If you ask twenty different search engine optimization marketing professionals how to increase Page Rank, you'll probably get twenty different answers.  The problem with asking these pros about ways to increase Page Rank is that many of them are selling their own systems.  Keeping sales numbers up sometimes means promoting ideas that are unproven, outdated, or just plain wrong.  In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the facts about how to increase Page Rank, but also the myths perpetuated by  SEO pros.

FACT: You Can Increase Page Rank With Traffic

When learning how to increase Page Rank, the single biggest thing you can do for your website is to bring more traffic in.  More traffic almost always equates to an increase in Page Rank.  How you draw traffic in is, of course, entirely up to you.  Traffic numbers will still matter even if you're bringing it in with paid advertisements.  In fact, when you're first learning how to increase Page Rank, it can be useful to bring traffic in with paid ads just to get the first couple of levels out of the way.

MYTH: If You Increase Page Rank, Traffic Goes Up

If your Page Rank goes up when your traffic goes up, does that mean that your Page Rank increase will translate to more web traffic?  The answer, sadly, is no.  If any marketer is telling you how to increase Page Rank so that your website will gain in popularity, you're putting the cart before the horse.  

Google keeps track of PageRank dynamically and in real time.  What this means for you is that even though you'll only see an increase in Page Rank when it is rounded up to the next integer value, your Page Rank could be slowly increasing for a long time.  While going from a 4 to 5 may look exciting, it won't make a big difference to your search results because all that really happened was that your rank went from a 4.49 to a 4.51.

FACT: Your Total Page Rank Matters

When learning how to increase Page Rank, you should focus not just on increasing the PR value of your main home page, but on an increase in Page Rank values throughout your website.  This is because in addition to considering the Page Rank of the page a link comes from when indexing search results, Google also takes into account the overall PR value of the website, including all of the pages that the search engine currently has indexed.  Anyone who wants to know how to increase Page Rank should be concerned with more than just their front page—otherwise, it's like wanting to know how to improve your house, but only by painting the front door a brighter color.

MYTH: The Page Rank of Your Inbound Links Doesn't Matter

A few years ago, if you tried to increase the Page Rank of your inbound links pages, it would have made some, but not much, impact.  Today, learning how to increase Page Rank is even more critical for your inbound links.  Many search engine optimization services today specialize in ways to increase the Page Rank of inbound links to give them more link juice.

Keep in mind that if you have too many inbound links with a very low (PR value of 0, usually) Page Rank, you can actually find yourself being penalized.  That's because many websites that have this kind of linking pattern for their inbound links are actually doing artificial, black hat link building.  They spam blog comments on unmoderated blogs rather than trying to create real buzz with their own content, and Google isn't stupid—the search algorithms notice, and fast.

FACT: You Can Increase Page Rank Faster With Original Content

If you think that you know how to increase Page Rank for your website, and it involves using great content that other people have already made, think again.  Google actually makes it much easier to increase Page Rank values if you're creating something that doesn't exist anywhere else on Google so far.  Google's focus is on delivering the best original content and the most relevant contextual results, so the more you can do to move your website toward those goals, the more likely you'll learn how to increase Page Rank for your web pages organically.

MYTH: Downloading Google's Toolbar Can Increase Page Rank

Some search engine optimization experts swear that just downloading the Google toolbar is a good way to start increasing your PR values.  While this is a piece of advice that gets trotted out in dozens of “how to increase Page Rank” articles, it's never been proven to work.  Now, it's true that you can use Google's toolbar to check your Page Rank and monitor its progress, but nothing about using it will increase your Page Rank value particularly.

FACT: Social Networks Help Increase Page Rank

Remember how we said that traffic is the number one contributor if you want to know how to increase Page Rank?  One of the best ways to get traffic coming into your website is to post links on social networking and social bookmarking websites.  Often, a post on one of these sites will give you a high PR link for a short time, and then it will retreat to a lower PR as people stop reading it.  However, in the meanwhile, you may receive more links on more blogs and other news sources, each of which will contribute a high quality, contextual, high PR backlink to your site.

MYTH: Large Numbers of Inbound Links Increase Page Rank

Simply having a huge quantity of inbound links is no way to increase your Page Rank.  Low PR value links, as we've mentioned, can actually hurt it.  You should work hard to build links not just for their value to your Page Rank, but for their value as contextual linkages between your website and other people's sites.  When you look at links in this way, you'll be much more likely to build quality link structures—and that, in turn, is more likely to increase your Page Rank than any other strategy you can have.

When it's time to start a law blog for your online legal marketing campaign, it can be hard to know what kind of blog to write.  While it's always good to “write what you know,” most attorneys could go in any of several directions for their blog.  What's more, it's almost always a good idea to choose a specific style and focus for your blog, instead of trying to do everything.  In this guide, let's take a look at a few different types of law blogs.  You can choose which type of law blog is right for you based on your own strengths and who you're attempting to market to.

#1: The Current Events Law Blog

One type of law blog that is often popular even with general interest readers is the current events blog.  Talking about current events in the law is a popular way for several types of attorneys to get readers and eventually clients.

Typically, people who keep current events law blogs are attorneys who are involved in criminal law, personal injury, and other types of law where there are current news stories fairly consistently.  If you tried to have a current events law blog as, for instance, a personal bankruptcy lawyer, you might have a hard time finding enough real news stories about changes to bankruptcy laws and so on to keep a blog.  If you think that you have enough material to mine for your blog, go for it.

These blogs can be among the easiest to keep updated, because you'll basically be linking to and commenting on news stories.  You can set up alerts on Google News to let you know when stories are published in the media about the area of law you practice, allowing you to get a head start on blogging about those stories.

#2: The Case Analysis Law Blog

Some people think that case analysis blogs and current events blogs are the same, but they're not.  While a current events blog will generally discuss recent happenings, including ongoing trials, in a conversational tone, a case analysis blog will generally look at the legal nuts and bolts behind court decisions.

Case analysis blogs are great for the Monday morning quarterbacks of the legal world.  Think you could have done better?  Talk about the different ways a case could have been resolved.  If you're convinced that a judge made a wrong decision, you can talk about why and what the right decision would have been.

#3: The Handy Tips Law Blog

If you're the kind of attorney who always has great practical advice for people before they're involved in a specific legal dispute, you might want to start this type of law blog.  Handy tips for consumers can be a great way to get people looking at your blog and is an excellent starting point for search engine marketing and optimization.

For example, if you're a criminal defense attorney, you can talk about how people can make sure that they're not saying too much to police when arrested, and how people can minimize their chances of being arrested during a routine traffic stop.  Bankruptcy attorneys can give financial tips and assessments of when it's best to declare bankruptcy.  Almost every legal niche has some room for blogs that contain real, easy to understand tips for consumers.

#4: The Lawyer's Lawyer Law Blog

Sometimes, you might not want to market to consumers or even to businesses.  Some of the most successful law blogs have been those that are actually tailored to other attorneys.  By catering to other lawyers, you may not be directly getting new clients, but you'll get something just as valuable: referrals.  Talking to other attorneys is a great way to be able to get clients through word of mouth, one of the most reliable methods of client development.

What's more, you can actually—if people at your firm have the time—run this kind of law blog in addition to one of the other kinds listed here.  Since they're targeted toward such different audiences, there's not likely to be a lot of overlap and duplicated effort.

#5: The List Law Blog

One way to get people interested in writing on the internet is to make it in the form of bullet pointed lists—just like this one!  So-called “listicle” websites like Cracked.com have made their mark on the online community, and framing your blog as lists of short points makes sure that people who are too busy for in-depth coverage can still read your blog and get something out of it.

#6: The Super Specialized Law Blog

One type of law blog is only for the kind of attorney who specializes in a very narrow legal area.  For instance, let's say that you're not just a personal injury attorney, but specifically a dog bite personal injury specialist.  If you start a blog, the best kind might be very specifically dog bite related.  This can ensure that you're getting exactly the people that you want to click through your search engine marketing efforts.

What's more, you'll usually find that there is less competition among these super specialized law blogs.  In fact, you may end up being one of the first few people in your specialty legal field to actually start a blog on the topic.

#7: The Special Interest Law Blog

This type of law blog isn't for a particular legal specialty, but rather for specific types of people.  For instance, you could start a blog that was about legal topics pertaining to women, or people from a particular country who had immigrated to the United States.  You could also create a law blog that was highly local, and would be primarily of interest to people who lived and worked in your local area.

Attorneys today are all looking for a way to get an edge on their competitors.  With over 85 percent of legal clients doing online research before even having an initial consultation with an attorney, online marketing techniques are becoming the single most vital part of lawyer marketing strategy.  One part of your online marketing that you should never neglect is website URL submission.  Free website URL submission is one of the easiest ways to get your website out there in front of people, and this guide will teach you how to do it.

Why Your Law Firm Site Needs Website URL Submission

When you make your website “live” by publishing it, you may be surprised to learn that you can't find it using Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any other search engine—at least, not right away.  These websites all use programs that “crawl” the web through existing links, trying to find new links through connections made by the old ones.  But maybe you don't want to wait for a web crawler to find your website—that's where website URL submission comes in.

Free website URL submission is slightly different on every website, but once you've submitted, your website will become part of a search engine's index.  This means that you'll actually be able to find yourself in search results—and, more importantly, after your website URL submission, other people will be able to find you.

Keep in mind that the process isn't instantaneous, and that it will take some time for your free website URL submission to start showing up in actual searches.  When you do your website URL submission to Google or Bing, for example, it can actually take four to six weeks to see your initial rise in rankings for your site's keywords.  While it's possible for this to happen more quickly—say, within two or three days—it's generally better to underpromise and overdeliver.

Finding Places for Free Website URL Submission

The best places to start your website URL submission spree are search engines.  If you want to, you can start to build a list of search engines so that you can get both obscure and common ones on your list of places to do a free website URL submission.  However, keep in mind that over 85 percent of search traffic comes from search algorithms made by just two websites: Bing (owned by Microsoft and responsible for about 20 percent of search traffic due to delivering results for both bing.com and yahoo.com) and Google.

By submitting to Bing and to Google, you'll be making sure that your free website URL submission reaches the most people possible.  If you only have minutes to do all of your website URL submission, those sites should be your first stops.  However, keep in mind that 15 percent of traffic is nothing to sneeze at—think of what a big deal it would be to see a 15 percent boost to your overall revenue numbers!  Doing free website URL submission to more obscure search engines, like Ask, can be very useful if you want to capitalize on the searches other people (like your competitors) aren't paying attention to.

You can also do website URL submission on directory sites.  You can use either general web directories, or more specific directory listings that only list attorney websites.  Both are good choices, and there's no reason not to diversify where you do your free website URL submission.

Avoid Placing Your Website URL Submission in These Places

Diversifying your free website URL submission locations doesn't mean that you should just insert yourself into every directory, though.  Some directories are completely without rules, and allow just about anyone to put their website in—even if it doesn't meet basic quality guidelines.  These directories generally aren't a good place to do website URL submission.  

Why?  Because Google actually keeps track of these unselective directories and devalues links coming from them.  This means that even though your link from a directory will still potentially give you some direct traffic, it's very unlikely that you will actually get any real authority, or link juice, that helps you move higher in search rankings.

Preparing to Make Your Free Website URL Submission

There are some things that you should do before you do any website URL submission at all. For example, you may want to work on your website's design and content first.  A website with poor web design may not meet Google's quality requirements for an acceptable free website URL submission.  You should make sure that it can display on several different browsers, including mobile browsers (or you can have an automatic redirect to a mobile site for mobile users).

You should also make sure that your hosting has relatively high speed.  Low speed can actually hamper your rankings, and when you do your website URL submission, Google will check out the speed your pages are delivered at.  You may want to run a test on your website before your free website URL submission to verify that page load times are low enough to avoid penalties from search engines.

Automating Website URL Submission with Software

If you don't want to do free website URL submission on just one website at a time, there is software that can help you to get it done more efficiently.  Website URL submission software makes it easy to, with a single click, send your website to many different search engines and directories.  You'll just need to fill your information in once, and then it will be saved and given in the proper format to as many different websites as you like.

Once you've gotten automated free website URL submission software, you should also make sure that your sites include a site index.  This will greatly increase the efficiency with which search engines will index your various web pages, and will make it much easier for people who are looking at your website to find the page they're looking for if they become lost or confused.

Over 90 percent of web search traffic comes from just half a dozen major search engine companies.  With so many people on the internet using the same tools to search, free website search engine submission has become very important for any lawyer looking to make sure that his or her website can be found easily online. 

If you've never done website search engine submission before, you might be intimidated, but don't worry—this is actually one of the easiest tasks you can do to start your search engine marketing.  We'll take it slowly in this guide and show you how to start with free website search engine submission, and what your next steps should be after it's done.

Indexing: Why Website Search Engine Submission Matters

So you've made your website, and you go to Google to search for it.  What comes up?  Not a thing!  Why?  Because of one word: indexing.  Google constantly maintains an index of all of the pages the search engine links to.  If you're not in the index, as far as Google—and the 2/3 of web searchers who use it—are concerned, you don't even really exist yet.

You can change all that in several different ways.  Google has programs designed to follow all available links and see where they go.  These programs, called “spiders” because they crawl on the web looking for links, can find you once you've accumulated some inbound links from other sites.  But what if you don't want to wait for these crawlers to find your website?  After all, doing that can take months, and you don't have that kind of time.

Instead of waiting to be indexed, you can do free website search engine submission.  Website search engine submission gives you the sure knowledge that a search engine has received your site and will index it as quickly as possible, as long as it meets content guidelines.

Website Search Engine Submission: Google and Bing

The two biggest search engines—where you should definitely do a free website search engine submission—are Google and Bing.  A few years ago, this article would have said “Google and Yahoo,” but today, Yahoo's search results are also served up by Microsoft's Bing search engine.  These two search engines will only take ten minutes to make a website search engine submission to—and those two submissions will put your website into the searches used by over 80% of web users.

To start by putting your first free website search engine submission URL into Google, go to www.google.com/submityourcontent.  When you go to this web page, you'll see a place for website search engine submission, and you should click there.  By following the step by step instructions on the web page, you'll be able to do a free website search engine submission within minutes.

Bing's procedure works in much the same way, and will also give you guidance in case you've never done a website search engine submission before.  Both of these websites also allow you to submit a site index in a specific format.  If you want to submit a site index (which is a very good idea in addition to doing your free website search engine submission), you should make sure first that it is in the correct format—an incorrectly formatted site index will be rejected and won't give you any better search rankings.

Don't Expect Instant Results

If you expect for your free website search engine submission to start giving you new clients right away, your expectations may need to be toned down.  Even after you do a website search engine submission, it still will take some time for your site to actually start appearing in the search results that normal web users are getting.

If you're not starting to see your website appear in searches after several weeks, you may want to inquire with a search engine to make sure that your submission was properly received and that it met all guidelines.  If there has been a mistake and your site wasn't indexed, the mistake will generally be corrected promptly.

You will usually see faster increases to your search rankings if you submitted your site index in addition to your traditional website search engine submission.  This is because site indices make it substantially easier for Google to look at all the different web pages on your site, not just your front page.

Beyond Website Search Engine Submission: Directory Links

Free website search engine submission is great, but without inbound links, it's likely that not many people will actually see the website that you've created.  That's because Google and other search engines base your search engine rankings in large part on the number and quality level of the inbound links you are able to build.

If you want to start building high quality inbound links to help make your website search engine submission successful, you can start by putting your website into directories.  Usually, the process for submitting your URL to a directory of websites is very similar to the process for free website search engine submission.

You should pay especially close attention to directories of other attorneys.  These are contextual directories and will be more valuable for your search engine results than more general directories that are not selective about what kinds of websites they accept through their submissions process.

Updating Your Website Search Engine Submission

As your website changes and expands, you may find that you need a site redesign to keep pace with changes to search algorithms or just changing tastes.  When you update your website, especially if you're updating the structure of the pages, you need to do a few things: you need to create redirects so that people coming to your old pages are directed to similar content on your newly designed website, and you need to do the free website search engine submission process again.

It may be effective to download a program online that helps you do free website search engine submission automatically.  These programs are not penalized by any search engines, and offer a convenient solution for busy marketing professionals who want to do website search engine submission as quickly as possible.

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.