One of the biggest changes that the internet has brought to the legal marketing world is the lawyer review.  Until websites like avvo.com and Yelp were developed, written reviews were mostly the purview of newspapers and magazines discussing food, art, and pop culture.  Today, more attorneys than ever are using Yelp for business marketing.  In this guide, we'll take a look at how Yelp came to dominate the online review field, and how using Yelp for business marketing at your firm can be one of the smartest decisions you make in 2012 or 2013.

Yelp: Reviews for Almost Anything

If you wanted to get a review for a law firm back in 2000, you'd have had very limited options.  You could do a web search that might reveal a review or two, especially if the law firm had some disgruntled customers, but it was very difficult to know which reviews were at all reliable.  You could also ask friends and family for their own recommendations, but of course this was not a very large sample of attorneys.

Yelp for business changed all of that.  Yelp's business model was very simple: if you allow web users to add their own reviews for any type of business, no matter what was being sold, people would have a single hub to get all their reviews from.  Today, that model is alive and well.  Whether you want to review your local McDonald's or an investment banking firm, Yelp is probably one of the first places you'd think of to do it.  Understanding how to make the most out of Yelp for business marketing is critical to any business where reviews matter—like a law firm.

Getting Started Using Yelp for Business

You may not know this, but even if you're not using Yelp yet, past clients may already be posting reviews about you.  There's no reason to avoid using Yelp for business purposes—the only difference it makes to join the site is that you get to fill out your profile and actually see what people are saying about your law firm.

Creating your profile doesn't take long, but you should still put some thought into it.  Keep in mind that using Yelp for business marketing won't work as well if you're not highlighting your firm's brand in the copy you're writing for your profile.  You should also make sure to use some search engine optimization techniques in what you write about your firm—remember that all of Yelp, including user reviews for your firm, is publicly available and indexed by Google, Bing, and other web search engines.

Maintaining Your Yelp for Business Profile

Once you've created a profile on Yelp, you can't just let the profile sit and hope that users do all the work for you.  Instead, you need to make sure that your Yelp for business profile is up to date for all contact information and any information pertaining to your law firm.  If you're not being careful about updates, you could be losing clients who attempt to use old contact information that is still being broadcast by your Yelp profile.

Getting Your First Positive Reviews

If you don't already have some positive reviews when you start using Yelp for business marketing, you should try to get some as soon as possible.  Even one or two Yelp reviews can vastly improve your conversion rate, and will help you to build your online reputation.

Mention to your clients that if they have been satisfied with their experience, you would very much appreciate them helping you with a solid review on Yelp for business marketing purposes.  You can make this call extend to some of your past clients by posting to your Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.  It can be hard to get people to make the initial effort to give you reviews, but the conversion rate increase will be well worth it.

Don't do anything unethical, like asking friends, relatives, or other people who have never been your clients to write fake reviews.  While there are even services that advertise that they will post fake reviews on Yelp for business marketing, this is no way to run your law firm and will be negatively viewed by everyone from potential clients to the state bar if your ruse is discovered.  The same goes for writing reviews yourself, under a different name.

Negative Reviews: How You Can Beat Them

If you get a negative review, don't worry: it's not the end of the world, not even close.  While it's true that negative reviews can significantly negatively impact your ability to get conversions, you have some ways that you can beat negative reviews before they spiral out of control and make it difficult to get new business.

For example, you can use the techniques in the last section to get some positive reviews.  While this won't make the negative review actually go away, it will make it harder to see and will help to balance your overall star review so that people see you as the excellent attorney you are.

But what if you're not sure the complaints were real?  What if you suspect that someone was unethically planting false negative reviews?  The first thing you need to do is talk to Yelp.  This kind of fraudulent negative review happens more often than you might think, and Yelp is very used to dealing with it.  Especially if the person has written no other reviews, or has only given negative reviews to law firms, they may have their account suspended and the review will be deleted.

Doing Competitor Research on Yelp

You shouldn't just stop after you see your own Yelp reviews.  Part of your branding should always be what differentiates you from the competition.  By researching your competitors' reviews, you can see what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong.  You can increase your own conversions by asking clients to emphasize a particular part of your service if and when they choose to write a review for you.

If you're an attorney and you're not already using Yelp, you need to be.  The website now receives over 600 million visits per year, making it the internet's biggest source of user created reviews for services.  If you're a new Yelp attorney, you may need some quick tips to help you get the most out of your Yelp marketing efforts.  This guide will give you the tips that you need to succeed, all while keeping your web presence professional and without resorting to any kind of unethical behavior.

Yelp Marketing Tip #1: Double Check EVERYTHING

One of the most embarrassing things that can happen to a Yelp attorney is to find out that a piece of contact information is incorrect or out of date.  You don't want the next newspaper story about your law firm to involve clients accidentally calling a strip club.  

Keep in mind that when you're using Yelp marketing, the goal is for at least some of your potential clients to see your Yelp profile before anything else about you.  You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and if the first impression a client gets about your Yelp attorney profile is that it is sloppy or incomplete, they will be unlikely to even think about clicking on your website link, much less giving you a call and trusting you with their legal issue.

Yelp Marketing Tip #2:  Watch Your Reviews Frequently

The biggest advantage to creating a Yelp attorney profile is that you will now be notified when you receive new reviews.  If you receive a notification about a review, you should check what the review says right away.

In some situations, you may find that a review of your law firm is not a legitimate review from an actual client.  Instead, it's possible that a rival law firm has decided to get their hands dirty by giving you a negative Yelp attorney review in the hopes of attracting more business to their firm.  This technique is underhanded and unethical, but it's definitely not unheard of.  If you suspect a review has been created by a competitor instead of a client, you can notify Yelp, which will look into the situation and delete the review if it appears to have been fraudulent.

Yelp Marketing Tip #3: Respond Thoughtfully to Negative Reviews

Not all negative Yelp attorney reviews come from rival firms.  Even if you're the world's best lawyer, it's likely that some clients have come away from your office unsatisfied.  People are more likely to write a review when they're very dissatisfied than when they're highly satisfied, which means that sooner or later, you're going to get a bad review.

This is where many attorneys see their Yelp marketing plans fall apart.  Here's how it happens: they see a negative Yelp attorney review, they respond in a defensive or aggressive way, and then more negativity starts coming in.

Remember, a disgruntled client who posts a negative Yelp attorney review has said their piece and is likely to just leave the site alone if you don't respond in an antagonistic way.  Instead of getting defensive, talk genuinely about the problems experienced and how you hope to do better in the future.  Potential clients reading Yelp attorney reviews understand that not every review will be positive—don't make a bad situation worse by showing yourself in a bad light.

Yelp Marketing Tip #4: Actively Solicit Positive Reviews from Clients

If a negative review is one of your first reviews, you may now have a very low star rating—which could drive off potential clients before they even get a good look at your Yelp attorney profile or reviews.  In order to get your star rating back where you want it, consider talking to your current or past clients about adding reviews on Yelp.  Clients are often quite willing to help with Yelp attorney marketing efforts if they've had a good experience with your firm.  You can even use social networks to get the word out to clients if you don't want to make use of email or mailing lists.

Yelp Marketing Tip #5: Stay Off the Astroturf

Don't get people to write positive reviews on your Yelp attorney profile who've never actually set foot in your law office.  This is called astroturfing, a form of Yelp marketing that is used far too often by people in many professions today, but in the legal world, it could actually get you in big trouble with the state bar.

Yelp Marketing Tip #6: Have a Conversion Ready Website

Even the best Yelp attorney reviews will sound unconvincing if people go to your website and it looks like it should be on Geocities, circa 1997, or if it has 3 Flash introductions and a CSS sheet that looks like a programmer's nightmare.  Get professional web design that keeps your website simple and user friendly, so that clients who visit your website can get to the information they need quickly.

Yelp Marketing Tip #7: Keep Your Branding Going

You should make sure that any niche marketing or branding efforts you're working on are also extended to your Yelp attorney profile.  Your Yelp marketing will be much more effective if it's synergistic with the messages you're already sending about your brand through other online media channels, like social networks, blogs, and your home page.  Don't make your Yelp profile so dry and boring that your law firm loses the brand personality you've tried to cultivate elsewhere.

Yelp Marketing Tip #8: Use Critical Feedback

When you get a negative review and say you'll change in the future, make those changes.  In many ways, your Yelp attorney profile can be one of the most useful snapshots you'll ever get of how your clients think about you.  Instead of tuning them out, really make use of their feedback so that you can have better client service (and better Yelp reviews) in the future.  Even in a generally positive review, if you notice a place that your firm could have done better, be responsive to that concern.

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.

It's hard to be in the online world for very long without hearing about page ranking.  Page Rank is a system developed at Google that assigns a number of 0-10 to every indexed web page on the internet.  The algorithms behind page ranking are shrouded in mystery, but there are a number of intelligent internet marketers who have figured out a great deal of what makes Google's system tick.  In this guide, we'll explore Page Rank, and show ways to use your new knowledge of page ranking to improve your website's performance and effectiveness.

A Brief History of Page Ranking

In many ways, Page Rank is the algorithm that built the multi-billion dollar Google empire.  At the time when Google debuted, it was the brainchild of two former grad students who had made a search engine they dubbed “Backrub” as a university project.  Their search engine was different from all other search engines at the time, in the mid-1990s, because unlike the other searches out there, theirs depended on a website's popularity, not just its keyword density.

As Google grew from a tiny two-person operation to the world's biggest search engine ever, with a 66 percent market share, the page ranking algorithm continued to grow and evolve.  Websites found new ways to try to manipulate Page Rank, and Google's engineers followed right behind with alterations to the algorithm to level the playing field again.

The Logarithmic Page Rank Scale: How it Works

When people first hear about the page ranking 0-10 scale, many assume that it is an arithmetic scale—that is, that the 10% most popular websites will get a 10, the next 10% will get a 9, and so on.  However, this is not the way that Google Page Rank works, or has ever worked.

Instead, page ranking on Google is done through what's called a logarithmic scale.  Without getting too deeply into the math, what this means is that there are far, far fewer pages at each successively higher Page Rank.  In fact, only about twenty websites are able to attain the elusive PageRank of 10 at any time.  This means that it's wildly unlikely that your website will ever be able to achieve a 9 or a 10 page ranking number, but that it can actually be relatively easy to move through the first several Page Ranks.

Why Page Rank Matters Today

Today, in one way or another, page ranking will determine the vast majority of how well your website performs in search rankings.  If you want people to see your website in the first page of search results, you need to be at least somewhat concerned with the Page Rank not only of your website, but also of the websites linking to you.

Today, inbound links account for the majority of your search engine rankings, and not all links have the same value.  If you're getting a link from a website with a high PageRank, you can expect a much bigger search results climb than if you got a link from a website with a low PageRank.  In fact, if you get too many links from sites with lower page ranking, you can actually be listed as over optimized by Google and penalized.

Factors That Affect Page Ranking in 2012

To say that Google bases Page Rank on a large number of variables is a bit of an understatement.  Currently, Google claims that Page Rank is based on over five hundred million variables, and so figuring out how to get the best page ranking is somewhat challenging.

However, we do know a lot about what affects PageRank, just because of seeing what works and what doesn't.  We know that popularity affects page ranking more than just about anything, and that Google also takes into account the total PageRank of a website (the PageRank of all individual pages on a website added together).

We also know that your Page Rank can be significantly affected by the linking patterns you're using.  If you're linking to a large number of low quality sites and low quality sites are the only ones linking to you, you can expect your page ranking to stay quite low.

Improving Your Page Rank: Tips and Strategies

One of the best ways that you can improve your page ranking is to make sure that you're part of social networking websites.  These sites have many pages with high Page Rank, and when you build inbound links from social networking sites you'll receive a bigger overall boost to your search rankings.

Many people try to automate their link building in order to enhance their page ranking without doing a lot of work.  This can seem like an excellent strategy in the short term, but it is likely to fail on a longer time scale.  Google has procedures in place to detect link automation, and you are very likely to be penalized by Google if you are seen to be over optimizing your site by automating link building.

Monitoring Your Page Rank

You should keep track of your own website's page ranking periodically, to make sure that it hasn't gone up or down unexpectedly.  If you see a negative change to your Page Rank, you may want to check on your links.  If a large number of links from your website are coming from low Page Rank websites, or you've recently had a number of links stop coming to your site, you may want to ask webmasters to remove or replace your links, respectively.

If your Page Rank has gone up unexpectedly, congratulations!  You should make sure that you know why your page ranking has increased, and you may want to continue growing your website's inbound link numbers using the same strategies that you've been using.  Often, PageRank can go up (especially in the lower levels) from just one or two pieces of widely circulated viral content, so it's absolutely achievable to boost your rankings quickly, especially when you're just starting out.
 

A hundred years ago, if you'd wanted to find a lawyer to resolve a legal dispute, you'd have asked your friends and relatives if they could recommend one to you.  Fifty years ago, and even twenty, not much had changed—word of mouth was still the most important factor in finding a new attorney.  Today, the legal landscape has been changed forever by the internet.  Attorney websites have become the single biggest marketing tool for most law firms, and online referral has become one of the biggest ways for people to find their lawyers today.  Keep reading to find out how you can maximize your online referrals and expand your reach through online marketing efforts.

What's So Special About Online Referrals?

When someone refers a client to you in person, that's great, but it's not as good as an online referral.  Why?  Because any time an in-person referral happens, it's over in an instant, and chances are that nobody heard about it except for the person the referral was intended for.  Online referrals, on the other hand, offer something very different: the chance to have a referral seen by a large number of people, including people that you wouldn't normally have a direct or indirect connection to.

Because online referrals extend your reach so much, it's worth cultivating a presence on online referral websites.  Without them, you'll be giving your competitors a great opening—and that's something you can't afford to do in today's hotly competitive legal business world.

Building Profiles to Get Online Referrals

The first thing that you need to do if you want to increase your online referral traffic is to start building profiles on websites.  Building profiles is generally the first step to making it easier for people to find your law offices online and refer clients to you, so it's the best place to start.  Try building profiles on a large number of websites, including social networking sites, social bookmarking sites, review websites, and attorney directories.

In many states and metropolitan areas, the state or local bar association also offers online referral services through its website.  Usually, the way this works is basically identical to a phone based referral from a bar association: the potential client calls, details their problem, and someone is trained to refer them to an attorney who specializes in the appropriate area based on their concerns.  

By getting onto the list of attorneys who receive online referrals and phone based referrals, you can significantly increase the number of new clients you receive from referral based sources.  In some cases, you may have to pay additional money to your bar association in order to receive this service, while in others you will only need to agree to accept a free or reduced fee initial first consultation with each online referral you receive.

Online Referrals Through Social Networks

Social networking through LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter is some of the best value you can get for your search engine marketing time.  Using these sites helps your website in myriad ways, not the least of which is by giving you yet another origination point for an online referral.  People talk on these websites about everything interesting to them, and as long as you make sure you have a profile on the appropriate websites, you'll get online referrals through your existing clients who are on Facebook.

You can also boost your online referral numbers by sponsoring a post and telling your Facebook friends to give you reviews.  Sponsoring posts on Facebook is now easier than ever, after an update released on October 11, 2012 allowed any person (whether or not they were affiliated with a business marketing page on Facebook) to promote a story at relatively low cost.  Because sponsored stories are seen by a larger percentage of your total friends, sponsoring stories can be an effective and cheap way to build your online referral business.

Online Referrals Through Review Websites

Online reviews for attorneys from websites like yelp.com and avvo.com have become one of the biggest sources of consumer information for people looking for new lawyers.  If you're not already signed up on these websites, you probably aren't receiving the online referral traffic you could be.

What's more, having profiles on these websites can help you to actually solidify and improve your practice.  If you notice similar criticisms being levied at your firm by several different former clients, don't get defensive—get proactive about changing the climate at your office before you get another mediocre review or worse.  By monitoring review pages, you can also make sure that the reviews you're getting contain a genuine online referral and aren't just placed there by competitors to make you look bad.

Often, if you ask people on your social networks whether they'll post reviews for you on these sites, they'll say yes.  Their testaments to your ability can be the best source of online referral traffic for your site for months or even years, if the reviews are good enough.

Online Referrals Through Attorney Link Exchange

One of the other ways to build an online referral base is to start exchanging links with some of your fellow attorneys.  You don't do tax law, but one of your best friends from law school does, just across town.  You do criminal defense, and he doesn't.  This is a perfect situation for a link exchange.  Both of you can benefit from this, and you won't be taking any traffic from each other's websites that the other person could have successfully handled on his own.  Make sure to check with your state bar about ethics rules pertaining to these link exchanges before you do them—no need to get in trouble because you didn't ask about the rules for your specific area.

Tracking and Analyzing Online Referrals

Once you're getting some online referral traffic, you should think about doing some analysis of it.  Analyzing your online referrals can help you prioritize your time and decide which aspects of your referral generating strategy still need work.  Using Google Analytics on your website can help you learn where your web traffic is coming from and where it's going to, which in turn makes it much easier to decide which of your referral sources work and which ones are less than optimal.