The most recent surveys are in, and Google has come out on top once again in the search engine wars.  Over 66 percent of searches on the internet today are conducted through Google.  If you're trying to improve where your results are displayed when people search for law firms on Google, you need to do a Page Rank check for not only your website, but also for web pages belonging to your competitors and to the people who are sending you inbound link traffic.  In this guide, we'll explore how to check Page Rank and why you should do so on a regular basis.  Keep reading to find out not only how to do a Page Rank check, but also how to improve your PR with the results you get.

What Is Page Rank?

When you do a Page Rank check, you're actually looking at the core of why Google search results were so different from other search engines' results when it was first released.  Page Rank is Google's way of deciding how popular a particular web page is, and this popularity index is put into an integer from 0 to 10.

There are very, very few sites with PR of 9 or 10, and many with much lower PR ratings.  It takes exponentially more work to get to each new Page Rank level.  The higher a web page's PR is when you check Page Rank, the more authority each of its links will confer.  A Page Rank check won't tell you exactly how much authority a page can give, though, because the amount of total link juice delivered is divided among all the outbound links on a page.

Understanding your PR through a Page Rank check will help you make solid decisions about your search engine marketing strategies.  Now, let's take a look at how to actually check Page Rank.

How Do I Check Page Rank for the First Time?

First, some good news: unlike many other types of analytics, you won't need to insert any code on your website to do a Page Rank check.  In fact, you can check Page Rank for not only pages on your own website, but also for any other web pages that you might be interested in analyzing.

Probably the easiest way to do your first Page Rank check is to download Google's free toolbar.  This toolbar will simply work in your browser, and allows you to check Page Rank by hovering over the PR icon.

What Page Rank Check Tools Should I Use?

There's a chance that you'll want to check Page Rank with something other than Google's toolbar software.  For example, let's say that you want to be able to do a Page Rank check as well as checking a large number of other SEO measures.  A toolbar like SEOQuake gives you all the SEO information you need, including a check Page Rank tool, at your fingertips and overlaid on every website you use.

There are also a number of tools for doing a Page Rank check without using any kind of toolbar.  Most of these programs are actually built into websites.  Just doing a Google search for the kind of thing you want to check will usually give you some of these websites—there are many clones and imitators, because making a program to check Page Rank is so easy.  Any of the available tools will have the same accuracy when doing a Page Rank check, so you may want to choose based on the display and other features that matter to you.

Using a Page Rank Check for Pages You Don't Own

If you want to improve your search engine optimization, you should start using tools to check your inbound links.  Then, check Page Rank for the web pages that are giving you these links.  Why?  Because you get the most link juice from high Page Rank links that have high PR values, and you want to know where to try to put your links in order to maximize the return on your link building investments.

You may also want to check up on the Page Rank of your competitors.  When you check Page Rank for your closest competition, you can get a good idea of whether they're overall doing better or worse than you at creating search engine optimized content.  You can then check their inbound linking with your inbound link checker to find new reseources for building links and staying competitive.

How Often Should I Check Page Rank For My Sites?

While Google's toolbar only infrequently updates Page Rank information for websites, Google is actually monitoring Page Rank dynamically in real time.  Generally speaking, you should consider doing a Page Rank audit of all of your existing web pages about once every month.  Checking Page Rank more often than this may give you data that jumps around too much without really telling you what your longer term trends are.

What Do Changes to My Page Rank Mean?

If your page has a higher PR than when you last checked it, congratulations—this means that your web pages are becoming more popular and confer more authority.  If you're noticing that your Page Rank has slipped by a point, it's possible that you're still getting exactly the same number of links, but that the internet has, in essence, grown bigger around you.  Only a certain percentage of websites can have each Page Rank value.

Even if you don't notice an actual change to the integer representing your Page Rank, there's a good chance that the value itself has changed.  Google simply rounds Page Rank numbers up or down to get to an integer, but it is always calculating to several decimal places.  Keep in mind that just because you don't see motion doesn't mean that it isn't there below the surface.
 

If you're reading articles about search engine optimization, PR and Page Rank are terms that come up a lot.  We know what you're thinking: “But what is my Page Rank, and what does it have to do with anything?”  The website Page Rank for your website is actually very critical to how your site does in searches, and this guide will help you become acquainted with it.  Keep reading, and you'll find out not only how to answer your “what is my Page Rank” question, but also how to find the website Page Rank for any site on the web and how to increase your PR value.

What is My Page Rank Used For?

Google uses your website Page Rank for a large number of things.  Perhaps the most important is determining how much link juice gets passed on with each of your links.  Websites with higher PR values start out with more link juice to pass around, and every link on a page dilutes the amount of link juice that it sends to each individual link.  The total amount of link juice you're getting from inbound links is the single biggest determining factor that Google uses to decide where your search rankings should be.

This alone makes it very important for people to ask “what is my Page Rank?” on a regular basis.  What makes it even more important is that tracking your Page Rank can help you understand whether your website is growing or shrinking in traffic compared to the growth of the web.  At any given time, only a set percentage of websites can have a particular PR value.  If your website Page Rank slowly lowers, it's probably because you're stagnating while other people are moving on and adopting successful search engine optimization strategies.

What is My Page Rank Calculated Based On?

According to Google, website Page Rank is based on a huge multitude of factors, and Google engineers are very tight lipped about which factors matter most.  We know that traffic matters, as well as how many links a website is receiving and whether those links come, themselves, from websites with high PR values.

Generally, you can build a high Page Rank website by focusing on contextual, high quality links and original content.  Your website Page Rank will depend in part on whether your content appears to be original or just reposts of things that you have found around the web.  You can think of it like this: higher Page Rank websites are the ones that Google believes people are most likely to find value in.  If you can make your website valuable, your Page Rank will increase.

How Do I Find My Website Page Rank?

Now you're probably wondering: “what is my Page Rank?”  There are several different tools that can help you find out.  The easiest to download and use is probably Google's own toolbar, which is updated only sometimes but can give you a quick and dirty idea of what your Page Rank looks like now.

If your website is relatively new, you may not be able to answer your “what is my Page Rank?” question quite yet.  It takes some time for Google to index new websites and start to assign them Page Rank numbers.  Be patient, and you'll be able to check your PR values within a few days or weeks.

What Is the Website Page Rank of Incoming Links?

If you want to find out the Page Rank of your incoming links so you can tell who is giving you the biggest amounts of link juice, you'll need an inbound link checker program.  Many of these tools now include a Page Rank check as part of the basic inbound link checking service they offer.

When too many of a website's links come from blogs, or from very low PR websites, it's very possible that Google will see this as deserving of an over optimization penalty.  If this happens, don't panic—just ask some of the people who have low PR links to your website to remove them if possible.  Before you know it, Google will stop penalizing you and your website will be as good as new.

What is My Page Rank Saying About My Website?

A PageRank that is increasing shows a rapidly growing website that is managing to outpace its competitors.  Keep in mind that because website Page Rank is a logarithmic scale, it takes herculean amounts of effort to move up in Page Rank once you've already attained a high level.  You may just want to settle for maintaining a PR level.

If your Page Rank level is decreasing slowly, you should step up your SEO efforts.  If it takes a sudden nosedive, you may want to ask Google what's going on—it may be that you have been impacted significantly by a recent algorithm change.

What is My Page Rank Change Caused By?

If you notice that your website Page Rank has changed appreciably since you last checked up on it, there can be several explanations.  One of the first things that you might want to do if you're wondering “what is my Page Rank doing?” is to check up on  your inbound link numbers.  One of the most common reasons for a website Page Rank to increase suddenly is an uptick in viral traffic.  You may have had a blog post or some other content go viral without even realizing it—that's the nature of the viral web world.

If your website Page Rank has dropped precipitously, that is definitely cause for alarm.  Typically, this kind of result comes from being penalized after a search algorithm update.  “What is my Page Rank being penalized for?” you may ask.  Well, that depends.  Have you been automating link building in order to artificially inflate your website Page Rank?  Have you been over optimizing using spam blog comments and non-contextual inbound links?  If you have, Google may see these as violations of Webmaster Guidelines that can be penalized with serious consequences for your website Page Rank.

Free backlink generators are a common tool of the trade for a lot of internet marketers.  Backlinks can represent over two thirds of your total search engine placement and rankings. If you're doing marketing for your law firm, you may want to know how a free backlink generator works, and whether a free backlinks generator tool is actually a good way to build your link presence.  Keep reading to find out why “free” may not always be the best way to build your links, and why you should use caution before using any free backlinks generator you find online.

What is a Free Backlink Generator?

Many people are just too busy to create their own backlinks.  After all, by the time you talk to a webmaster about getting a link included on their website, then create new content for the link, then actually post the link, and then get the link indexed, you may have used up hours on a single link.  If you want to build hundreds of links, you're looking at weeks of work and uncertain results.

Instead of doing all that work, a free backlinks generator frees you up to do the rest of your marketing campaigns.  Using a free backlink generator, you can build dozens or even hundreds of backlinks in a day.  Instead of being one of the most difficult parts of your marketing strategy to implement, backlink creation can become one of the easiest.

How Does a Free Backlinks Generator Work?

Typically, a free backlink generator works by finding websites where it is very easy to post comments or other types of content.  Then, using pre-made templates for content, the free backlinks generator will spawn a number of backlinks to your website on these web pages.  Depending on what free backlink generator you decide to use, these backlinks may come in the form of article links, comment links, or some other type of link.

Because of the limitations of free backlink generators, it's very unlikely that the content will vary significantly from post to post.  Depending on which free backlink generator you're using, you may be able to use multiple keywords for anchor text or you may have to stick with one piece of anchor text per time you generate new backlinks.

How Long Does a Free Backlink Generator Take to Work?

Some people start using a free backlinks generator assuming that they'll be able to watch the meteoric rise of their SERPs within a few hours or days.  This scenario is vanishingly unlikely, though, because getting a backlink is only the first step to having it affect your rankings.

Before you can have the rankings boost from a new backlink, Google will need to index it.  That means it needs to find and see the backlink.  Typically, websites that have sitemaps are easier for search engines to index, while very badly organized websites with many “orphan pages” (that no other page on the website links to) are much harder to index.

On average, you can expect about 20 percent or so of your links to be indexed within a month of posting them.  The others may take several months more, and of course, in some situations Google may not find a link you've posted at all.

Will Google Penalize Me For Using a Free Backlink Generator?

This is the part where using a free backlinks generator gets very tricky.  In fact, most of the time, it's probably a bad idea to use a free backlink generator, because these generators typically produce low quality content and post it to low quality websites.  If too many of your website's backlinks come from low PageRank websites (like the ones commonly used by a free backlinks generator), you could actually suffer from penalties to your search rankings.

Ah, but, you say, you've found a free backlink generator that only puts your backlinks on websites with a high PageRank!  How about those?  Well, the truth is that Google engineers are still a few steps ahead of you.  If you're building backlinks too fast, you'll get penalized.  If too many of your backlinks, proportionally, come from high PageRank websites, you can get penalized.  If you're getting way more backlinks than most websites with your traffic level—you guessed it, you'll be penalized.  What's more, Google is getting better at detecting unnatural link building efforts with every passing week.

What does this mean for you?  That at the end of the day, using any kind of free backlinks generator is a risky proposition.  Sure, it's possible that your SERPs will climb—at least for now.  But later on, you could find yourself de-listed because of a suspicion of link buying, or penalized until none of your web pages show up in the top 50 pages of any search.  That's not the kind of long term return on investment you want, so think carefully before using any free backlinks generator tool.

Is a Free Backlink Generator Worse Than Paid Options?

If Google's good at detecting unnatural backlink generation, do paid tools work any better than their free counterparts?  The answer is actually yes.  In many cases, unlike free backlink generator tools, paid generation tools also include service by real people who can help you build much more natural looking links.

Paying for a backlink generation service, especially if their focus is on creating organic looking, contextual backlinks, is much safer than using a free backlinks generator.  Of course, it also costs significantly more, but think how much it will cost your website in the long run if you're penalized for over optimization and can no longer draw clients in with search.

Alternatives to Using a Free Backlink Generator

If you're wary about using a free backlinks generator (and you should be!), check out other articles on lawfirms.laws.com about building your own backlinks.  By building your own, you'll have more control over your online reputation and a lot less fear of the unknown.  Organic backlinks look great not just to Google, but to the actual human beings who can become your legal clients.

Law firms today don't just need to find inbound link sources and get their links listed.  In today's fast paced search engine optimization world, that's just not enough—case studies show that a month after you find inbound links and place them, only 20 percent will be indexed by Google.  To make sure that the links you find are indexed and that you maintain them for a long time, you might need some guidance.  Keep reading this guide to learn not only some great places to find inbound links, but also tips about keeping the links you've worked so hard to get.

Places to Find Inbound Links: Blogs

One of the best places to find inbound link traffic is the blogosphere.  Before you start a blog, it's a good idea to start following some legal blogs to get a feel for what their scope is like and how they're using their blog to market their law firm.  If you jump into the deep end right away, without even seeing how blogs are done, you could find yourself alienating potential readers by violating conventions.

Once you have a blog, it's easy to find inbound link sources in the form of blog comments both on your blog and on the blogs of others.  You can find inbound links by posting comments, including full anchor text hyperlinks to your homepage, on the blogs of other people.  Make sure that when you're responding to a blog, it's not a generic response—you'll have much more success with inbound links that are contextually relevant and show some evidence of prior planning and thought.

Places to Find Inbound Links: Social Networking Websites

Websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter offer significant opportunities to find inbound link resources.  If you're not already a member of all three of these websites, you need to be to find inbound links quickly and efficiently.  These three sites are all high in PageRank value, which means that links from them are significantly more valuable than if you had just gotten an inbound link from a low PageRank site.

You can not only find inbound links on these websites by posting them yourself, but also by fostering an environment where conversations are likely to take place.  You can find inbound link sources in these conversations, just by seeing who's talking about your services and what they're saying.

Places to Find Inbound Links: Local Directories

When you're trying to find inbound link sources that will help attract local searchers—who are much more likely to convert than people who aren't using a location term in their search—you should first look into making your business's voice heard on local directory websites.

By making sure that your law firm appears in local directories, you'll find inbound links are automatically generated to your website.  Not only that, when you find inbound link sources in local directories, they're likely to be indexed very quickly and will contribute to Google's “local search” results, which occupy most of the first page when people search for location based terms.

Places to Find Inbound Links: Social Bookmarking Sites

Another great environment for anyone looking to find inbound link sources is the social bookmarking website.  These sites first became popular during the “web 2.0” movement, and many, like Reddit, are strong and getting stronger every day.  On these websites, anyone can post a link and other people may or may not promote it, increasing its popularity and visibility.

Not only is it easy to find inbound link sources on these websites (usually an account takes only a few minutes to register, and then you can post!), but you'll also find that they can help generate buzz about your website.  However, if you're going to post on these websites, you'll need to have really great content.  People on social bookmarking sites have seen a whole lot of the internet—you need to get creative to really impress them and get website traffic from your inbound links.

Places to Find Inbound Links: Question and Answer Sites

Because lawyers are subject matter experts, question and answer websites are a natural fit for anyone looking to find inbound link sources.  Try answering some basic questions that have recently been posted to a website like Yahoo Answers.  By including an inbound link to your own website, you'll potentially draw in new clients and help your search engine rankings as well.

Any time you answer questions on one of these websites, it's important to include a disclaimer about your answers not constituting legal advice.  Try to speak only in more general terms about the law, rather than about the specifics of someone's case.

Get Your Inbound Links Indexed

It doesn't help to find inbound link sources if the links you make are never indexed.  That's why it's critical to tier your backlinks whenever possible.  What is tiering?  Simply put, it's making sure that there are links to the webpages that your backlinks are on.  Some websites make this easy—most of the time, a website with a site index will be very easy for Google to index and won't require any additional tiered backlinking.

Tiering your backlinks can double or even triple your indexing rate after a month.  This is one of the fastest and easiest ways to get ahead of your competition.  Even if they're able to find inbound link sources at the same rate as you, you'll be ahead because the websites you're getting links from index you faster and have better PageRank scores.

Don't Get Your Inbound Links Deleted

In order to minimize the prospect of your inbound link being erased, possibly before it can even be indexed, you'll need to follow the guidelines of any website you post to.  Failing to do this is a gamble, and even if it “pays off” and your link doesn't get deleted, your violation of the rules is likely to be noted by other community members.

When in doubt, it's a good idea to just “lurk” as a non-posting member of a new online community before starting to actually participate.  This way, you can get a feel for what is and is not acceptable before you do something that would call negative attention to yourself or your law firm.
 

You've tried reading other articles about getting inbound links for your law firm's website, but you're still left confused and needing the basics.  What are inbound links, and why do they really matter?  Does your law firm really need to be working on building inbound links, or is there a more productive use of your marketing time and budget?  What are inbound links already going to your website saying about you?  You can get all the answers to these questions, and more, by reading this guide.

What are Inbound Links?

It's best to start with the very basics of inbound links when you're brand new to finding linking opportunities.  What are inbound links?  In short, they're just any kind of link to your website from any other website.  That's it.

The real question is, what are inbound links doing to your search engine results?  It turns out that inbound links are the single most important factor when search engines today determine the rankings of your web pages in search results.  What are inbound links doing that makes them so important?  Well, the reason that someone posts a link to a website can vary, but usually it's at least a good indicator that someone thinks your website is interesting or informative.

When more and more people think that your website is interesting, search engines tend to rank your results before the results of pages that may not be as interesting.  That's why keyword density doesn't matter as much today as your inbound linking.

Who Needs Inbound Links?

Now that you've got the basics (like “what are inbound links?”) down, it's time to move on to the next question.  Who actually needs to build inbound links?  Should they only be built by law firms that already have very popular websites and an established client base?

The answer to this last question is a vehement no.  Remember, inbound links are critically important to search, and search is how over 80 percent of people today look for their lawyer.  If you're ignoring your search engine placement, you're leaving money on the table.

Even a very small law firm can begin to build inbound links and start to work on getting to the front page of Google search results for specific niche phrases and keywords.  When you're at the front page, you'll see a sharp spike in website traffic and, more importantly, client conversions.

Checking Out the Competition

One of the easiest and best things you can do to improve your inbound links is to analyze your competitors.  Think of which of your competitors seems to have the biggest and best online presence in searches for attorneys in your geographic area and practice specialties.  Now, what are inbound links that are working for them?  When you can find that information out, you can often start to build your own inbound links in the same spaces.

In order to find out what are the inbound links that the competition is using, you'll need to use some sort of backlink checker tool.  These are abundant online, and can tell you a huge range of information about the inbound links your competition is using to get ahead.  You can tell what are the inbound links that have high value and high PageRank scores, as well as which links are bringing in the most traffic.

When you've looked at the links your competition is building, you can start to look at those websites and figure out how your competitors got linked there.  In many cases, you'll find that you can post in the exact same places that they did, which can bring your links dramatically closer to theirs in search rankings.

Where Can I Find the Best Inbound Links?

When people talk about inbound links today, they often want to know what are inbound links that will stay put and really continue to provide value for their website.  Many types of links that used to be valuable have since been devalued by Google's algorithms after they proved easy for spammers to abuse.

The best inbound links will be on websites with a high PageRank, .edu websites, or websites that already have a similar context to your law firm site.  You should avoid any websites that have no contextual relevance whatsoever to your practice, because Google will often disregard these links outright when computing how authoritative your website is.

Of course, if you really want to know what are inbound links that will be looked at, you need to start building the links completely organically.  This means getting people to post your content on their own, without being prompted.  The best way to do this is to make sure that your content is so relevant and interesting that it seems more like a giveaway of something great than like an advertisement.

How Can I Make Sure My Inbound Links Work?

If you're unsure that your inbound links are still performing, you can use inbound link checker tools to monitor them.  These tools can verify that all of your inbound links are going to valid parts of your website, not a 404 error.

When you check your inbound links, you can also look to see which ones are working best.  What are inbound links that work going to look like?  Typically they'll be from websites with a high PageRank, and they'll be contextual, which is to say, they'll be about some aspect of the area of law you practice.  These are the links least likely to be deleted by a site owner later and least likely to get caught in any of Google's over optimization filters.

Where Can I Get More Information About Inbound Links?

If you're still not quite sure how to build inbound links, or you just want more specific information on where to build new links to your website, lawfirms.laws.com is a great resource for up to the minute information on the latest SEO trends and software.  Other articles right here on this site can give you great details on how to build your links from the ground up—without using any automated shortcuts.

If you've been working on building an inbound link presence for SEO purposes, you might have started to wonder where all your links now come from.  Sometimes, when law firms start doing this in 2012, it's because Google has sent them a warning about some of their inbound links seeming unnatural.  Whether you're just curious about your links or you—like about 5 percent of webmasters—have been punished by Google Penguin, you need this guide.  Keep reading to learn about inbound link checker software and how it can make your job easier.

What Are Inbound Links?

Inbound links are now the single most important aspect of search engine optimization, responsible for up to 70 percent of what your website's final rankings in Google's searches look like.  If you're not deliberately working on inbound linking, you're probably missing out on many inbound link resources that are easy to use and don't take a lot of specialized training to understand.

An inbound link can come from just about anywhere, but Google prefers some types of links to others.  Google assigns a number to every website between 0 and 10 called a PageRank that acts as a stand-in for a website's level of popularity and authority.  If you get an inbound link from a website with PageRank 9, you'll see much more impact on your search rankings than you would from an inbound link from a PageRank 1 website.

Certain other things can also impact how much weight Google attaches to your inbound link presence.  If you have .edu links, they will outperform their PageRank, because they tend to be much harder links to get.  This means that you should dedicate more time to seeking out high value links, either from .edu websites or high PR sites.

What Is an Inbound Link Checker?

Once you start to develop an inbound link strategy, it's time to start thinking about software.  Using an inbound link checker tool periodically is a good way to make sure that the inbound links you've already built are working just as you had intended.

Different inbound link checkers are made for different purposes.  For instance, if you want to do an analysis of the anchor text that is on your inbound links, you can use an inbound link checker that gives you this information.  Some tools can help you compare your inbound link strategy to that of a competitor—when you compare yourself to a competitor with a great Google presence, you can get a lot of new ideas about where to post your inbound links.

Even if you don't feel the need to compare with your inbound link checker, you can still find out a lot of valuable information.  You can also check your inbound link sources to see if any of them are pointing to pages that no longer exist on your website, so that you can build redirect links or ask a webmaster to change the link destination.

Why Do We Need Link Auditing?

It's very important to run an inbound link checker tool periodically on your inbound links.  If you don't, your inbound link presence could be compromised in any of several ways.  Google now penalizes websites that show clear indications of over optimization, and can even de-list your website if it appears that you paid for the inbound links that you've already received.

Because the ways that Google detects over optimization are predictable and relatively well understood, you should take them into account when you run your inbound link checker.  For example, if every inbound link to your website is from the same IP address, you could very well end up seeing yourself penalized.  Google also monitors with its own inbound link checker algorithms whether you're building inbound links too quickly for your results to be natural.  Try raping up your inbound link building efforts very slowly in order to avoid tripping this detection system.

Help!  I Got an “Over Optimization” Warning From Google!

If Google believes that your website is over optimized, odds are you haven't been running an inbound link checker.  Your website can recover, and the damage isn't irreversible, but you need to start taking your inbound link sources into consideration before you do anything worse to your search rankings.

To get the over optimization penalty to stop, you'll need to ask webmasters hosting the offending links to pull the links off their website.  This means running an inbound link checker and finding out which links are most likely to be setting off Google's detection.  If the webmasters of those websites won't delete the inbound link in question, you can appeal to Google.  You'll need to show them the documentation, because in order to stop penalizing you, they need to see a good faith effort to have the link removed or changed to a “nofollow” link.

Finding the Right Inbound Link Balance

To avoid ever getting the over optimization message, you'll need to work on balancing the kinds of links you're getting.  The best results from an inbound link checker will show a wide variety of links, rather than just a few sources.  This diversification strategy not only makes your inbound link footprint look much more natural, but also ensures that even if a link source falls into disrepute later on, you have a number of other types of links to fall back on.

Having the right link balance isn't just about sources, either.  You'll also want to vary your anchor text, sometimes substantially, in order to avoid accusations of over optimization.  Many websites that are very over optimized use the same exact keyword match phrase over and over as link anchor text, which is a very unnatural pattern and quite easy for search engines to identify.

Any time you use an inbound link checker, you shouldn't see any one type of result that overwhelms the others.  If you do, it's time to branch out—or possibly to ask for “nofollow” links or link removal at the website that is dominating your link presence.

Building inbound links is the cornerstone of any successful search engine optimization strategy today.  What's surprising is how few law firms are actually doing it.  Currently, only about a third of United States businesses doing internet marketing are working on inbound link building at all.  If you don't know how to start building inbound links, or if your previous inbound link building strategies have come up short, keep reading.  You'll learn 7 tips, including six that should be basic today and one advanced strategy for firms that really want to boost their firm's SEO performance.

#1:  Inbound Link Building is Like a Diet—Balance is Key

If you're not maintaining well balanced link sources when you're building inbound links, it's very likely that you'll soon see penalties from search engines.  This is because search engines want to discourage people from unnatural inbound link building efforts and creating any content that could be perceived as spam or overly repetitive.

Because of this, if you're going to work on building inbound links, you can't just use one resource.  Many services that provide inbound link building only work with one or two types of links, and this is no longer good enough.  Try building inbound links in house, using both big web sources and sources you have actual personal connections to, in order to get a much more diverse link presence than if you had outsourced.

Anchor text needs to vary as well.  If you start building inbound links that all use identical anchor text, Google's search algorithm, Penguin, can detect exactly what you're doing and penalize your rankings to stop you from doing it in the future.  You'll want to vary your anchor text, including both the exact keyword matches you hope will bring in SEO results, as well as branded anchor text (like the name of your law firm or an attorney who works there) or just ordinary words and phrases.

#2:  Don't Do Too Much Inbound Link Building At Once

It's easy to go a little bit crazy when you start building inbound links—there are just so many sources to choose from today, and that can make it easy to just list dozens of links all at once.  If you're doing this, you'd better make sure that your website already has very high traffic numbers.  Otherwise, Google is likely to notice that you've done much more inbound link building than your web traffic would seem to indicate is natural.

In order to work on building inbound links without Google having this kind of problem, you should start very slowly increasing the number of links being built to your website.  Link building won't look suspicious to Google's algorithms if it's done slowly and in accordance with the growth of your website's traffic.

#3:  Only Build Links to Great Content

It can be easy to forget in the middle of your inbound link building efforts what the final goal of link building really is.  At the end of the day, you're still trying to get conversions, not just people clicking on your website.  Even the greatest efforts at building inbound links will go wrong if your website is ugly, outdated, or slow.

That's right—slow.  If your website is slow, all the inbound link building you've been doing may be for nothing.  Google now takes your website's speed into account when deciding which sites should be at or near the top of the rankings heap.  To have the best success when building inbound links, you need to make sure your website works quickly and is hosted on reliable servers.

#4:  Don't Take Inbound Link Building Shortcuts

When building inbound links, don't make the mistake of thinking that you can make lasting and high value links using any kind of automated link building program.  These programs, while they may be flashy and promise high quality links, are at the end of the day just software.  They can't really understand the context of a website, and can't really decide whether it would help or hurt your law firm's reputation to have a particular link posted.

If you're taking the automated inbound link building shortcut, don't be surprised if the links that work so well today fail when Google makes its next algorithm update.  Building inbound links in an automated program just to take a shortcut is incredibly short-sighted, and could lead to big problems later if Google penalizes your site.

#5:  Audit Your Inbound Link Building

Periodically, you need to check to make sure that your links still work and that you're maintaining a diverse group of inbound links.  This is a great role for a computer program.  Link auditing programs can check the links you're receiving, including the PageRank and anchor text.  This helps you understand how to build effective links in the future and keep the ones you have intact.

#6:  Keep Informed About Changes to the Web

Because of changing algorithms, it's a good idea to make sure you're always up to date about any changes that are occurring with Google and other search engines.  Consider subscribing to an RSS feed for some blogs about search engine marketing, or just keep an eye on lawfirms.laws.com for the latest in information about how to keep building links in a constantly changing environment.

#7:  Advanced Technique—Tier Your Inbound Link Building

This technique is really only for people who already understand all of the previous techniques.  If you want to make sure that your links are indexed more quickly (and that they therefore give you more “link juice” faster), you can try building backlinks to your backlinks.  While this process can be hastened with a computer program, it's once again better to build quality links on your own so that you don't risk penalties.

Two and even three or four tiers of inbound link building can make it much more likely that your link building efforts will increase your rankings fast.  While the first tier of links is obviously most important, every new tier you build improves the indexing rate of your backlinks.

Today, you probably already know that it isn't enough to just build inbound links to your website if you want to get to the top page.  A quality inbound link counts for more, and if you're not building quality inbound links, Google will take notice.  It penalized over 10 percent of web pages for building links from easy-to-game press release and article marketing websites with Google Panda.  In this guide, you'll learn what makes a quality inbound link, and how to create quality inbound links that won't earn penalties from new Google algorithms.

Step 1: Know What Quality Inbound Links Look Like

Before you can start making quality inbound links for yourself, you should take a look around the web at some high quality websites and look at what their inbound links look like.  You'll notice a few things about any quality inbound link you find online: they're often, but not always, linked with relatively innocuous phrases instead of exact keyword matches for Google searches.

Quality inbound links will be contextual, which is to say, they'll make sense in the context of the website around them.  If you build a link that has very little to do with any of the content on a web page, it is very unlikely to be a quality inbound link of any sort.

You'll also notice that quality inbound links have a tendency to appear on higher quality websites with more traffic.  While it's quite possible to build a quality inbound link on a website with a lesser reputation, higher quality websites tend to exclusively allow quality linking, while even a low quality inbound link might not be deleted on a low quality website.

Step 2: Get Accounts on Major Websites

After you've given yourself an education in what quality inbound links look like, it's time to work on some basic administrative tasks.  Before you can build a quality inbound link on many websites, you'll need to build a profile and register for an account.  It's often a good idea to get your accounts significantly before you actually start building quality inbound links: some websites are more suspicious of link building efforts that come from new accounts.

In order to reduce suspicions that you are just working on link building, you should make at least some posts once you've registered your account that aren't just designed to give you another quality inbound link.  After you've gotten a reputation as someone who makes quality posts and contributes to the community, it's much more likely that you can post quality inbound links without risking post deletion or an account ban.

Step 3: Take it Slow When Building Quality Inbound Links

The fact that you'll need to build up a reputation on websites before you post your first quality inbound link isn't so bad.  It gives you time, in fact, to ramp up your number of quality inbound links slowly—which is great, because Google can penalize websites that are building their quality inbound link number faster than their traffic patterns would indicate was natural.

Because of this, you should try to start by just making one or two quality inbound links per day, especially if your website is brand new or has a very small user base.  For larger websites that are already getting a substantial amount of traffic and some organic quality inbound links, you won't necessarily need to keep your activities at that low a level, but don't make your quality inbound link number more than half a dozen a day, at least for the first couple of weeks.

Step 4: Use a Variety of Quality Inbound Link Types

When a website is getting quality inbound links naturally, they don't just come from one type of website.  Having all of your quality inbound link traffic come from just a few websites is a surefire sign to Google that you've been purchasing links or posting them yourself instead of having them build organically.

By making sure that you have quality inbound links coming from more than ten different sources, you'll be able to control what Google sees and limit your chances of being perceived as a link buyer.  You should audit your links periodically to make sure that they are still coming from a variety of sources.

Step 5: Vary Your Anchor Text

It's not enough to make sure that your quality inbound link websites vary.  If you're making hundreds of quality inbound links, but they all have the same exact anchor text, you'll instantly be seen as over optimized.  Think about it: when websites give a link to someone, they very rarely use an exact keyword match unless they're working together.

Varying your anchor text makes every quality inbound link you produce look much more natural.  Even if your competitors are making many quality inbound links with identical anchor text, keep in mind that as Google's ranking algorithms become more sophisticated, you'll surpass their performance.

Step 6: Seek Out High PageRank Websites

While not every quality inbound link you create should come from a website with a high PageRank (Google's system for measuring how important a website is), it's much easier to raise your rankings with high PageRank sites.  At least some of your links should always come from sites with a PageRank of higher than 5.  If all of your links are from low quality websites, Google may see this as evidence of link buying.

Step 7: Use Contextual Websites for Quality Inbound Links

The highest quality inbound link you can get is one that is relevant and contextual.  Make sure that all the websites you're including in your linking efforts actually have some bearing on your law firm outside of their PageRank.

If you're not making your quality inbound links contextual, it becomes obvious very quickly and will usually be regarded as spam.  Because no law firm wants a spammer reputation, it's always best to avoid this linking strategy—especially since Google is likely to catch on quickly and penalize you.

While website submission for Yahoo used to be one of the biggest things you could do for your website, Yahoo now lags behind other search engines with less than 5 percent of market share.  Yahoo website submission is different today than it has been in the past, because of recent changes to how the search engine works.  While Yahoo website submission is free and always has been, you need to keep updated about these changes in order to make sure your submission is handled correctly.

Why Do Websites Need Yahoo Website Submission?

If you're already submitting your website to Google, should you really do website submission to Yahoo as well?  Is doing Yahoo website submission for free a waste of time, and does Google just do it for Yahoo anyhow?  There is a lot of misinformation on the web about website submission for Yahoo, so we should clear some things up first.

First of all, Yahoo recently made a deal with Microsoft's search engine, Bing, that replaced Yahoo's in-house search results with search results from Bing.  Because of this change, doing website submission for Yahoo is now the same as doing website submission for Bing.  Not everything changed: Yahoo website submission is free and easy, and even still starts from the same page.  In fact, if you hadn't kept up with the news about the changes to search results, you might not even know that Yahoo website submission had changed so significantly.

If you've already submitted your website to Bing, there's no need to do a website submission for Yahoo as well.  While it certainly won't hurt to do a Yahoo website submission for free, you're basically duplicating your effort for no reason at all.  However, you should make sure to do either a Yahoo website submission or a Bing submission: combined, these two search engines make up about 20 percent of the search traffic in the United States.

Does It Matter Who Does Our Website Submission to Yahoo?

While some website tasks could get your website penalized if you do them wrong, Yahoo website submission is basically risk free.  This means that you could not only have the intern do it—you could also have a computer program do it for you.  Several different programs have been developed to help people with automatic website submission for Yahoo.  If you're interested in doing your Yahoo website submission for free while doing several other submissions at the same time, you can easily do that with most automated submitter programs.

Why is Yahoo Website Submission Free?

Lawyers are sometimes skeptical about things that are offered for “free.”  Is Yahoo website submission really free?  How can they give away the service?  The answer is: yes, website submission for Yahoo is completely free.  The reason has to do with how search engines work.  Yahoo website submission actually makes the site stronger, because it makes it so that more websites about more topics are listed.

You can also do Yahoo website submission for free using the Yahoo directory.  The Yahoo Directory isn't the same as search—instead, it's a human-organized directory that tries to put websites into different categories for interested people.  

How Do We Submit Our Website?

It's very simple to do website submission for Yahoo.  All you need to do is go to this page: https://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html and click the first link.  You'll see that your Yahoo website submission is actually being handled through Bing now, due to the changes in how search results are served.  Follow the instructions, and you'll be able to do your Yahoo website submission for free in record time.

Website submission to Yahoo should always be done both for search and in the directory.  Yahoo website submission on the directory takes a little more work, though.  You'll need to find where you want to put your website submission for Yahoo Directory, and make sure that the category is accurate.  If it isn't, your website might not be listed in the directory or could be removed from it later.

When Do We Submit a Website to Yahoo?

Before you do any Yahoo website submission of any kind, you should make sure that you're not posting it before it is ready.  Website submission for Yahoo is much more effective when you are absolutely certain that your site is fast and fully functional.  Check to make sure that your website works on several different operating systems, including mobile operating systems like iOS (used on Apple products like iPhones and iPads) and Android (the most common operating system for smartphones today).

If you're confident in your website's look and feel, it's time to do Yahoo website submission.  After you do Yahoo website submission for free, don't be surprised if you can't find your site right away.  Website submission for Yahoo takes some time to work.  In some cases, your Yahoo website submission may be listed by Yahoo and Bing within a few days, while other websites take longer to process and index and may take up to 4-6 weeks!  Don't view website submission to Yahoo and Bing as an instant cure for your website's traffic issues—it just isn't designed to work that way.

Submitting To Multiple Search Engines

Yahoo website submission may be fast, but it still takes time, and when you combine it with all the other website submissions you're doing, this simple task can start taking up a lot of your day.  Instead of doing your Yahoo website submission for free using Yahoo itself, consider doing a website submission for Yahoo using an automated submitter.

Automated submission programs still let you do Yahoo website submission for free.  They just let you do it while you're also putting your site onto many other search engines and directories.  Using a submitter program can save you hours versus tediously giving the same information over and over when doing your website submission for Yahoo, Google, and so on.
 

Referral marketing has always been big business for lawyers.  In the 20th century, referral marketing almost always meant direct word of mouth recommendations from one friend or relative to another.  Today, the whole idea of referrals has changed—online referrals are now an incredibly influential force for many law firms.  If you want to get on the online referral bandwagon but don't quite know how, you need to read this guide.  You'll learn how to start getting online referrals, and which online referral marketing techniques are worth your time and money.

Why Lawyers Are Uniquely Primed for Online Referral Marketing

“Going viral,” which means getting word of mouth attention online, is one of the biggest things that most online companies hope for.  Of course, attorneys have been profiting from referral based marketing and word of mouth advertising for a long time.  Every case a lawyer wins is a chance for a happy client to tell several friends about their positive experience.

Online referrals are in many ways even better than an in person one.  Let's say that someone decides to give you an online referral by telling their friends on Facebook: “My divorce is final—a special thank you to my lawyer, [your name], for helping me through a tough time and being so patient and understanding.”

As soon as that status is posted to Facebook, hundreds or even thousands of people can see.  These people are more likely to be geographically near to you than people who find you through random search keywords, and are also more likely to be demographically poised to use your services.  Online referrals have a much bigger reach than someone talking to another person one-on-one about their legal services experience.

Before You Start Online Referral Marketing

Before you start working on getting online referrals from past clients and other attorneys you know, you should make sure that your website is ready.  Have good, reliable hosting so that no one tries to visit a dead or overloaded website—odds are, if it's down the first time they check, they'll never be back to check a second time.

You should also make sure that your online referral marketing is directing to a website that looks clean and well organized.  People tend to assume that a website reflects the company it's advertising for, and if your website appears outdated and uncared for, people may make negative assumptions about your ability to keep up to date with the latest legal information.  Having a great website with no dead links is key to successful online referral marketing.

B2B Online Referral Marketing: The LinkedIn Advantage

If your practice consists largely of B2B work, you may have a single source for achieving phenomenal online referral marketing success: LinkedIn.  This social networking site is the lawyer's favorite, with more than four in five attorneys in the United States reporting that they now have a profile there.  If you're not on LinkedIn yet, you need to be.

LinkedIn can be a great source of online referral marketing, because it's a good way to make sure that other attorneys in your area know that you know your stuff.  By connecting with attorneys in other specialty areas, you can start to refer clients to each other.  Posting to LinkedIn, especially if you're posting links to original content like great blog articles, will make it much easier for other attorneys to send you online referral traffic even if they don't know you very well in person.

B2C Online Referral Marketing: Facebook and Twitter

For B2C oriented attorneys, online referral marketing looks a little bit different.  Facebook and Twitter are the two most commonly used social networks among consumers, and you should probably have a profile on both if you want to get these online referrals.

While there are several ways to get all of your Facebook posts to appear on Twitter, or vice versa, this is a terrible technique.  You should tailor your content for the user experience at each website.  You should also avoid over-loading your feeds with advertising.  This will make it much easier for people to give you online referral traffic.

To start online referral marketing using Facebook or Twitter, you can start by just asking your best and most loyal clients to mention you on these websites.  Many of them will likely be willing, and any clicks that are generated by these referrals have a much better overall conversion rate than web searches.

Blogs and Online Referral Marketing

You can also use your blog to generate online referrals.  How you should handle online referral marketing through blogs depends on who you are trying to talk to with your blog.  In some cases, just blogging itself may be fantastic online marketing for you—if you're talking about topics primarily relevant to other lawyers, this extra visibility to colleagues will make sure that you have all of the referrals that you can handle.

If you're marketing to consumers, you may want to try to integrate some of your blog posts with the marketing efforts you're already making on Facebook and Twitter.  This will make it so that your brand image is consistent across several different platforms.

Review Websites and Online Referral Marketing

When your clients want to give you a positive review, you might have tried putting the review on your website—and that's still a good idea.  But what about giving those reviews more reach?  Online review websites like avvo.com and yelp.com are one of the best ways to make sure that your reviews are seen by any prospective client who decides to research your practice.  

You can ask past clients for reviews on these websites using your social media presence or even just talk to them over the phone or in person about it.  Most of the time, satisfied customers are happy to leave a review for businesses they've had a good experience with.  This allows your online referral marketing to reach not only the friends and connections of the people you're connected to on social networks, but also complete strangers who are trying to research a local law firm.