In the early days of the internet, a law firm's website was informative, created to be discovered by internet researchers who were interested in information about, or contact with, an attorney for a legal need. Promoting a practice was passive. You staked out a piece of bandwidth with a website, and you were instantly visible when your name was called. Contrast that with television advertising which invades our home with annoying jingles from New York, or radio ads barking a lawyer's name at millions to find the dozen who might care. Advertising by website was straightforward and transparent. And civil.

Most of us don't need the whole world to know of our existence; we market in a geographical area, or we point to our specialties, or cultural or linguistic or socio-economic communities. We can focus the ad budget with great precision. For efficiency, we imbed keywords into our websites, allowing the right internet searchers to find us more easily. We even get professional help to choose the keywords that should optimize the number of "hits" our site receives. There may be many hundreds of keywords and keyword phrases in a professional website, generally relating to the firm's geographical coverage, areas of practice, attorneys' names and so on.