An e-mail was just sent out to advertisers participating in Yahoo! Search Marketing, formally known as Overture, advising of the proposed class action settlement for bidders advertising during the period of January 1, 1998 in July 31, 2006.

Affected bidders should submit the Assertion of Right to Participate in Additional Claims Review Process form by November 20, 2006, indicating that you intend to file a claim form for Yahoo! advertising credits and give up your ability to sue Yahoo! over the subject matter of this case. The Assertion of Right to Participate form is available for download at
www.checkmatesettlement.com.

The Plaintiff Checkmate Strategic Group, Inc. claims that Yahoo! has breached its contracts with Class Persons and committed unfair business practices including improperly collecting revenue by charging and/or overcharging Class Persons for clicks that were fraudulent, click spam, invalid clicks, etc.

The first thing that I noticed is that the settlement is for a period of time which is continuing right up to and beyond the date of the Court Order, on June 28, 2006, proposing the class-action settlement. Although Yahoo! denies any wrongdoing, I have not read that Yahoo! denies that advertisers were charged for click fraud perpetrated by third parties. Apparently, Yahoo! does believe that click fraud occurred because they are settling the claim and apparently, while settlement payments will end on June 28, 2006, the fraud is continuing.

The fact is that while it may be possible to reduce click fraud, it can never be eliminated. According to a C/net News.com article, dated July 5, 2006, “Online advertisers estimate that 14.6% of the clicks on ads for which they’re billed are fraudulent, costing them about $800 million last year.” The article also states “…companies that sell click fraud detection and prevention services have pegged it at 20 percent to 30 percent.”

Google announced earlier this year that it would pay $90 million in advertising credits and attorneys fees to settle a class-action lawsuit concerning click fraud. A lawsuit to block the settlement has been filed by advertisers who claim Google is paying far too little.

Certainly, click fraud can be costly. I no longer bid on keywords, but I had an account with Overture, now Yahoo! The only time I checked on click activity, I found two fraudulent clicks totaling $70. Who knows how much I actually spent on fraudulent clicks.

Two things that you can do to reduce costly fraudulent clicks are to use a click fraud detection company and to limit your advertising accounts to advertising only on the search engines and not on private websites. While competitors may occasionally click on your advertising appearing on search engines, it is very unlikely that a competitor will continually click every day and that type of behavior will likely be caught by Yahoo! or Google. The biggest problem remains with private websites that display your advertising. Some unscrupulous webmasters are smart enough to get around fraud detection methods.

Your personal injury law practice needs a website as an online brochure, but how do you pick a domain name for your law firm’s website? What exactly is a domain name?

Your website is located by an IP (Internet Protocol) address and looks like this http://67.15.4.94. Instead of typing a series of numbers that are difficult to remember, you can register an easier-to-remember domain name that becomes associated with your IP address. Similar to a 1-800 vanity phone number, some domain names pertain to the subject of the website, while others may simply be the name or an abbreviation of your law firm.

For instance, lawyer-advertising-blog.com is the registered domain name for my blog, which is obviously for lawyer advertising. When you type that domain name, the domain name servers on the Internet know that you’re looking for http://67.15.4.94 and take you there. You can have multiple domain names pointing to the same website.

I also registered LawyerAdvertisingBlog.com (without hyphens) and many other domain names such as AttorneyAdvertisingBlog.com, all of which will forward you to lawyer-advertising-blog.com.

Be sure to include your domain name on your business cards, law office letterhead, and any advertising you may use.

Following are tips to help you pick a domain name:

1) Ownership. When you register a domain name, make sure that you are the registrant of the domain name. Sometimes, website design firms or hosting companies will register their name as the registrant for your domain name. This is an unscrupulous practice and will essentially keep you hostage. If you try to change companies, they will likely not allow you to continue using your domain name.

2) Hyphens. There have been a lot of misunderstandings about whether to use hyphens in a domain name. First of all, the domain name you choose must not have hyphens. The domain name without hyphens is the domain name that everyone will type in the address bar of their Internet browser and the domain name that you should use in print and advertising.

The reason that some people say that you should have a domain name with hyphens is to force the search engines to see keywords in your domain name so that your website does better in search engine results. The bigger search engines can now see the individual words even without hyphens, however, smaller search engines may not and even the bigger ones may see a word differently than you want.

Thus, the importance of hyphenated domain names has diminished, however, if you wish to use a hyphenated domain name, as I did above, you can set the DNS or domain name servers to the hyphenated domain name, but you should also register the unhyphenated domain name which you will forward to the hyphenated domain. The unhyphenated domain name is the one that you will use in print and advertising and is the more important domain name.

3) Extensions. Domain names are available with various extensions, for instance, .com, .net or .org and various new extensions. If it’s really important to you, you can take domain names in any or all of the extensions, however, if you take only one domain name, you need to register your domain name in the .com extension.

The .com extension is similar to 1-800 for telephone numbers. Everyone automatically goes to .com first. Additionally, many people including myself simply type in the domain name without the http://www. or the .com and press “control. enter”. Pressing “control, enter” will enter http://www. and .com for you, automatically taking you to a website with .com.

4) Choosing. Choosing a domain name is a lot like choosing a name for your company or law firm. Ideally, the name should be short, easy to remember, and good for branding.

5) Website domain names and Attorney Ethics. A website name is an address, not a trade name that may be prohibited. Advertise your website name as an address, a means for people to find your website, not a trade name. Like a vanity telephone number, some website domain names can violate legal ethics. Make sure that your website name avoids using certain words which could create a potentially incorrect expectation in the mind of the consumer or violate one of the other ethics rules.

Your domain name should not imply that you are better than another lawyer or that you can accomplish something that may not actually occur. Use of words such as “BEST”, “TOP”, “FOREMOST, “LEADING”, “WIN” and similar words in a website domain name could create a misleading expectation in the mind of the consumer and will violate ethics rules in most states.

For instance, 1-800-LEADING, LeadingLawyer.com, or BestLawyer.com will violate ethics rules by implying that you are the leading lawyer or the best lawyer. The question is by what standards and who’s standards are you the best or leading and in what? 1-800-WIN-XXXX may be good for a casino but will imply that the person who becomes a client of the firm will win money when, in fact, that may not happen and even when it does, it’s an award for just compensation, not a winning. Likewise, WinningLawyer.com or WinningCase.com will also violate ethics.

Laura Hodes in her article for the ABA Journal entitled Vanity Phone Numbers Make Your Firm Less Forgettable, quoted Will Hornsby, an expert on lawyer advertising and staff counsel in the ABA Division for Legal Services, who said that while there is nothing unethical about vanity numbers, “1-800-I-WIN-CASES would be unethical because it is making an unsubstantiated claim, creating unjustified expectations that can be true but still be misleading.”

6) Top Level Domain vs. Sub-Level Domains. A sub-level domain is a second-level domain under a first-level domain name and can look like yourlawfirm.freehosting.com. You must have your own domain name. Do not under any circumstances use a free hosting service, since free hosting services will only give you a sub-level domain. It’s sort of like typing your own letterhead on a manual typewriter.

If you do not already have a domain name for your law firm, you can get one at 8.95domains.com from Dynaserve for only $8.95/year or free when you get hosting starting at $4.95/month. If you do not want to spend the amount needed to use a website design firm, you can choose from 20 beautifully designed law office websites (on 3 pages) at
for around $50 (one-time charge) or you can customize the template for around $300 at TemplateTuning (TemplateMonster & TemplateTuning are both divisions of the same company).

Your law firm needs a website as a professional looking online brochure, but not necessarily to grab your share of clients who may be looking for your lawyer advertising on the internet. The second consideration is whether and how much to spend on Internet advertising which includes keyword bidding, search engine optimization and lawyer directories.

While printed brochures may still have a use for some law firms, their importance has diminished for law firms utilizing direct response advertising where clients will usually retain a lawyer at the initial meeting, such as personal injury, divorce, and individual bankruptcy. Potential clients responding to direct response advertising will usually meet with the lawyer and the personal relationship established, whether positive or negative, will overshadow any impression created by a printed brochure. However, clients who have retained a lawyer may later go on the Internet to view the lawyer’s web site. You don’t want your client’s latest impression to come from a poorly designed web site. With a professionally designed web site, your clients are more likely to refer you to their friends.

Today, people routinely check out a business by looking at it’s web site. Your web site address should appear on your business card, letterhead, printed brochures and giveaways. While you’re printed brochure was thrown in the garbage long ago, your web site is always readily available. Not only will potential clients be unimpressed with a website that looks like a novice built it, but so will competitors, adversaries and in the case of personal injury matters, insurance company claim representatives.

Make sure that you have a competent web site design firm build your web site. For an interesting look at how a web site viewer’s eye looks at a web site see this article about an Eye Tacking Study.

Don’t expect to start a web site and find that people hurt in an accident will go to the computer, look on the Internet, find your law office web site, and call you. It is unlikely that your new web site will show up within the first pages of a search result, because lawyer web sites typically only have a few pages of general information. Search engines are programmed to look for good informative content, not a short blurb about your firm, the cases you handle, and some verdicts you won. Unless you’re willing to spend thousands of hours or thousands of dollars, your web site won’t have much of a chance. I spent thousands of hours on my web site and the bigger it gets, the more work it needs to maintain it.

The number of personal injury clients signed in New York through the HURT911.org web site are approximately 0.5% of the number of clients signed through TV advertising. For the amount of time and expense required to obtain clients through the Internet, your money is better being spent first on traditional means of direct response advertising. For those law firms with a large budget already being spent on traditional media, adding Internet advertising to your media campaign is a good idea.

To get around the problems with search engines, many law firms bid on keywords which will guarantee you first page placement if you bid high enough. web sites appearing in the search results because of keyword bidding will appear in a special section marked sponsored web results or sponsored links. People frequently ignore these results and go directly to the non-paid search results. I recommend keyword bidding only for larger law firms which can afford the cost. There are several reasons. One is that there is a lot of fraud due to competitors clicking on your advertising and there are computer robots that click on links. Fraudulent and robot clicks can cost you many thousands of dollars. See Click Fraud Roils Search Advertisers By Stefanie Olsen at C/Net News. A keyword bidding management company can monitor your clicks and obtain refunds that are due you. My experience is that keyword bidding will result in your paying for fraudulent and robot clicks, salespeople, lawyers, people with general interest, people who already have a lawyer, as well as people hurt in an accident.

Bidding on keywords requires a lot of knowledge if you don’t want to waste your money. I see many large firms bidding on keywords which will not bring them any targeted traffic. I could write several pages on how to bid on keywords and maybe I’ll do that in another article. If you decide to bid on keywords, I recommend that you use a company that specializes in managing your keyword bidding. Make sure that they understand exactly who your clients are, what they are looking for, and what you offer.

Tip: If you list your e-mail address on a web page, it will be picked up by spammer software which scans web sites all over the Internet collecting e-mail addresses. This is guaranteed to deliver substantial quantities of spam to your e-mail
account. My suggestion is that you do not post your e-mail address on your web site. Instead, use an email form like mine, that the sender can fill out and which will be e-mailed to you without exposing your e-mail address.

If you’re considering or already bidding on keywords on the Internet (known as Pay Per Click advertising or PPC), there may be important issues which you have not considered. If you know what you’re doing, bidding on keywords can be quite profitable, however, there are pitfalls which can cause you to literally throw your money in the garbage. This article will cover one of them, click fraud.

Click fraud occurs when a click is intentionally generated by a third-party who knows that a click will be generated without a valid visitor being delivered to your web site and that your account will be debited for the fraudulent visit.

There are several types of perpetrators who generate fraudulent clicks. Fraudulent clicks can be generated by competitors, PPC affiliate web sites, and even PPC companies.

Large PPC companies such as Google and Yahoo, which are the two largest and which cover most of Internet searches, do not engage in click fraud and in fact spend a substantial amount of money to prevent it. For obvious reasons, Google and Yahoo do not disclose how their click fraud software works, however, one example of what they look at is the number of clicks coming from a single IP address. If there is a large number of clicks coming from the same IP address over a short period of time, they will screen the traffic. One reason this is a difficult task, is that some Internet service providers, such as AOL, use shared IP addresses for their users. One way to attempt to limit the amount of click fraud is to avoid PPC companies which depend solely upon affiliate web sites for traffic, since affiliate traffic is less reliable. PPC companies such as Google and Yahoo receive a substantial amount of traffic directly to their web site, while some PPC companies receive all or most of their traffic from affiliate web sites.

Some of the smaller, usually unheard of, PPC companies will even itself engage in fraud, billing you for fraudulent clicks. I myself was once taken in by a company, which was unknown to me, and which offered thousands of free clicks if I opened an account. The company fraudulently claimed that the thousands of free clicks were used up within hours. I immediately closed the account and disputed the billing with my credit card company.

While Google would not engage in click fraud, they allow web sites to become affiliates. This means that anyone with a web site can display Google advertising and share, with Google, the revenue generated from people clicking on the advertising. Although Google has software to detect an unusual number of clicks from the same IP address, an affiliate could potentially click on the advertising to generate income. Criminals usually come up first with a new way to commit a crime, while those who try to catch the criminals are usually just behind.

Competitors can easily find your advertising, simply by searching for keywords that they are bidding on. Your competitor may find that you are bidding $23 to be in the first position, while your competitor is in second position. Your competitor could potentially click on your advertising from several different computers every day in an effort to increase your advertising costs to a point where you might decide that it is not worth it, lower your bid, thus dropping in position leaving your competitor in position number one.

There are several ways that clicks are fraudulently generated. Software exists that automatically clicks on PPC ads to generate fraudulent clicks. In this instance, no one lands on your web site, but a click is generated for which you are charged. This type of fraud can result in a substantial amount of fraud and exists solely for the intention of generating a fraudulent profit for a web site which is an affiliate of a PPC company or even the PPC company itself.

A competing company may perform searches for keywords it is bidding on and manually click on its competitors in an effort to increase their advertising costs thus encouraging them to lower their bids. A web site owner who is an affiliate of a PPC company could manually click on advertising links, which appear on the affiliates web site, from several different computers with the intent of generating profits for themselves.

Equally complicated, is choosing which keywords to bid on. Knowledge of your practice and your clients is very important in determining which keywords to bid on. This will be covered in another article. As usual, when something as complicated and can result in substantial cost, there are usually companies available to help you out. Such companies will make sure that you bid only on keywords that bring you the traffic you’re looking for and can monitor your PPC campaign for effectiveness and fraud. One such company which has a very impressive client list and specializes in managing keyword bidding and search engine optimization for lawyers and doctors is EinsteinLaw.

Your law firm needs a website, but how do you pick a domain name for your web site? What exactly is a domain name?

Your web site address is also known as an IP (Internet Protocol) address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) and looks like this http://67.15.4.94. Instead of typing a series of numbers which are difficult to remember, you can register an easier to remember domain name which becomes associated with your IP address. For instance, lawyer-advertising-blog.com is the registered domain name for my new blog, which is about lawyer advertising. When you type that domain name, the domain name servers on the Internet know that you’re looking for http://67.15.4.94. You can register multiple domain names, all pointing to the same web site. I registered LawyerAdvertisingBlog.com, which, when you type that into an Internet browser address bar, will forward to lawyer-advertising-blog.com.

Your domain name, should appear on your business cards, law office letterhead, and any advertising you may use. When choosing a domain name, follow the following guidelines:

1) Ownership. When you register a domain name, make sure that you are the registrant of the domain name. Frequently, web site design firms will register the domain name for you and will register it in their name rather than in your name.

2) Hyphens. There have been a lot of misunderstandings about whether to use hyphens in a domain name. First of all, the domain name you advertise must not have hyphens. The domain name without hyphens is the domain name that everyone will type in the address bar of their Internet browser and the domain name that you should use in print and advertising. The reason that some people say that you should have a domain name with hyphens is to force the search engines to see keywords in your domain name so that your web site does better in search engine results. The bigger search engines can now see the individual words even without hyphens, however, smaller search engines may not and even the bigger ones may see a word differently than you want the search engine to. Thus, the importance of hyphenated domain names has diminished, however, if you wish to use a hyphenated domain name, as I did above, you can set the DNS or domain name servers to the hyphenated domain name, but you should also register the unhyphenated domain name which you will forward to the hyphenated domain. As previously stated, the unhyphenated domain name is the one that you will use in print and advertising and is the more important domain name.

3) Extensions. Domain names are available with various extensions, for instance, .com, .net or .org and various new extensions. If it’s really important to you, you can take domain names in any or all of the extensions, however, if you take only one domain name, you need to register your domain name in the .com extension. The .com extension is to domain names as 1-800 is to toll-free telephone numbers. Virtually everyone will assume that your domain name is a .com. Additionally, many people will simply type your domain name without the extension or the http://www. and then press control/enter. If you didn’t know that you can do that, try typing lawyeradvertisingblog in the address bar of your browser and then press control/enter.

4) Choosing. Choosing a domain name is a lot like choosing a name for your company or law firm. Ideally the name should be short, easy to spell, easy to remember, and good for branding.

5) Web site domain names and Attorney Ethics. A website name is an address, not a trade name which is prohibited. Advertise your web site name as an address, a means for people to find your web site, not a trade name. Lawyer advertising using words that describe the lawyer or the lawyer’s services in boastful terms which are not quantifiable, provable, or create an expectation of an outcome which cannot be guaranteed, are unethical. Web site domain names and vanity telephone numbers using these words can violate legal ethics. Make sure that your web site name avoids use of certain words which could create a potentially incorrect expectation in the mind of the consumer or violate one of the other ethics rules. Both web site names and vanity telephone numbers should not imply that you are better than another lawyer or that you can accomplish something for the audience that may not actually occur. Use of words such as “BEST”, “TOP”, “FOREMOST, “LEADING”, “WIN” and similar words in a vanity telephone number or web site domain name could create a misleading expectation in the mind of the consumer and will violate ethics rules in most states. For instance, 1-800-LEADING, LeadingLawyer.com or BestLawyer.com will violate ethics rules by implying that you are the leading lawyer or best lawyer. The question is by who’s standards are you the best and leading in what? 1-800-WIN-XXXX will imply that the person who becomes a client of the firm will win money when, in fact, that may not happen and even when it does, it’s an award for just compensation, not a winning. Likewise, WinningLawyer.com or WinningCase.com will also violate ethics. Laura Hodes in her article for the ABA Journal entitled Vanity Phone Numbers Make Your Firm Less Forgettable, quoted Will Hornsby, an expert on lawyer advertising and staff counsel in the ABA Division for Legal Services, who said that while there is nothing unethical about vanity numbers, “1-800-I-WIN-CASES would be unethical because it is making an unsubstantiated claim, creating unjustified expectations that can be true but still be misleading.”.

6) Top Level Domain vs. Sub-Level Domains. You must have your own domain name. Do not under any circumstances use a free hosting service, since your domain name will not appear in a browser address bar (with a free hosting service it will look like yourlawfirm.freehosting.com). It’s sort of like typing your own letterhead on a manual typewriter.