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.

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.

Not all strategies to improve your backlinks for SEO work equally well.  In fact, since Google's 2012 updates to searches, it's very possible that your law firm is using an SEO backlink strategy that could drag your page down fast.  Today, backlinks for SEO should form the backbone of your overall search engine optimization strategy—but which backlinks work best, and which are best left in the past?  Keep reading this guide to find out.

Why SEO Backlink Strategies From 2011 Don't Work

As the internet changes and evolves, search evolves along with it.  When Google noticed that a number of SEO backlink efforts had led to misleading links, spam websites, and over optimization, their engineers took action.  Today, if your backlinks for SEO look like they did in 2010 or 2011, you'll probably be very disappointed in the results.  Google now penalizes websites—sometimes severely—for appearing to buy backlinks for SEO.  If you're using SEO backlink strategies that involve purchasing links rather than building them organically, you're going to have to get a lot more careful and build your links in a smarter, more thoughtful way.

Here are a few of the SEO backlink strategies that have been devalued because of Google's new algorithm changes:

Using the same type of link over and over—for instance, having all of your inbound backlinks for SEO coming from blogs or directories.

Having identical anchor text for a high percentage of your SEO backlink traffic will almost always set off a red flag now.  You'll need to vary your anchor texts from now on.

Having too many backlinks for SEO that come from identical articles rather than varying your content will result in rankings penalties.

Using too many low quality websites for your backlinks will now also garner penalties.  You need to make sure that the PageRank of the websites that are linking your website is, on average, relatively high.

Fortunately, there are more ways than ever to leave your mark on the web without using outdated SEO backlink strategies.  The new ways of building backlinks for SEO are not only more likely to last, but also will give your firm a much better reputation online than spam techniques would have.

New SEO Backlink Sources: Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking sites allow for users to share a link that they find interesting, and then have the community decide as a whole how much popularity it will attain.  One of the biggest websites for social bookmarking in 2012 is Reddit, which has garnered both positive and negative media attention as its user base expanded rapidly.

Social bookmarking websites can be a fantastic source of backlinks for SEO, because many of these websites have high PageRank values.  All you'll need to do is get an account and start posting links.  The higher quality the content you're linking to, the more likely that your link will not only give you a better search engine ranking position, but also get positive attention from members of the community.

New SEO Backlink Sources: Google+ Local

Google Places became Google+ Local in 2012, and if your law firm hasn't already started its profile page you need to get onboard today.  When search engine users ask Google for law firms in a particular location, local search results now show up first.  This means that you need to have a fully completed Google+ Local profile and build your business's local web presence.

You can add to the benefits of making a great Google+ Local profile by, for instance, getting your website listed with local website directories or statewide attorney directories.  This can help Google pinpoint your location while garnering you new backlinks for SEO.

New SEO Backlink Sources: Facebook—And Don't Ignore Comments

While many law firms still don't have any Facebook presence at all, many of the ones that do still aren't using it particularly well.  On Facebook, studies show that users tend to trust comments much more than they trust actual posted content.  What this means is that in order to get the most backlinks for SEO by using Facebook, you'll want to post not only quality content, but content that engages users and gets them to post comments.

You may even want to ask friends or other social network connections to help you by adding comments that include a link to your website.  These backlinks for SEO will be on a high PageRank website (as long as you keep your Facebook posts public) and can be a great way to quickly enhance your rankings.

New SEO Backlink Sources: Twitter

As people have started to understand more about how Google's new search algorithms work, they've noticed some patterns.  One of those patterns is that when businesses use Twitter to build backlinks for SEO, they seem to be doing quite well for themselves.  Twitter links are apparently regarded as being relatively authoritative by Google, so your law firm should make sure that it has a Twitter account and that it is being used regularly.

You should focus your Twitter work on getting people to re-tweet the posts you've made and your links.  Infographics and other unique information sources are key to getting re-tweets, so these can be the best ways to build backlinks for SEO using Twitter.

Making the Most of Traditional SEO Backlink Sources

You can still use some traditional sources of backlinks for SEO.  For example, if you have already been using a blog to make some backlinks, this is still a great idea.  Make sure to keep your quality level up, and your blog links should make your search rankings increase.  You can also do guest posts on the blogs of other attorneys in your practice area or geographic area to make more backlinks for SEO.

Forum posts are also a great way to get backlinks, especially if they're forums that have a high PageRank.  However, if your posts seem like they're spam that is designed just to get a backlink, they will probably be deleted.  Make sure you're only posting relevant content, and you can rest assured that your backlinks will stay up.

Now that Google really monitors the quality of your backlinks, you need to get quality backlinks that will catapult you to the top of the rankings.  If you don't be one of the fifteen percent of websites that has been affected by Google Penguin and Panda, you'll need to learn about how to get quality backlinks sooner rather than later.  If you've already been affected by these updates, it's even more important to get quality backlinks and eliminate the low quality links that made your site get flagged.  Here are seven different types of quality backlinks, and how to get each type easily and quickly.

How to Get Quality Backlinks: The Elusive .Edu Backlink

One of the hardest types of backlinks to get is the .edu backlink.  Because it's a sign that you know how to get quality backlinks when you have .edu links, these links actually are considered to be higher quality than their PageRanks indicate.  The amount of “link juice” that you obtain when you get quality backlinks on a .edu website will be equivalent to the link juice you'd get from a .com or .org site with a PageRank score one or two points higher.

Now you want to know how to get quality backlinks on these websites.  It's actually relatively easy for attorneys to do, even though other types of business professionals can have problems when trying to get quality backlinks on a .edu domain.  Why?  Because law schools are almost always at .edu domains, and in today's legal hiring climate law students are eager to hear from real attorneys who are making it in the real world.

To get quality backlinks from a law school's website, usually all you'll need to do is find the student forums or ask if you can give some kind of talk about your area of practice.  You'll be helping law students decide what to do after school is over, and you'll have learned a great method to get quality backlinks fast.

How to Get Quality Backlinks: The Contextual Blog Backlink

Most of the time, law blogs are about some specific area of the law, not just about law in general.  If you are a blogger, odds are that you know some other blogs operating in the same fields yours is.  That's a great opportunity to get quality backlinks.  Consider asking for a guest blog opportunity to help yourself get backlinks—and you may want to offer similar guest blogger opportunities to people on your own blog.

In much the same way as how to get quality backlinks from a .edu website, you can also seek out backlinks from law student blogs.  Many of these students are eager to interview real attorneys about what they do from day to day.  You can easily get quality backlinks from this kind of interview or profile piece.

How to Get Quality Backlinks: The Directory Entry Backlink

Another way to get quality backlinks is to get your law firm listed in relevant, high quality directories.  Not all directories are quality resources, but a large number of them are.  From Google+ Local (which is one of the biggest generators of local search results) to the local directories created by your chamber of commerce or even your city or county government, directory listings are one of the easiest methods to get quality backlinks quickly.

Another advantage of learning how to get quality backlinks with directory listings is that these are often indexed very quickly by search engines.  This means that when you get quality backlinks with, for example, the Google+ Local profile you fill out, the content of that profile will be indexed by Google right away and you'll get the link juice from the backlink immediately.

How to Get Quality Backlinks: The Social Network Backlink

Social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are fantastic for any attorney who wants to get quality backlinks.  Social network backlinks can come either from you, or from people making comments relating to your website.  In order to get quality backlinks from other people, you may want to create new content like infographics or how-to guides that will be interesting to a wide swath of people online—interesting enough that they'll want to share with friends.

You can also get quality backlinks using social networking sites just on your main profile page.  However, in order for these links to count, you'll also need to make sure that your profile is public.  All of the content that you post on Facebook and other social networking websites should ideally be public in order to get quality backlinks as frequently as possible.  Because most of these sites have very high PageRank scores, it's important to get these links right away so you don't end up getting overshadowed by competitors who know how to get quality backlinks with social networks.

How to Get Quality Backlinks: The News Coverage Backlink

Public relations can often overlap with getting quality backlinks.  If you're putting out press releases, make sure that they're not just going to generic “press release” websites like PRWeb.  You should try to cultivate real working relationships with members of the media in your area so that you can more easily publicize your firm's victories.  Keep in mind that it's always easier to have the media cover your firm if you already have an angle in mind that will be of interest to news readers or viewers.

News coverage generally comes from websites with a relatively high PageRank, which means that these links are much more valuable than getting backlinks from most blogs or other types of websites.  Also, when you get a link through news coverage, you'll be more likely to get clients as a direct result of that link.  Don't think that it's impossible to get this kind of coverage.  Even if daily newspapers won't run your story in the actual paper, they may put it on a newspaper blog.  You can also ask weekly community newspapers, which tend to be easier to get press coverage in, whether they would be interested in doing a story about your firm.

Ten years ago, most of your search engine rankings were just based on your keyword density.  Today, over two thirds of your overall rankings depend on how many inbound links you have.  Now that search engine optimization has moved beyond keywords, how are you going to change your inbound links SEO strategy?  You should be dedicating a solid majority of your optimization time to SEO for inbound links and building new sources for links.  This guide will help you understand why inbound links SEO has become so important and how to make great links with a high value to search engines.

The Anatomy of an Inbound Link

Before you learn the details of how to do up to date inbound links SEO in 2012, you'll need to know a little bit of terminology.  If you already know basic terms pertaining to SEO for inbound links, you can feel free to skip this part and go right to the next section.

Inbound links are links to your website from other websites, and they're important to Google and other search engines because a higher number of inbound links typically means that your website is important and well-regarded.  Anchor text is the text that a person will click on to go to your link, and can be of several types.  Some SEO inbound links will include exact phrase matches in this anchor text for keyword phrases in the article.  Other inbound links for SEO, called branded links, will be words like your law firm's name or an attorney's first and last name.

Crafting Your Content for Inbound Links SEO

The first thing that you need to do to make optimal SEO with inbound links is to make your content great.  Inbound links SEO that takes people to a poorly designed, hard to navigate law firm website is bad, and if its design looks like something straight out of 2002, you'll have a hard time being heard.

Make your content conversion friendly, not only for your inbound links SEO but also for your overall conversion rate.  When people like your website and find it easy to navigate, it's easier for them to share their experience with others and give you organic links back to your website.

You should also make sure that any time you do SEO with inbound links, you have a mobile website ready for anyone accessing the website from a smartphone or tablet PC.  This traffic is unusually eager to convert, but only if you're careful about making a mobile optimized website version.  You'll miss out on the great results of mobile inbound links SEO if you're directing mobile users to a desktop site with tiny, tough to click links.

Making Great Anchor Text for SEO Inbound Links

The anchor text that you use for your inbound links for SEO matters.  If you're using the wrong kinds of anchor text, or using the same kind too often, your SEO for inbound links could end up hitting a brick wall called Google Penguin.  Google Penguin is an algorithm designed to spot websites that have been buying inbound links for SEO or otherwise building a link presence unnaturally.  Penguin basically ensures that if your links are too low-quality or have the same anchor text, no matter how many more you add, you won't see any positive results.

To keep Penguin at bay, you'll need to focus on varying your anchor text.  Not all of your inbound links for SEO should look the same.  In fact, some of your SEO for inbound links should be ordinary phrases, rather than the exact keyword phrases you're hoping for people to search for.  Take a look at blogs and other websites that exhibit a natural-looking link pattern, and try to learn from their example when working on your own inbound links for SEO purposes.

Finding Places to Put Your SEO Inbound Links

Today, there are a multitude of websites that happily host many types of content and links from anyone who creates an account.  When building inbound links for SEO, you need to make sure that the websites you're using are considered authoritative and have a high PageRank value (preferably at least 3 or 4).  The higher the PageRank of your inbound links for SEO, the more your rankings will show results.

Before submitting your SEO inbound links anywhere, make sure that they are formatted correctly for the website you're posting to and that you're not posting anything that would be considered prohibited content.  If your content is very interesting, you may want to try making inbound links for SEO on social bookmarking websites and social networks.  If it's good enough, it will very likely be shared by a large number of users on these sources.

Keeping Your SEO Inbound Links Working

If you've made sure that your links don't violate any written or unwritten rules at the website where you're posting, you've got a good chance of having a link that lasts for years.  However, let's say that you redesign your website a year after building fantastic inbound links, and part of your site redesign included changing the URLs of some of your pages.

Initially, you might think that this means your inbound links for SEO won't work any more.  However, if you run an analysis tool to detect which links are now broken, you can find out exactly which pages are still being linked to.  Then, you can create a redirect page for these pages that will bring the viewer directly to the part of your content they were trying to access.  This creates a much more user friendly experience than a redirect to your home page, which may make it hard to find the right content again.

Monitoring the Success of Your SEO Inbound Links

Periodically, you should check your search engine rankings so that you can tell if you're actually going up in the ranks.  You don't need to check every day or even necessarily every week, because indexing by Google can sometimes be slow.  However, if you're not checking at least once a month, you're missing out on the valuable data that you've gathered by creating inbound links for SEO.

Having a strategy to increase backlinks to your website can improve your SERPs by leaps and bounds. However, only about a third of companies today are pursuing these strategies.  If you're not sure how to increase backlinks without spamming, or you're unsure what your backlink presence should look like, this guide is for you.  By the time you're finished reading this guide, you'll have learned how to increase backlinks in half a dozen ways—none of which require you to spend money or use spam content.

Warning: Trying to Increase Backlinks Can Backfire

Before you learn how to increase backlinks, you should know about the limits of backlink building.  If you increase backlinks too quickly or do so by using low quality links, you not only won't get an increase to your search engine results, you could actually see them decline.

That's because Google Penguin notices what appear to be unnatural link building efforts, and punishes websites that have clearly worked to increase backlinks by spamming other websites and using non-organic link building techniques.  Therefore, your emphasis should be on how to increase backlinks organically (or at least, in a way that seems organic to Google's algorithms).  You can do this by working to increase backlinks from high PageRank pages, and by building your backlink presence slowly.

The worst things you can do to increase backlinks include spamming blog comments and plastering the same articles everywhere.  These techniques may appear in some guides on how to increase backlinks, but they only worked before Google's algorithms became more complex and better at detecting over optimization.

How to Increase Backlinks With Your Blog

So with many ways to increase backlinks no longer working, how can you make sure you're getting the backlink presence your website wants and needs to be competitive in today's economy?  A great place to start is with your blog.  Attorneys have adoped blogging faster than nearly any other profession, perhaps because their jobs are already so focused on writing and explaining legal principles.

If you already maintain a blog, you also probably read other people's law blogs.  If there are any law bloggers that you admire, or even a few you just get along with really well, consider asking for a guest blogger arrangement.  This is a great way to increase backlinks with really high quality content—content that may drive web users to your website even without using a search engine.

Lawyers who don't have blogs yet can still learn how to increase backlinks using them.  Instead of guest posts, you will have to use the comments sections.  Make sure that any comments you make are direct responses to the things discussed in the blog post—otherwise, they will probably be moderated away and won't increase backlinks for you at all.

How to Increase Backlinks With Press Releases

Press releases can be a fantastic way to increase backlinks, as long as you've got something to talk about.  A press release that just looks like an advertisement for your firm, without a lot of meat or any angle for a reporter to really report on, is likely to be ignored.  It used to be that many companies would just increase backlinks with press releases by posting them to press release websites.  However, this kind of backlink strategy now fails most of the time, because these press release websites are viewed as very low quality link sources by Google's Panda algorithm.

Instead, work with your local media and see what kind of legal stories they usually run.  If you can fit your story into one of the kinds of pieces they often do, you'll be able to increase backlinks and get a lot of positive media attention focused on your firm.  When you learn how to increase backlinks with the media, you're doing double duty—not only will your search engine rankings improve, but you'll improve your reputation and prominence in your community.

How to Increase Backlinks With Reciprocal Linking

Now, before you start to increase backlinks in this way, a word of caution: it's okay to have some reciprocal backlinks.  However, if Google notices that all or almost all of your backlinks appear to be reciprocal instead of one way, it may view this as a sign of over optimization that draws a rankings penalty.

It's easy to increase backlinks through reciprocal linking.  All you need to do is approach another person running a website in a similar situation to yours.  By linking to them, and them linking to you, you'll both look more popular and have better search rankings.

How to Increase Backlinks With .Edu Websites

The hardest domains to increase backlinks from are .edu and .gov websites.  While it's very, very difficult for anyone—even attorneys—to get backlinks from a .gov website, it can actually be easier than you think to get backlinks from .edu domains.

Consider doing a profile or interview with a college newspaper or law school publication about what you do and how to become a lawyer of the same type you are.  These kinds of pieces often appear both in print publications at the school and online.  The online version can contain a backlink to your website that will be considered very valuable because it came from a .edu domain.

How to Increase Backlinks With Local Listings

Another way to improve your backlink presence is to think very, very local.  Don't dismiss local websites, even if they are relatively low in PageRank or seem like they were designed several years ago.  Google takes note of how many local websites you're receiving backlinks from when people do geolocational searches for lawyers.  With 20 percent of legal searches being local—and local searchers being more likely to convert right away—this means your local websites can be a great way to bump up your rankings and your conversions.

Some of the best local backlinks you can get are from local directories.  If you're in a relatively small city or town, they might have listings of local businesses on the local government website.  Other directories you'll want to become part of include chamber of commerce directories, your local Yellow Pages, and Google+ Local.

Backlink professionals have been pushing the idea of building .edu backlinks for a long time.  There are several reasons why this is the case, and as Google's search algorithms have evolved, these backlinks have only become more valuable.  But does your law firm really need .edu backlinks, and if so, how can it get the backlinks it needs?  Can you simply buy .edu backlinks, or is there a better way?  All these questions and more will be answered by the end of this guide.

What Are .Edu Backlinks?

Backlinks are just the links that go to your website from the websites of other people.  When these backlinks come from a .edu website, they're called .edu backlinks.  Unlike most other top level domain names, there are very few websites—less than 8,000 in total—that use .edu.  This is because you can't just use a .edu domain name for any website.  Instead, websites that want to use .edu must meet stringent requirements.

Since 2001, the .edu top level domain has only been able to be used by accredited institutions of postsecondary education located in or affiliated with the United States.  There are, however, still hundreds of websites from before 2001 that used the .edu domain and have been grandfathered in.  These websites include those for museums like San Francisco's Exploratorium and high schools like the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy.

Much like other backlinks, these are weighted by Google according to the authority level of the website that the backlink comes from.  However, there are some key differences, and it's these differences that make people want to buy .edu backlinks.

Why Would I Want .Edu Backlinks?

There are several different reasons that you might want to intentionally cultivate .edu backlinks, or that you might even think it would be a good idea to buy .edu backlinks directly.  First of all, these backlinks, more than those from any other domain (with the possible exception of the .gov domain, which is exclusively used by government agencies), are quite difficult to get and tend to carry a great deal of cachet.  Your competition is not very likely to be using .edu backlinks, at least not many, so it can give you a great competitive edge.

Additionally, Google considers .edu websites to universally be more authoritative than a website with a similar PageRank but a different domain name.  This means that if you can get free .edu backlinks or buy .edu backlinks for your website, you can actually increase your search ranking results dramatically, even with a relatively small number of added and indexed links.

Can I Just Buy .Edu Backlinks?

The short answer to this question is “yes,” but the long answer is “Yes, but why would you want to?”  In general, anywhere you buy .edu backlinks from is going to be getting the links themselves for free.  The only thing they're doing is spotting opportunities for posting on .edu domains, which is something that you can do for yourself.

Moreover, if you try to buy .edu backlinks, the service you use is unlikely to post quality content.  Most of the places that you can post .edu backlinks are moderated, which means that when bad quality content is posted, it will be deleted quickly.  Because it can take Google several days, weeks, or even months to index your new backlinks, just because you buy .edu backlinks from a service doesn't mean they won't be moderated out of existence before they ever get indexed.

Google is also employing increasingly advanced detection algorithms to help spot anyone who is clearly purchasing backlinks.  If you buy .edu backlinks and the service you hire leaves too clear a trail of breadcrumbs, Google might penalize your website or even de-list it completely.  As a lawyer, that's a fate you absolutely cannot afford to meet.  Use extreme caution if you decide to buy .edu backlinks, and the better idea is to develop your own .edu backlinks using organic marketing techniques.

How Many .Edu Backlinks Should I Have?

The number of .edu backlinks that you get isn't as important as the quality of each of the links.  If you're able to post very high quality and high relevance backlinks, especially if they're in keeping with the context of the rest of the .edu website, you may be able to do quite well.  Keep in mind that your amount of link juice is much higher for the same PageRank .edu website than it would be with a similarly ranked .org or .com website.

You should make sure that you don't try to build your .edu backlinks too quickly.  If you do, Google will take this as a sign that you may have tried to buy .edu backlinks and you will be penalized.  Especially when you're just beginning your link building efforts, try to confine yourself to creating just one or two of these backlinks every day.  As long as you're consistent, you'll still be able to build up a large number of links in a few months.

Finding the Best Sources for .Edu Backlinks

Lawyers have a huge advantage over other types of business professionals when it comes to building .edu links, because lawyers—unlike almost any other type of business pro—can get great backlinks from the websites of law schools.  Check with law schools near you to see if you might be able to give a talk in the evening sometime.  Often, these talks will be publicized on a page on the law school's website—a page which may link to your law firm's site or your biography on that site.

Another way to get these backlinks without having to buy .edu backlinks is to make relevant posts on forums that are hosted on .edu websites.  This will probably work better if you're talking about legal issues that are relevant to students at the postsecondary level of the forum posters.  Criminal defense attorneys, for example, may have good luck using .edu backlinks by talking about what to do if you're pulled over by a cop for underage drinking and driving.

Backlinking can account for up to 70 percent of your website's total search engine rankings.  When you're assembling backlinks to bring “link juice” to your website, you need to know how to get free one way backlinks.  One way anchor text backlinks are some of the best possible backlinks you can get to your website, and there's no reason to pay for them.  In fact, paid for one way backlinks may be a very bad idea.  Keep reading to find out why—and to learn how to get the best free one way backlinks possible for your law firm site.

One Way vs. Reciprocal Backlinks: Not Treated Equally

Why does it matter if a backlink is reciprocal (there are backlinks on two different websites to each other) or one way?  That has to do with web history.  Reciprocal backlinking was, for some time, the primary way that most webmasters and search engine marketers build their backlink presence.  However, this could easily be abused: imagine if 1000 different people, each with very low quality, spam websites, decided to put reciprocal backlinks to each other on their websites.  Would you want them to show up high in the search rankings just because of these links, even without quality content?

When search engines noticed this problem, they worked to fix it by weighting one way backlinks more than reciprocal backlinks.  This means that if you have a one way anchor text backlink, you'll get significantly more link juice from this link than you would from a reciprocal anchor text link.

Why You Should Only Have Free One Way Backlinks

Some businesses, looking to build their one way anchor text backlinks quickly, try to purchase one way backlinks instead of generating them organically.  However, these non-organic one way backlinks are likely to be penalized by Google.  Google has become much better at detecting paid one way anchor text backlinks, and you're unlikely to be successful with this strategy for long.  Since you have a professional business and aren't just a cheap online retailer, you can't afford to stake your reputation on one way backlinks that could backfire.

Besides, there are plenty of places to find free one way backlinks.  For example, you can get your own one way anchor text backlinks by making real, insightful comments on blogs, or by creating links on Youtube, social networking sites, or even directories of businesses that are maintained by your municipality or local chamber of commerce.  These opportunities for free one way backlinks mean that it's usually a waste of time and energy to pay for them.

Varying Your One Way Anchor Text Backlinks

Your free one way backlinks need to have some variance in their anchor text today if they're to help you get better search rankings.  When Google sees one way anchor text backlinks that all have the exact same anchor text, it assumes that you're using some sort of automated backlink creation method.  When those one way backlinks are detected, you're very likely to be penalized instead of seeing your rankings climb.

Because of this, it's very important to change up exactly what link text brings visitors to your website from free one way backlinks.  One way anchor text backlinks should have many different variations, including not just your brand keywords or exact keyword matches, but also a natural looking mix of other phrases and words.  Keep in mind that you can have some identical one way anchor text backlinks, just not too many as an overall proportion of your total backlinks.

The Best Ways to Get Free One Way Backlinks

Since you can't just offer to do a backlink exchange with another website when you need one way anchor text backlinks, you'll have to get creative.  A great way to get free one way backlinks is to include yourself on directory websites.  For example, if your local bar association or chamber of commerce has directories that include URLs, this is a great way to get one way backlinks—sometimes, though not always, for free (or included with the price of your membership).

You can also get free one way backlinks by posting to blogs in the comments section, or in web forums.  In order for your one way anchor text backlinks to stay up as blog comments or forum posts, you'll need to make sure that they're actually relevant to the content of the web page that you're linking from.  If you're posting irrelevant spam, you'll see your free one way backlinks disappear before Google can ever index them.

One way to get a huge influx of one way backlinks is to create an infographic.  While the initial infographic creation may cost money, you won't have to pay for your one way anchor text backlinks.  Infographics are a great way to increase interest in your website and improve your own PageRank fast.

Use Caution With One Way Backlinks Services

You may have seen services advertising their ability to build hundreds of one way anchor text backlinks in a few days or weeks.  While these services have been quite profitable for their proprietors, it's not usually a good idea to get your one way backlinks in this way.  Why?  Because usually, these services are creating low quality content that will only serve to hurt the reputation of your law firm.

What's more, most services of this type are using the exact same free one way backlinks resources that we've already discussed in this guide.  You can do the same thing that they're doing, while creating content that your law firm will be proud of instead of content that is likely to be disregarded by viewers or even that will lead to you being perceived as a spammer.  There's no need to pay for your one way anchor text backlinks when free one way backlinks resources abound all over the web.  Make the most of your social network and the blogosphere, rather than hiring a service to take a one way backlinks shortcut for you.