In the good old days, online was the place where David could beat Goliath. It was the forum where success was decided not just by market cap or the size of your advertising budget, but by nimble strategies and just plain chutzpah. It was the place where the little guy could triumph and slam one in the face of the corporate behemoths. But those days are over, right? Not quite, at least not in the legal field.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: "Are you nuts? Why would I ever want to run a paid search campaign on my branded keywords? I'm already ranked well organically." Sound familiar? I've lost count of the number of times we've fielded a question like this from our clients. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable concern. After all, you've already optimized your site and you're ranking well and getting a bunch of traffic from searches that include your brand name. Why would you turn around and pay the search engines for that traffic? Speaking of …

The people at the major search engines like to talk a lot about the separation of church and state. They use the historical reference to explain the unbreachable divide between their organic listings and the sponsored ones, and the departments that govern each. It represents some ethical buffer zone between the two sides of search.

If you've recently optimized your Web site for search engine crawlers and expected to see your Web site jump in the rankings but it hasn't yet, don't despair. Maybe you're wondering: What's wrong? Didn't my changes have any effect? Well, more than likely, nothing's wrong. Google just hasn't spidered and indexed your changes yet. You can know for sure by using an advanced query in Google by using the query operator: cache. The syntax would look like this in the Google search box: "cache:www.namehere.com."