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.
 

Learning how to create backlinks is a must do for anyone who wants to bring their website up in Google and other search engine rankings.  If you're ready to start creating backlinks today, you probably want to know some places to start and some principles to keep in mind.  When you create backlinks on today's world wide web, you'll need to make quality a priority.  Keep reading this guide to find ideas on how to create backlinks that are high in quality and that will keep viewers coming to your site.

Tip #1: Create Backlinks on Local Websites

Sure, the internet is global—but it's also very, very local and getting more so every day.  With so many locally based websites, odds are that you can find a few local sites that allow people to create backlinks after creating an account.  For example, many local news websites have comment sections—perfect for creating backlinks with relevant content.

You may also want to look for local and state level attorney directories when learning how to create backlinks.  Many of these directories make creating backlinks easy by allowing you to make a profile for your law firm or for each of the attorneys at your firm.  These directory listings help you in several ways—you can not only create backlinks to make your Google search rankings better, you'll also have a place for people to find your website when they're searching for a lawyer in the directories.

Tip #2: Create Backlinks on High PR Sites

It's not enough to know how to create backlinks.  Because of the way that Google ranks websites, you also have to be able to create backlinks that are on high PageRank websites.  These are the web's most high traffic centers, and they're usually (but not always) tough to get links on.

The easiest way to start creating backlinks on high PR sites is to find a list of websites that are accepting links and posts from anyone with an account.  These websites can vary from month to month, especially because PageRanks can change somewhat quickly.  Make sure that any list of high PageRank websites you're using to create backlinks is from May of 2012 or later, because changes to the way Google searches work changed many websites' PageRank number at that time.

Tip #3: Creating Backlinks on .Edu Websites

When you create backlinks from either of two websites with the same PageRank, they'll have the same effect on your search rankings.  However, there is a place where this is not true, and where creating backlinks can have an effect that's substantially better than it would normally be.  Any time you create backlinks on .edu websites, they count for more than a similar backlink on a different domain.

Because there are only about 7000 total .edu websites, it can be tough to learn how to create backlinks on them.  Lawyers can get creative by creating backlinks through law school websites.  As an attorney, you can give talks at law schools or talk to students on school forums.  These give you great opportunities to create backlinks.  Remember—part of how to create backlinks is always making sure you're providing quality content.  Don't spam, or your posts will be deleted, your account will be banned, and you'll lose a great resource for creating backlinks with a very high value.

Tip #4: Create Backlinks that Get Noticed

It's all well and good to try to optimize your website by creating backlinks with exact keyword anchor text.  However, this kind of anchor text often appears when people create backlinks that have been mass produced.

Instead, learn how to create backlinks with “link bait” text—text that makes people want to click.  This could be text that involves a question being asked of your readers, or some interesting aspect of a blog post you're linking to.  This is a much better formula for creating engaging, noticeable backlinks—and those are the links that will get your website the most overall traffic and conversions.

Tip #5: Shake It Up When Creating Backlinks

Don't use the same anchor text over and over again when you're learning how to create backlinks.  Google often sees this as a sign of artificial link building, and could give your website a rankings penalty.  Even if your link text pertains to your firm brand rather than an exact keyword to be searched, Google might penalize the site.

This means that you should think of how to create backlinks with variations in anchor text, even if those variations are subtle.  You should also make sure that at least some of your backlinks have anchor text that is not an exact keyword match with anything in the page linked to—after all, this is often how naturally created backlinks look online.

Tip #6: Create Backlinks to Interesting Content

Even if you know how to create backlinks that get clicks, remember that the point of a backlink shouldn't just be to game the rankings.  It should also be to bring people in to your website from other places online.  Make sure that any time you're creating backlinks, they are going to content that is original and engaging.  Learning how to create backlinks won't help if your website can't convert any actual new clients.

Tip #7: Check Your Competition's Backlinking Strategy

If you have a competitor who clearly knows how to create backlinks that get their website noticed, remember that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  By running a backlink checker program on their URL, you can find out where they are creating backlinks online.

Once you've seen where your competition's backlinks are hosted, you can start to learn how to create backlinks on those websites.  Odds are that you won't be able to duplicate all of them—after all, they may have built some by using personal connections or social networking—but you can make big inroads on making your backlink profile look similar.  Learning from people who already know what works is a big part of backlinking strategy for the smart and efficient law firm marketing professional.

Thousands of marketing professionals have been impacted by Google's April 2012 decision to weight backlinks differently according to where they come from.  Now, rankings aren't just about how to get backlink traffic—they're about where to get backlinks with a high value, and finding the best backlinks possible.  That's why you need to keep reading this guide.  You'll learn how to get backlink traffic that really counts in searches, and why you should seek smaller numbers of the best backlinks instead of trying to get low-quality links everywhere.

How NOT To Get Backlink Traffic: Links to Avoid

Before you start learning where to get backlinks, it's a good idea to know what strategies to avoid.  These strategies are typically those which were used by spammers in the past.  Because of these spammers, Google and other search engines now devalue the backlinks of people who use these techniques today.  For example:

Don't use any kind of article marketing or article spinning service that copies the same content onto a huge range of web pages, including many with little or no relevance to your firm's business.
Don't use the same anchor text every time you make a new link, or make all your anchor text exact keyword match text.
Don't have all your links come from the same IP addresses.  That's not a sign of the best backlinks—it's a sign of spam.
Don't start building backlinks too fast once you learn where to get backlinks—this is regarded as suspicious, try doing just a few a day.
It's important not to learn how to get backlink traffic from any guides made before the latest Google search updates in April 2012.  Any guide telling you where to get backlinks that is from before that time can be safely ignored.

You should also keep in mind that the best backlinks are those from websites with high PR rankings.  If you learned how to get backlink traffic several years ago, you may just have tried to get a high quantity of backlinking done.  Today, you need to know where to get backlinks that are high quality and likely to be indexed quickly.

How To Get Backlink Traffic From Blogs

Every guide on how to get backlink traffic for lawyers will talk about blogging, and with good reason.  Any law firm professional who wants to know where to get backlinks when you've just started a website can start with blogs.

In order to get the best backlinks from blogs, you'll want to find other blogs that are either part of your local community or that pertain to similar subjects.  This is a great way to find opportunities for guest blogging.  If you don't know where to get backlinks from blogs, start by just reading some.  By creating a list of blogs you read regularly, you'll start to learn which ones would yield the best backlinks and guest blogging opportunities.  Once you figure out where to get backlinks that will suit your firm best, you can approach the blogger about linking to your website.

How to Get Backlink Traffic From .Edu Sites

It can seem almost impossible for many businesses to know where to get backlinks on .edu websites.  Fortunately, law firms have a competitive edge that most other businesses completely lack.  If you find a .edu website for a law school that has a student forum, you may be able to post in the student forum to get the best backlinks possible.

If you don't know how to get backlink traffic on these forums, just think about the kinds of questions you might have had as a law student about the areas you're practicing in now.  These answers can help you get fantastic .edu backlinks, which are the best backlinks possible as far as Google is concerned.

How To Get Backlink Traffic From Facebook

When thinking about where to get backlinks, don't neglect Facebook.  As the single largest website for B2C social network marketing, it has a high PageRank and tremendous visibility for the average consumer.  Some of your best backlinks in terms of total traffic generated may very well come from Facebook.

The easiest place to start getting backlinks from Facebook is on your profile page.  However, as long as you keep your content posted publicly, there are several other places where to get backlinks on Facebook.

How to Get Backlink Traffic From Twitter

Twitter is another place where you can get some of the best backlinks for your website.  If you don't know where to get backlinks on Twitter, start with your profile.  You can also use Twitter to create backlinks to your backlinks—a process called tiered linking that helps to get your links indexed by Google.  This kind of tiered linking ensures that you get the best backlinks performance.

How to Get Backlink Traffic From Directories

Another great answer to the “where to get backlinks” conundrum comes in the form of directory listings.  When learning how to get backlink traffic, you may have learned about using directories like DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory.  These kinds of directories can still provide good links, but the best backlinks from directories today come from local directories and Google+ Local.

That's because when someone searches using a geolocational term, Google+ Local will take these local directory backlinks into account more than your other links.  If you want to rise fast in local search rankings, these are the best backlinks you can get—and what's even better is, they're completely free.

How to Get Backlink Traffic From Press Coverage

A lot of law firms, especially those just starting out, don't think that they can actually get press coverage.  Instead, they put phony press releases (which aren't even released to their local press!) on sites like PRWeb.  These websites no longer count for much with Google, so they don't help your search rankings.  

Instead, for the best backlinks, try making real, engaging press releases and getting media coverage.  Just an interview or profile piece in a local or regional magazine, or a local weekly newspaper, could be a huge boost for your search rankings.

Over 90 percent of internet users use search, including over 85 percent of prospective legal clients.  When you try to find out how to improve your search rankings, though, you can find a lot of contradictory information.  Sorting out the myths (which are usually perpetuated by services that have something to sell your law firm) from the facts can be tough, especially when it comes to building cheap backlinks.  Before you buy cheap backlinks, read this guide.  It could help you to avoid a costly mistake.

Myth: All Cheap Backlinks Help—At Least a Little

Because the quantity of backlinks matters, some people think that if they buy cheap backlinks, they'll see their search rankings increase.  You'll see some search engine marketing companies saying essentially this—that in spite of recent changes to the way Google and other search engines work, you still need big numbers of cheap backlinks.  Usually, these companies will acknowledge that not all backlinks are worth the same amount, but they still operate on the assumption that when you buy cheap backlinks, you'll increase your amount of “link juice,” or authority from backlinks.

Fact: Some Cheap Backlinks Can Hurt Your Website

Obviously, the companies you would buy cheap backlinks from have an interest in getting you to buy them.  Because of this, they may not tell you that some cheap backlinks will actually make your search rankings decline.

What kinds of links should you avoid purchasing when you buy cheap backlinks?  Don't buy any backlinks that aren't contextually relevant to your website.  If the context of the website they're on is completely different from yours, Google is likely to notice and suspect that you buy cheap backlinks instead of building them organically.

If you get cheap backlinks on a number of websites which are all owned by the same person and hosted at the same IP address, you're also likely to be flagged by Google.  Don't ever buy cheap backlinks without verifying that they will be from websites with different IP addresses.

Myth: Backlinks Should All Have the Same Anchor Text

If you started to buy cheap backlinks a few years ago, you may want to run a backlink checker program that can look at what anchor text is linking to your website from your backlinks.  You may find that almost all of your cheap backlinks have identical anchor text.  This kind of strategy was often employed to give websites better search engine optimization for a particular keyword or phrase.

Other times, you may find that almost every link to your website is a brand link—for example, one that lists the name of your firm or the URL of your website.

Fact: You Need to Vary Anchor Text

If you've used these tactics in the past, be warned: when you buy cheap backlinks with identical anchor text, it's very likely that you'll trip Google Penguin's over optimization detection.  If your site is seen as being over optimized, you will be penalized because you chose to use cheap backlinks instead of building quality links.

One of the easiest ways for Google to detect that you are trying to buy cheap backlinks is a lack of variance—remember that natural backlinks will have a very wide variety of anchor text, including not only brand and exact keyword matches, but sometimes just simple phrases that aren't designed as SEO keywords.  A good backlink audit can help you see whether your linking pattern appears natural or unnatural.

Myth: Blog Comments Are Bad Cheap Backlinks

When companies would buy cheap backlinks in 2011 and the early parts of 2012, their backlink purchases often included huge numbers of blog comments.  These comments were often very spammy and Google took action against cheap backlinks on unmoderated blogs.  Because of this, some companies today believe that all blog comments are risky and not worth trying when you buy cheap backlinks.

Fact: Some Blog Comments Work Well

While it's true that spam blog comments are bad cheap backlinks to buy, this doesn't mean that you should rule out blog commenting altogether as a source of backlinks.  Make sure before you buy cheap backlinks in the form of blog comments from any source that these comments will be contextually relevant.  This means that they need to be real responses to the blog entry, not mass produced “this was a good article” text that could go in just about any comment section.

Myth: Article Spinning and Press Release Sites Still Work

Some of the classic resources that law firms used when they would buy cheap backlinks in the “old days” before Penguin were called article spinners or article marketing services.  These services worked by reproducing a single article, or small variations on one article, through a huge number of affiliated websites.

Because of the huge quantity of cheap backlinks that law firms could buy using these services, they were one of the most favored techniques for a long time.  Unfortunately, today, they're not a good solution.  Google has identified most of the websites that are part of these affiliate networks, and no longer value the “link juice” from these links or even assign it a negative value.  Many law firms that had used article spinners are now having to request that their links (which they paid for months or years ago) be removed from low quality affiliate websites.

Fact: You Need Different Cheap Backlinks Sources

By far the best way to avoid any big backlinking mistakes is to have a diverse strategy.  If your backlinks are spread out on a number of different types of websites, and come from a wide variety of different post formats, odds are that your backlinks will be much safer than those from firms that put all their SEO backlinking eggs in one basket.

Diversify your backlink sources as often as possible by keeping an eye on internet trends.  By learning about new backlink sources before your competitors, you'll maintain a wider link variety and better visibility.

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.