a blog for your firm, which is that there are blogging services (like Google's Blogger and Wordpress.org) and there is blogging software (like Wordpress but not Wordpress.org, Drupal, etc.). As a law firm, you'll want to give your blog a professional presence by hosting it yourself rather than with a blogging service - that is, unless you actually want your firm's blog to have an address like smithandassociates.blogspot.com.

Blogging software has the advantage of being easy to install, configure and manage once it's set up. However, the things that make blogs really attractive to law firms is that they make it very easy to publish content and their inherently search engine friendly nature. You really don't need to know the first thing about web design to get a blog-based site up and running, much less to post on it. You may need to learn a little bit about the code if you want to make certain kinds of personalization and design touches later on (or hire someone else to do it), but you can get started within a matter of minutes.

As mentioned above, blogs are very search engine friendly as well. This is because they have a number of traits which search engines tend to like which are built into their structure. They are usually updated frequently and generally, have their content well organized into categories. This makes blogs very easy for search engines to index - and while you shouldn't replace your firm's static website with a blog, you should start a blog as well to drive traffic to your existing site. Just add a link to your main website in each post and you'll see your main site quickly rise in the search engine rankings.

There is also the advantage that having a blog makes it a little easier for you to communicate time sensitive news and to engage in conversations with your readers. You can post useful information about your area of practice, recent legal news and the like and discuss them with visitors. It's the kind of personal interaction which the average law firm doesn't usually get to have with the general public; but if your content is good and engages readers, they are likely to spread the word and recommend your firm to their own acquaintances. Word of mouth advertising with the power of the web behind it - if that's not a strong enough argument to build a blog for your firm, it's hard to imagine what would be.