A majority of marketers today rank link building as being a difficult or very difficult search engine optimization task.  How can your law firm improve link popularity numbers without running into problems with Google?  How can you increase link popularity in a way that will make sure that you're getting closer to the front page of search results every day?  Here we'll learn 8 ways to improve link popularity that work without “black hat” techniques.

#1: Improve Link Popularity With Quality, Not Quantity

If you learned how to increase link popularity in the early part of the 21st century and haven't brushed up since, you may need to start relearning some things.  Today, quality matters much more than just how many links you have.  If you want to improve link popularity for your website, you'll need to focus on getting links from websites with high amounts of traffic and high levels of authority.

Google will increase link popularity for a website more when it receives links from pages with a high Google PageRank.  This is because these websites are viewed as being more likely to be authoritative.  Similarly, because they are perceived as more difficult to get, inbound links coming from .edu top level domains will improve link popularity more than a similar link coming from a .com address with equivalent PageRank.

#2: Increase Link Popularity By Monitoring the Competition

If you're not sure where your strategy to improve link popularity could use improvement, use your competitors to get your next ideas.  Use a link popularity checker tool to find out what kind of links your competition is building, and then use those results to find your own link sources.  Whenever you find a website that your competitors are using to increase link popularity, you can work to get a link built in that website as well.

Consistent monitoring of your competitors can generate valuable intelligence about their strategies to increase link popularity.  Don't be too beholden to their results: remember that you should also strive to improve link popularity in ways that your competition hasn't yet figured out, so that you can more easily defeat them in the search rankings.

#3: Improve Link Popularity Organically and Contextually

Google has recently started paying more attention to whether a website is working to really improve the quality of its results or just the quantity.  Because of new, stricter scrutiny that Google is applying to websites' inbound links, you should try to make sure that many of your links are contextually based.  When you improve link popularity with contextual links, each of your links will grant you more link juice than if they had come from a website with very little in common with yours.

The best way, bar none, to increase link popularity is to have other people post your content and provide inbound links organically.  This means that people are posting links to your website without being asked or prompted to.  However, it can be difficult to improve link popularity in this way.  If you can't, try to at least make it look like your links have been naturally built rather than artificially.

#4: Increase Link Popularity Slowly For Best Results

A sudden spike in the number of links to your website won't lead to a meteoric rise and thousands of new hits.  Instead, it's likely to set you back, because Google will penalize websites that are seen to improve link popularity too quickly.  If you're in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, it may not happen today or tomorrow but you will be found out—and it can be absolutely devastating to search rankings when you are.

Start with three or four links per day at most when you start to improve link popularity.  If you increase link popularity more rapidly in a month or two, this won't look nearly as suspicious as if your link building had happened all at once.

#5: Monitor Your Google PageRank To Check Your Progress

You should consistently check your PageRank to see if your efforts to improve link popularity have translated into a direct result for your website.  If you're seeing your PageRank number slowly increase, you're probably in very good shape for the future.  Keep in mind that because PageRank is a logarithmic scale, even if you are an amazing web marketer, it's very unlikely that your website will ever become a site with PageRank 8 or 9.

#6: Use Analytics to Increase Link Popularity Efficiently

If you're just shotgunning your approaches, you may not know which method for improving link popularity is actually working best.  You should instead try a single method to increase link popularity at a time, and see how it works using analytics tools.  If you find that a particular method is ineffective, you can improve link popularity using a different method and then use analytics again for a side by side comparison.

#7: Improve Link Popularity With One Way Links

If you're using too many links that are reciprocal (that is to say, two way between sites), Google will assume that you have just been trading links.  It's fine to have some casual reciprocity, just don't make it the entire focus of your campaign to increase link popularity.  It's easy enough to build one way links today that you shouldn't have any trouble finding sources.  Reciprocal linking should only account for a small percentage of your overall links.

If you're not able to get enough one way links using conventional means, you may consider using an automated one way linking service.  However, this is usually a bad way to increase link popularity.  When you improve link popularity with one of these services, you're automating the link building process in a way that Google disapproves of.  If you're caught, you can expect to face stiff penalties in the rankings or even see your website de-listed from Google searches—the search engine optimization equivalent of the death penalty.

2012 has made significant changes to how link popularity is tracked and measured by Google.  As link popularity has become important, more firms than ever want to know how to search link popularity.  In this guide, we'll look at some of the reasons that law firms find it in their best interest to perform a link popularity search.  We'll also find out how to search link popularity effectively, and why it isn't always your website that you should be searching for.

Why Should We Perform a Link Popularity Search?

No matter what you've done to build your links, it's a good thing to know how to search link popularity.  Understanding searching techniques will make it much easier for you to monitor and track your reputation online.  By doing a link popularity search, you'll learn what kind of websites are linking to you and where you might be able to create profitable advertisements.  You'll also find out what kind of linking is most effective in bringing clients to your website.

When you thoroughly understand what kind of links you're getting, you can begin to develop a comprehensive plan for expanding your link presence.  Identifying existing strengths and weaknesses can make it easier to develop a more well rounded approach to link building.  This versatile approach is often neglected by online marketers desperate to cut corners instead of providing the very best advice and service.

How to Search Link Popularity: Getting Started

Before you actually start to learn how to search link popularity, it's a good idea to have your goals in mind first.  What kind of results do you want from your link popularity search?  Are you learning how to search link popularity so that you can compete more easily with a rival firm?  Will a link popularity search be used by your firm to figure out where to post your links next?  Understanding what you want will help you make better decisions about what tools to download and how to use them.

How to Search Link Popularity: Free Web Tools

The most common way for people to search link popularity today is by using websites that have free online tools.  These free online tools are a good way to keep people coming to websites, so nearly every search engine optimization guru has his or her own link popularity calculator for people who want to know how to search link popularity.

These tools change locations online constantly, and you may want to check more than one of these tools before you decide that you have a hard and fast number for your law firm's link popularity.  Doing a double or triple check with multiple tools is always a good idea, because disagreement among the results may be an indicator that the websites you're using for your link popularity search aren't working as well as you had hoped.

How to Search Link Popularity: Your Website

The first website that you should do a link popularity search on is, of course, your own.  Start by running a link popularity search that gives you your results for Google popularity.  Different tools will give you different information.  For example, if you learn how to search link popularity using seoprofiler.com, you'll find out how many of the pages of your website are in Google's Top 50 search results, as well as seeing a list of websites in direct competition with yours.

Other tools can just list a large number of backlinks in whatever search engine you prefer.  Don't hesitate to do a link popularity search that involves several different search engines—you may find that you have much better search rankings on one than another, and exploring why can help you create your next strategy for improving your link presence.

How to Search Link Popularity: Competitor Websites

Once you've looked at some link popularity search reports for your website, it's time to turn your attention elsewhere.  Where are your competitors building their links?  Are they getting inbound links by getting directory entries, or by having social media link to their site regularly?  Analyzing where your competitors' links come from can give you fantastic ideas for helping out your own website.

After you learn how to search link popularity, you can do it for any website at all.  If there's a legal website that you're in awe of when it comes to search engine optimization, a link popularity search can take away the mystery and make it easier to imitate that site.

Tracking Your Link Popularity Search Results

It's great to know how to search link popularity and run a search, but just one search is of limited use.  You'll want to use consistent tracking of link popularity in order to make sure that you're seeing whenever a new inbound link appears for your website.

At least once every week or so, you should be looking at a link popularity search.  Tracking changes over time to these results can be helpful in identifying patterns of behavior.

What an Ideal Link Popularity Search Will Show

Google monitors link popularity because some patterns indicate that the popularity has been built artificially.  If your link popularity search reveals that almost all of your links come from the same few IP addresses, you are probably skating on very thin ice with Google and should watch out—your website could be sandboxed at any second.

What you want to do when you learn how to search link popularity is to generate a real variety of links.  You should make sure that you're cultivating links of several different types on many different websites.  Your link popularity search should indicate that you're using varied anchor text and that you don't use the same content over and over for all of your inbound links.

Maintaining link variety is the only way to ensure that Google doesn't identify your website as being too optimized.  What's more, when you have a wide variety of links, you'll be substantially more invulnerable to new spam detection techniques.

When you're looking for information on the specifics of today's online marketing, you'll want to have brand new information that keeps recent changes to social media and web searches in mind.  However, when it comes to strategizing for your online marketing plan and content, you might want to look to a different source: books on advertising and marketing.  Many of these books contain information and ideas that are timeless, and that too many online marketers forget.  In this guide, we'll take a look at seven of the best books about advertising and marketing that can help you develop content strategies for your online campaigns.

#1: Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! By Luke Sullivan

This book, by an advertising copywriter who worked on major campaigns for decades, is subtitled “a guide to creating great ads.”  Sullivan actually starts by talking about Mr. Whipple, the mascot for Charmin brand toilet paper, who was considered by most television audiences to be an annoyance—yet it seemed that having him as the company's mascot kept paying.

Sullivan isn't afraid in his book to talk not only about why some advertisements work better than others, he's also not afraid to talk about the kinds of advertising that he finds to be uninspiring, bland, and boring.  Sullivan's prose is light and entertaining, making this a great first book on copywriting for anyone who is just starting to create their own written content for a website or social media page.  Hand it to anyone who's considering writing copy for your website or advertisements, and you won't regret that you did.

#2: The Hero and the Outlaw, by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson

Legal marketing professionals today are always looking for a way to differentiate the brand of their law firm.  A great branding effort can make the difference between a firm that prospers, even in difficult times, and one that has to shut down.  In this book, Mark and Pearson look at some of the biggest brands in the country and find a common thread to their incredibly successful branding efforts: archetypes.

Archetypes are the basic personalities and stories that we've heard a million times since childhood.  If someone says “outlaw,” you probably already have a fairly large number of traits assigned in your head to what the outlaw is like and what is likely to happen to him or her.  The same goes for an explorer, or even just a regular guy or girl.  Our archetypes help us anticipate narratives and understand where a brand is coming from.

In The Hero and the Outlaw, Mark and Pearson give aspiring brand strategists tools to develop their own archetypal “personality” for their law firm.  If you're stuck when trying to come up with a good branding initiative, this is the right book for you.

#3: Fascinate, by Sally Hogshead

When you read advice about content on legal websites, you'll probably hear a lot about the need to captivate viewers with original content.  But how do you write content that actually gets people to click and read?  In this book, you'll learn seven different reasons that people become fascinated with content.  It includes ways to look at your fascination strengths and weaknesses, allowing your firm to get the most out of its content and draw in the most viewers.  

#4: Buyology, by Martin Lindstrom

Maybe reading about branding and fascination isn't your thing.  You want quantitative results, statistics that help you understand exactly what will generate conversions and give you lasting business relationships.  If that's the case, you want Lindstrom's Buyology.  Instead of just looking at the psychology of advertising and marketing, Lindstrom's book actually examines the neurobiology at work behind human motivations.

By looking at MRI brain scans of people who are thinking about advertising and marketing content, the book is able to explain why some types of branding and content work better than others.  What's more, the book is written at a level suitable for a lay person, so you don't need to have any special knowledge of science, math, or statistics to get a lot out of it.

#5: Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite, by Paul Arden

Arden, the former creative director from advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, brings this book that can help you get out of a creative rut.  If you know that your content strategy is failing but you don't know why and don't know how to get back on track, this book can help you think about your problems in new ways so that you can create real change.

#6: The Book of Gossage, by Howard Luck Gossage

One of the strangest advertising men of the 1960s, Howard Luck Gossage's advertisements are like nothing you've ever seen before.  The Book of Gossage gathers not only many of these advertisements, but also writings by Gossage himself, and assembles them into a book that is as timely today as when it was written.

Gossage's advertisements are particularly relevant for online content creators, because they tend to be very wordy and informative while still being quite fascinating.  Unlike many of the creators of advertising in his time, Gossage favored text—and lots of it.  A master of making even an ad with hundreds of words of copy a breeze to read, Gossage is worth a look if you want to know how to make your website's content uniquely readable.

#7: Winning the Story Wars, by Jonah Sachs

This brand new book came out just last year, and is great at discussing why, exactly, story and narrative matter when it comes to advertising and marketing.  Sachs is talking about up to the minute trends in this book, and understands that in today's marketing world, the biggest advantage that winning the story wars gives you is virality.

If you've ever wanted to know how to make your content go viral, and how to make sure that your stories are outshining the ones being told by your biggest competitors, you should pick up Sachs' book.

In today's legal marketing world online, it can be easy to think that the only strategies that will work are the ones developed this minute, for specific problems like a new Google search algorithm.  What might surprise you is how much legal marketing wisdom you can find in older sources.  Maybe the writer from the longest time ago who'd have something valuable to say about legal marketing is Sun Tzu.  This Chinese general, who lived about 2500 years ago, wrote the strategy classic The Art of War, which detailed his own strategies for winning conflicts.  Sun Tzu's writing applies not only to war, but also to business and marketing.  In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the oldest advice in the world—as relevant today as it was millenia ago.

#1:  “Know Thyself, Know Thy Enemy.”

One of the biggest things that Sun Tzu focused on when discussing battle strategies is the idea of knowledge.  When Sun Tzu was a general, not all other generals worked on reconnaisance before a battle, and those who failed to know their enemy or themselves well tended to fail on the field.

According to Sun Tzu, when you know either your enemy or yourself very well, you'll win about half the time—the key is knowing both.  This is great advice for legal marketers.  You need to know both your own brand and the brands of your competitors if you want to be able to play to your unique brand strengths.  Doing competition research isn't cheating—it's the quickest path to victory.  Keep in mind that just because you learn what your competition is doing doesn't mean you have to imitate it.

#2:  “Strategy Without Tactics is the Slowest Route to Victory.”

When Sun Tzu differentiated strategy and tactics, he was referring to the bigger picture and the little, everyday details.  When you have a great long-term strategy, but your tactics are haphazard, you may be able to succeed through sheer tenacity—but why not get where you're going faster?  Make sure you have the everyday details taken care of, not just your big picture strategy concerns.

This means doing the little things right, like downloading social media dashboard tools so that you can juggle all of your different social media websites without letting any balls drop.  It also means planning out your days and making sure that your schedules are realistic for accomplishing your goals.

#3: “Tactics Without Strategy Is the Noise Before Defeat.”

If you're doing all the little things right, Sun Tzu says that you'll still fail if you don't have a big picture view.  He's right: when you're just posting randomly to social media accounts, doing online marketing based on whatever the most recent fad you read about is, and ignore any kind of overall branding initiative, you won't be able to differentiate yourself from the crowd.  In the hyper-competitive legal services market today, that's a death knell.

Follow Sun Tzu's advice here: know that you've already lost if you're not looking at where you're going.  Set real goals for yourself and plan long-term as well as short-term.

#4: “To Be Prepared for Any Contingency Is the Greatest of Virtues.”

Contingency planning is something that a lot of legal marketing professionals don't think about when it comes to their primary ways of marketing services online.  Consider for a few moments what you would do if any of your main ways to communicate with your audience went down.  Strange things can happen in the world of the internet.  What if Facebook went belly-up all of a sudden?  What if Google changed its ad policies so that you could no longer use their services in the ways you had been?

Trying to think about what you'd do if any of your marketing tricks just stopped working one day.  Remember, it's happened before—some search updates for Google significantly changed the SEO landscape and put some search engine optimizers out of business promptly.

#5: “Do Not Repeat The Tactics Which Have Gained You One Victory.”

It can be tempting, once you find something that works, to just keep going with that idea until you hit a brick wall.  But keep in mind that the best way to stay in front of your competition is not to keep doing the same thing until it gets stale—you need to innovate and keep one move ahead.

At the same time, Sun Tzu obviously doesn't mean you should ignore what works.  Just don't become too reliant on something that you've only seen work for sure once or twice.  Shifting your marketing strategy significantly in response to a single good week of responses to a new tactic, for instance, is probably hasty.  Make sure it's not a fluke before you start investing too heavily in the next new thing.

#6: “We Cannot Enter Into Alliances Until We Are Acquainted With the Designs of Our Neighbors.”

When you start using any website to host or share content for you, from Facebook to Google Local, it's a good idea to first learn about the business models of these sites.  Knowing how these websites work can help you decide whether you actually want to do business with them.  In some cases, you may decide that a particular website is not likely to still be in business within the year—so why keep sinking marketing dollars into their site?  In others, you may decide that the current rate of growth makes marketing on a particular site a real bargain.

#7: “No Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy.”

People will never do quite what you'd expect with your content.  There's no sense in blaming your audience for not responding according to your plan.  Instead, you need to revise your plan with the new data.  Keep in mind that revising your plan isn't an indicator that you failed in your original planning—knowing what doesn't work is just as important as knowing what does.

From the Madison Avenue “Mad Men” of the 1960s to contemporary thinkers on advertising, copywriting and design gurus can teach legal marketing departments a lot.  Often, legal marketing is—in a field known for how good it is at persuasion—rather disappointing and bland.  In this guide, we'll explore some lessons from the masters.  Each of these quotes comes from an advertising professional who succeeded by having a unique understanding of why and how humans are persuaded to do the things they do.  By incorporating their ideas into your legal marketing strategies for 2013, you'll be going beyond your competition and helping yourself to stand out in a crowded market.

#1: “What makes all the hysteria so silly and unwarranted is how quickly consumers digest and adjust to 'the future'–and how seamlessly it arrives.”  Bob Hoffman

Hoffman, in his book 101 Contrarian Ideas About Advertising, writes that marketers are always overly concerned with the idea that the future will represent a huge seismic shift, and that nothing will ever be the same.  Instead, he says, the truth is far more prosaic: generally, consumers accept the future much more easily than the marketers do, and in spite of all the conferences proclaiming huge changes to how business is done, not much actually changes.

Most of the same strategies—listening to your clients, keeping up with technological developments, monitoring your competition, and so on—work today in the same basic ways that they did a century ago.  The only real difference is that cultural changes have changed the ways in which you need to implement those strategies.

#2: “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them. Sometimes it’s an ad.” Howard Gossage

This is one of the most important maxims for online marketers to remember.  People don't read corporate Twitter posts, or Facebook status updates, or blog entries, or attorney biographies.  They read what interests them, and sometimes those are corporate Twitter posts, Facebook updates, blogs, or attorney bio pages.  The trick is to make sure that for every single piece of content you create—no matter how large or how small—there's a reason for your audience to listen to what you're saying.  Always give people a reason to be interested.  If you can't come up with one, keep working on your content until you've got one.  You're better off posting only a few interesting Facebook updates a week than five boring ones every day.

#3: “Never Write an Advertisement Which You Wouldn't Want Your Own Family To Read. You wouldn't tell lies to your own wife. Don't tell them to mine. Do as you would be done by.” David Ogilvy

Perhaps the single most famous ad man of all time, Ogilvy's campaigns didn't work by insulting or lying to audiences.  Ogilvy believed advertising should go beyond slogans and into consumers' motivations for buying products.  This is great advice to keep in mind when you're thinking about your website content.  Don't use puffery and don't say anything that you'd be embarrassed to have even your closest friends or family members read.

#4: “Your ad begins as an interruption.  Make paying attention to it feel like a reward.” Lee Clow

This wisdom comes from a book of tweets by famous contemporary advertising guru Lee Clow.  Whenever you put up a pay per click advertisement for your law firm, you're interrupting someone's browsing space.  Give them something for that interruption.  Make sure that your website has good legal information and helps legal consumers understand your firm's practice areas and personality.

#5: “The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.” Leo Burnett

There's no reason for you to try to create whole new ways of thinking about the law in your content.  In fact, because consumers can be somewhat uncomfortable when they're looking for legal services, you should probably try to make sure that they're seeing content that doesn't add to their stress.  Keep your language relatively plain, and don't use too much legal jargon.

At the same time, try to use some of the more familiar language you're using to talk about seeing legal problems differently.  Giving people a new way to understand their issues will make them more comfortable with calling your firm and scheduling a consultation.

#6: “Radio gave birth to impertinent advertising. Never before the advent of radio did advertising have such a golden opportunity to make an ass out of itself.”  William J. Cameron

If Cameron's quote is right, then surely the internet has brought impertinent advertising into its full-fledged adulthood.  When you make mistakes in your marketing today, your faux pas can immediately be broadcast to the internet.  For many reasons, people have a greater tendency to share things with friends that are embarrassing or negative than they are to share positive things they hear about a company.  It's not fair, but that's life, and eventually it will probably catch up with your law firm—no one can be perfect all the time.

The only thing you can do if you make a mistake is to apologize for it and move on.  While it's a good idea to delete anything that was embarrassing you, this doesn't mean you should deny it was there or try to pretend it didn't happen.  Own up to anything embarrassing and keep going—people will forget as time goes by.

#7: “There is no such thing as too long. Only too boring.” Dan Kennedy

When trying to decide how long a particular piece of content should be, let the medium, the audience, and how interesting the writing is guide you.  A single sentence can be incredibly boring if it's poorly constructed, while a great writer can keep an audience captivated for pages and pages about topics that wouldn't usually be considered interesting at all.

Being boring is the biggest sin you can commit on the internet if you want to be a marketing success.  Make sure someone's taking a look at your marketing content to establish whether it will hold your readers' attention./

As Facebook tries to effectively monetize its social media platform and become sustainably profitable, it has tried several new tactics.  One of those tactics is allowing businesses and individuals to “promote” posts on Facebook so that everyone who is connected to you will see the post.  Another is graph search, which tries to pull business away from other search engines like Google, keeping people looking at Facebook's ads longer.  Is Facebook Graph Search actually being used, and what should you do to get good rankings in Graph Search?  This guide will give you the basics so that you can go in with all the information.

What Is Facebook Graph Search?

Facebook's Graph Search allows users to search based on information that Facebook knows about their friends, photos, and about locations near the user.  For example, if you indicated to Facebook that you wanted to find restaurants near a specific location, you could narrow the parameters further by telling it what kind of restaurant you were interested in and exactly where you wanted it to be located.

Facebook also lets people look through their friends for people who work for specific places, live in secific towns, or are friends with other friends.  This search functionality makes it easier for people to access the data that is being made public by people and businesses.

Getting Good Rankings in Graph Search

It's not yet clear exactly how Facebook's Graph Search decides which results to display first, when it comes to businesses.  It does, however, appear that there are at least a few things you can do to increase the chance that your result will show before your competitors.  First of all, you should make sure that all parts of your Facebook page are filled out, and that you haven't left any blank information sections.  You should ensure that your address is correct and that all the other contact information Facebook has for you is right.

It's also true that Facebook will tend to rank pages higher in the Graph Search if they are updated on a regular basis.  If you barely post to your Facebook page and don't comment or engage with your users often, you will likely see significantly lower results as part of Graph Search.  Of course, these kinds of interactions are also useful from an overall social media marketing perspective, so you should work on interacting more with your audience no matter what.

Are People Using Graph Search?

So far, this is one of the most difficult questions to answer, and also one that many marketers would love to know the answer to.  Graph Search is certainly not going to overtake Google, Yahoo, or Bing any time soon.  But for certain types of businesses, especially those that use a large number of word of mouth referrals, Graph Search is already being used and will probably be used more in the future once Facebook promotes the feature more.

The lack of overall promotion for Graph Search has hurt how many people use it.  Not all Facebook users are aware that Facebook has changed how its search algorithm and sorting works, and not everyone has felt that the changes are a net positive.  Some users feel that the Graph Search's reliance on information voluntarily given to Facebook can seem like an invasion of privacy.

Hiring Outside Help

If you want to make your Facebook page Graph Search ready but don't know how or don't want to risk doing it wrong, you might consider outsourcing this aspect of your social media marketing to an agency.  Some agencies will help a law firm develop their Facebook page for as little as a few hundred dollars, making it well worth it if it spares your firm frustration and several hours of work.

However, it's important not to have all of your social media content created by outside providers.  At the end of the day, you're the one who knows your specialty areas best.  Having outsiders try to talk with authority about your specialty topics could result in misinformation being distributed on your website.

Identifying Target Demographics With Graph Search

Graph Seach doesn't just have to be a way that people look for you.  By using Graph Search, you can successfully identify groups of your fans and friends, learning what demographics are most likely to add you to their friends and who is most likely to give you a call after becoming your Facebook friend.

Try looking at Graph Search to see how many of the people who have friended you are, for example, men versus women.  Do you have a fairly even ratio, or is it imbalanced in one direction or another?  Understanding this can help you target your Facebook posts, sponsored content, and pay per click advertisements to be most effective with the eyes that are actually reading your pages.

Keep An Eye On the Future

It's important to understand that Facebook Graph Search is new enough that nobody really knows yet whether it's going to work or not.  It may be that Facebook Graph Search will soon be abandoned, or that many users will find it more creepy and invasive than useful.  Make sure that you don't do anything that could compromise the privacy of your own clients in order to get ahead with Facebook graph search.

Make sure that you keep reading recent articles regarding Facebook Graph Search to make sure that the numbers keep showing steady growth in use.  If users simply refuse to adopt the new feature, you should stop sinking your time and money into making the feature work for you.  Don't throw good money after bad—if it starts to look like Graph Search will simply never be competitive, there's nothing wrong with trying new strategies instead.

Outbound links are everywhere online.  Until relatively recently, Google limited the number of outbound links that could pass on their link juice to new websites.  Today, that's no longer the case, but outbound linking has become so complicated that you may want to use an outbound link checker.  These tools can help you to check outbound links both on your own website and on the websites where you're considering starting link building campaigns.

How Do Outbound Links Affect Websites?

Whenever a website that is considered to have authority (given to it in Google's 0-10 numerical “PageRank” value) gives an outbound link to another website, some of its authority is conferred upon the website being linked.

Why does that matter?  Because when those outbound links are referring to your website, you'll receive a boost to your search engine rankings whenever Google indexes one of these links.  The higher the PageRank of a website is, the more authority you can get from being linked there.

Why Do Outbound Links Need to Be Checked?

If you're not already checking your links with an outbound link checker, you might want to give it a try.  Most software to check outbound links is available for free on the web—often you can use the tools right on a website rather than downloading a piece of outbound link checker software.

By checking on your own outbound links periodically, you can identify exactly which of your outbound links is getting the most traffic and which don't seem like they have been very useful for people using your website.  If you have an outbound link that the outbound link checker indicates is almost never used, you might want to remove it so that the remaining links on your page get more value from the links they are receiving.

You can also run basic outbound link checker programs on other websites.  While you won't be able to track hits to outbound links the same way that you can for your own site, you can verify that links are working.  You may want to use your outbound link checker to monitor the number of links that are on a given website, for reasons that we'll go into in just a minute.

Is There an Outbound Links Limit?

If you've heard vague rumors that after a certain number of links, they don't count, or that you'll get penalized by Google for having more than some amount of links, that's no longer quite true.  It is true that Google used to have, as part of its Webmaster Guidelines, a rule about having no more than 100 outbound links per page.  Some people first used outbound link checker tools to make sure they weren't exceeding this limit.

However, as many websites began to grow that thrived on having large quantities of new links (think social networking and social bookmarking websites), this limit quickly became very impractical—and more importantly, it became unrepresentative of the web.  If a website's link is spreading virally through social bookmarking websites, it should gain authority so that it's easier to search for.

However, that doesn't mean you get the same amount of link juice from your outbound links on these websites.  Now, the total amount of authority a website has to give must be divided among all the links it has.  This means that you won't get nearly as much link juice from a very link-heavy website as you would from a website with similar PageRank and only a few links.  Because of this, outbound link checker tools are still relevant even though there's no longer a hard limit.

Avoiding Link Dilution With an Outbound Link Checker

By running an outbound link checker periodically on the websites where you're working to build inbound links, you can verify that your links are still worth something.  If the links that you're building are very diluted, they may not be worth the time and effort that you're spending to make them (unless they're from a website with a very high PageRank score).

You can also use an outbound link checker to find out which new websites might be fertile ground to start building new links on.  By understanding how much link juice you're likely to get from each new link, you can start anticipating how much you'll rise in search rankings and how many additional links you need in order to reach your search engine optimization goals.

Monitoring Inbound and Outbound Link Traffic

If you want to keep a very close eye on your outbound links, you need something more than a basic outbound link checker.  If you want to be able to closely monitor where your traffic is coming from and where it's going, you'll need to start checking events using Google Analytics.  Event tracking can actually involve anything on your website, from clicking a link that goes to another page on your site to tracking visitors who stay longer than five minutes on a particular page.

However, this isn't for the faint hearted or the bad with computers.  You'll need some basic coding skills to get started on event tracking, in contrast to the very easy to use basic outbound link checker programs.  For some smaller firms, it's probably not worth it to pay someone to do this work—you may want to focus your search engine marketing efforts on other aspects of search engine optimization.

Analyzing Your Outbound Links

Once you start tracking where your links are heading and keeping track of how many you have with an outbound link checker, you'll be able to do some hardcore analysis.  Outbound link analysis can help you understand what your site visitors want and where they're going to get it.  

By looking at the traffic leaving your website through your links, you can develop a much more data driven understanding of what to include on your website and what to direct people offsite for.  While this kind of analysis can be somewhat difficult, many analytics agencies can help you interpret the results for a reasonable fee.

If you're using a lot of reciprocal links, you may need to know whether they'll start having a negative impact on your SERPs.  After Google's Penguin and Panda updates, 15 percent of websites were penalized for having excessive optimization—and one of the biggest red flags for over optimization is having too many reciprocal links.  In this guide, you'll learn how to avoid these penalties and how to overcome them if you've already been penalized.

What is a Reciprocal Link URL?

Any time you type a web address into your browser bar (like www.google.com), this is called a URL.  A reciprocal links URL is a URL that goes to a website that also links back to your own website.  Usually, reciprocal links are set up deliberately by people from two different websites in order to help improve visibility, publicity, and search engine rankings.

Sources for Reciprocal Links

In order to get reciprocal links, you don't have to look very far.  You probably already know friends, family members, colleagues, and relatives who have websites.  You can start getting your first reciprocal links URL by just asking one of them if they would be willing to do an even exchange of links.  After you get the reciprocal link URL from them and have verified that the link to your website is up, you can link to their site.

You can also find a reciprocal link URL and code to include on your website using some reciprocal link exchange programs.  These reciprocal link URL codes will actually work to automate the process of creating reciprocal links.  When someone includes the reciprocal link URL and code on their website and then follows the reciprocal linking instructions, your website will automatically create a reciprocal links URL that directs to their site.

How Google Penguin Checks Your Reciprocal Link URL

Google monitors your website's inbound links constantly to see whether your reciprocal links appear to be too high a percentage of your overall inbound links.  There's no exact percentage number (if your PageRank is higher, for instance, you can get away with having more reciprocal links URL content, while lower PageRank sites will get flagged with much less), but you should always keep these penalties in mind when making a new reciprocal links URL.

If you're not already working on building one way links in addition to your reciprocal links, you need to start right away.  If your website is already heavily imbalanced in favor of reciprocal links, you should focus on one way link building before including a single additional reciprocal link URL on your website.

Why Your Reciprocal Link URL Anchor Text Matters

In addition to monitoring your reciprocal links URL statistics, Google is also looking at your anchor text.  The reason that your reciprocal link URL anchor text matters is that Google wants to be able to identify trends and patterns.  If you're using the exact same reciprocal links URL anchor text in every single link that you create on a reciprocal basis, Google will see this as a very solid indicator that your links have been built artificially, possibly with black hat methods.

To keep your reciprocal links generating link juice for your website, you'll need to vary your reciprocal link URL anchor text.  By varying the reciprocal links URL anchor text even slightly, you'll show that your links haven't been made using a totally automated system.  Try to make the level of variation fairly high: for instance, some of your reciprocal link URL anchor text should be a brand related term like your firm name, while others should be the kinds of exact keyword matches that you might use for search engine optimization.

Checking a Reciprocal Link URL from Your Linking Partners

If you've already worked hard to build a great reciprocal links URL on a website, you don't want to let it just disappear.  It's critical to make sure that any reciprocal link URL you've agreed upon still exists as long as you're still running a reciprocal link for that website.

In order to check on your reciprocal links URL and make sure that your partners are doing exactly what they said they'd do, you can run a reciprocal link checker program.  This program examines every reciprocal link URL you've set up and verifies that the link to your website still exists on every website you're linking to from your reciprocal links page.

If you find that one of your linking partners is no longer listing your reciprocal links URL where they should be, don't just delete their link right away.  Sometimes links can disappear during site redesigns or during problems with a website.  Instead, talk to the webmaster about the problem.  Many webmasters will be more than willing to re-list your reciprocal link URL as long as they can see that your link is still intact.

What if You Have Too Many Reciprocal Links?

It's every web marketer's worst nightmare in 2012: waking up to a message from Google that says your website has been overoptimized, or has suspicious links.  If you have used too many reciprocal links, especially from non-contextual sources or sources that are blacklisted as being potential sources of link buying, you'll face these penalties.  When you get an email from Google about your reciprocal links URL content being bad, you'll need to act fast in order to recover the lost search rankings.

First of all, find out which reciprocal link URL they believe to be from a bad source.  Then contact the webmaster who is running that website and ask for them to take your reciprocal links URL down.  If they do, you can notify Google that the offending link has been removed.  If not, you should keep all the documentation relating to your attempt to have it removed.  Google will take this documentation into account and may decide to lift the penalty even if the link isn't removed, as long as you made a good faith effort.

Millions of links are being added to the internet every day in 2012.  If you're looking to build links so that you can improve your search engine rankings, you may have started to consider reciprocal link exchange.  Reciprocal links exchange is one of the oldest ways of doing link building on the web, and can be done by just about anyone with even basic knowledge of internet issues.  If you're curious about the details of reciprocal link exchange and whether it would benefit your search engine marketing, keep reading this guide.

What are Reciprocal Links?

When a link is one way, Site A gives Site B a link on their website.  But when a link is reciprocal, Site B also gives a link back to Site A.  Why would two websites do this?  The answer is simple.  Every new inbound link that you receive makes it so that Google perceives your website as having more authority.  Therefore, every time you do a reciprocal links exchange, both websites that are linked will generally gain in the rankings.

Reciprocal link exchange in some form or another has been part of the web from its very beginning.  Even if you're just linking to a friend's website and they link yours back, you've done a basic form of reciprocal links exchange.  Of course, as technology has improved and become more sophisticated, the form that a reciprocal link exchange takes has changed as well.

How Does a Reciprocal Link Exchange Work?

The idea of a reciprocal links exchange has come a long way from friends swapping links in the mid-1990s.  Today, reciprocal link exchange is often done on a large scale, and has become big business.  A large number of websites are now devoted to creating a reciprocal links exchange for any websites that want to submit their URL to their directory.  Some of these reciprocal link exchange programs are completely free, while others cost money to join.

When you join a reciprocal links exchange, you'll give your URL, and in exchange, you'll have to host some other URLs on your own website.  Some of the reciprocal link exchange programs today actually do three way reciprocal links (in which Site A links to Site B, Site B links to Site C, and Site C links back to Site A) in order to obscure the fact that they are exchanging links.

Why Are Search Engines Suspicious About Reciprocal Link Exchange?

In the early part of the 2000s, it was very common for websites to try to build their search engine rankings through overuse and outright abuse of reciprocal links exchange.  Because of this, Google and other search engines have been working to discourage people from using too many reciprocal link exchange resources.

The problem that search engines were having with reciprocal links was that when companies got automated reciprocal links a hundred or a thousand at a time, these links were often to websites that had no relation to theirs.  It made it more difficult to navigate the web, and made it so that junk and spam websites were able to gain in the search rankings even ahead of legitimate businesses.  Since as a law firm your business is professional, you should actually be glad about these changes—you don't want a spammer to be able to exceed your rankings by using reciprocal links exchange too heavily.

What Websites Would My Reciprocal Links Be On?

Depending on what kind of reciprocal link exchange you're using, there are several different answers to this question.  Today, some reciprocal link exchanges are set up to allow webmasters to look through websites in particular categories that are hunting for reciprocal links.  If you see a website that is in a contextually relevant category for you, you can do a reciprocal links exchange with that website.

Other reciprocal link exchange websites don't allow people to be quite as picky.  You may be able to choose a basic category on which to get your reciprocal links, or you may just find a reciprocal links exchange site that automates the entire process.  Keep in mind if you use one of these latter types of reciprocal link exchange, you have less control over where your links are and what your reputation online becomes.

Are There Disadvantages to Reciprocal Link Exchange?

There are actually several different reasons that you might want to avoid reciprocal links exchange, at least as a primary link building method.  While it's fine to build some of your links using a reciprocal link exchange, Google actually penalizes websites that have a percentage of reciprocal links that is judged to be too high.

It's worth noting that no one knows exactly what that percentage is, or what other variables may be able to affect it.  Having most of your links come from a reciprocal links exchange resource will probably negatively impact your website, but there are no guarantees.

The other reason that you may want to avoid a reciprocal link exchange is that it can make your website look spammy.  If you don't want the appearance of link-grubbing on your professional website, you should try to get one way links instead of building reciprocal ones.

Fixing Overoptimization Penalties

If Google does say that your website has been over optimized (your webmaster will get an email), you may want to take your links off of some reciprocal link exchanges.  Remove the link from your own website and notify the webmaster of the reciprocating website that the link has been removed.  

This will generally lead them to stop listing the link on their website.  You may need to specifically request this removal if it isn't done within a few days or weeks.  If the link is now one way, you may not actually need to have it removed unless you really want to—so ask yourself whether you believe the link would be providing value as a one way link before deciding to email for a deletion.