4 out of 5 new legal clients use web searches to help them make a decision about which lawyer to hire.  Because link popularity influences search results so much, many lawyers are now looking into using link popularity tools to increase their traffic and conversions.  However, not every lawyer has the same problem, and not every lawyer needs the same link popularity tool.  Here are some of the most common problems that attorneys have when trying to put together a successful, high ranking website, and the link popularity tools that can help you to overcome those problems.

Problem: We Don't Know How Popular Our Links Are

Solution: Link Popularity Tools for Link Checking

Sometimes, lawyers have had a website for a very long time—maybe your site dates from a time when search engine optimization mostly depended just on keyword percentages.  If this is the case, you may not have checked your link popularity at all, especially not with modern link popularity tools.

Using a link popularity tool designed to check your level of link popularity can give you part of the picture about how well you're performing.  In order to get a more detailed image of what you're doing right and what you can do better, you should check out your competition's website using the same link popularity tools.  This helps you understand comparatively where you are, and using a link popularity tool like this may even give you some new ideas about where to try to build new links.

Problem: We Don't Have Enough Links

Solution: Link Popularity Tools For Link Building

Maybe you've already used a link popularity tool to check how popular you were—and you didn't like the results very much at all.  You saw that your website was languishing behind many other sites like it, and you want to use some link popularity tools to help you create new ones.

Some all in one link popularity tools act as link managers that can help you post links to a wide variety of websites from a single interface.  This also helps you to keep track of the links that you have already posted.  If you're not using a link popularity tool like this to enhance your link popularity, you'll have to post at every website individually, using their interface, which may not seem like it takes very long—but once you add up all the time you're spending navigating different website layouts, it turns out that these link popularity tools can be one of the biggest time savers your law firm can invest in.

Problem: Not Enough Time To Post Our Links

Solution: Automated Submission Link Popularity Tools

This is one of the biggest problems that many law firms have when trying to figure out what link popularity tool to use.  Posting links takes time, and for lawyers, time is money in a very direct and tangible sense.  To avoid the feeling of those billable hours just slipping away, many attorneys use link popularity tools that automate their link submission fully.

However, this type of link popularity tool has a down side that you should be aware of before you ever choose to use one.  Automated link building through link popularity tools is not looked upon favorably by search engines, and if you're caught, you can expect penalties to your search rankings.  For some lawyers, this may be perceived as a risk worth taking.  Others won't want to chance it.  You'll have to make up your own mind about whether or not automating your links is enough of a time savings to be worth the possibility of losing your hard-won rankings.

Problem: Finding New Sites To Post Links On

Solution: Using Social Bookmarking as a Link Popularity Tool

Some of the best link popularity tools today aren't freestanding pieces of software.  Instead, think of websites that allow free user posting to be their own unique form of link popularity tool.  If you want to increase your link presence, social bookmarking sites are the best link popularity tools possible.  Just start by creating an account and soon you'll be able to freely post links to whatever part of your website needs them most.

Problem: Don't Know Which Links Are Better

Solution: Use SEOQuake or Other Link Popularity Tools to Check PageRank

When you're building your links, you'll want to prioritize them by quality, and there's no better way to check than by using a link popularity tool.  Google bases the amount of link juice you get with each link on how authoritative the link source is, and how many other links are on the website.  Using a link popularity tool like SEOQuake, which works in your browser to tell you information about a website's PageRank and other data, can be extremely useful if you're hoping to find the most efficient route to Page One of search results.

If you're considering two different sources for your link, try using SEOQuake and seeing whether their PageRank is the same or not.  If it's not, you probably want to prioritize putting links on the website with the higher PageRank value.

Keep in mind that not all of your links can or should be from high PageRank sites—this would be a very unnatural linking pattern.  However, you can definitely use link popularity tools like SEOQuake to find out which links are likely to be most valuable and which ones you can probably ignore.

Problem: Google Says Our Website is Overoptimized

Solution: Use Link Popularity Tools to Identify Bad Links

One last use of a link popularity tool that you should know about is using tools to identify bad links.  Whether they're inbound links leading to your website or outbound links that go to websites other than your own, you need your links to work.  If you use link popularity tools and find out that one of your inbound links isn't working, you can talk to the webmaster or redirect the link URL to the page that now contains the relevant information.  If an outbound link no longer works, you should find where the data you were linking to is now displayed, and change your link accordingly.

Search engine link popularity is now the #1 factor that matters when it comes to where your link appears in the rankings.  If you're not actively working to boost your SEO link popularity, you're going to fall further and further behind your more prepared competitors in 2013 and beyond.  In this guide, we're going to look at some of the hottest search engine link popularity topics of 2012 and examine how they can affect law firms.  Sit back and take some notes, because these tips will help you to get your website onto the top page, where the traffic flows freely.

Is Your Law Firm Prepared for 2013?

It's not exactly a secret that most lawyers hate marketing.  Search engine link popularity just isn't a very exciting topic to most legal professionals, which probably explains why so many lawyers are ignoring it.

Today, though, it's like everybody's living in the future—over 80 percent of people look for lawyers online before deciding on who will represent them, and over 90 percent of those people aren't looking past the first page of their search results.  That means that in order to get clients, you're going to need to put yourself on the first page for at least some search strings that people actually use.  

Google makes most of its rankings decisions based on your inbound links—both how many of them there are, and how authoritative each link is based on the linking website's PageRank.  If you're going to boost your SEO link popularity today, you'll need to not only focus on building large numbers of links but also on checking the quality of every link you get.

Use Caution When Boosting SEO Link Popularity

There is such a thing as trying too hard to boost your search engine link popularity.  If you spam the entire internet with link after link to your website, you might think that the boost to your SEO link popularity would automatically lead to a dramatic increase in your search ranks.  Not so—in fact, Google has several ways to detect when someone is gaming the system.

One of the easiest mistakes to make is building your link presence too fast.  No real website builds its search engine link popularity overnight.  Gradual, slow changes to your SEO link popularity will look more natural and will lead to a slow but steady positive change to where your website appears in search results.

The Difference Between Indexed and Non-Indexed Links

Not all links are created equal.  Not only are some links poorer quality than others for search engine link popularity purposes, but some links actually don't make any difference at all.  Why?  Because Google's “spiders” (the programs used to find new web pages and index their content) aren't able to find them.  If your inbound links can't be found by Google, there's no way for their link juice to add to your website's level of authority.

The best way to ensure that your links will be indexed and affect your SEO link popularity is to put them on websites with easy to navigate interfaces and site maps.  You may also want to actually build links to your links in order to increase your search engine link popularity—this is called nested or tiered link building.

Worry About Clients First, Search Engines Second

With all the focus in the search engine marketing world today, some marketers make the mistake of putting the machines first.  It's worth keeping in mind that the best way to build your SEO link popularity is still to get natural links from people interested in your content.  If you build for people first, and think of search engine link popularity as a nice bonus, you'll do much better than if you make barely readable pages full of content that an audience wouldn't care about but a search engine would.

Methods of Boosting Your SEO Link Popularity Naturally

Search engine link popularity isn't necessarily hard to build naturally, as long as you're good at creating content and can do so consistently.  Start joining and participating in social networking websites, and you'll see your SEO link popularity start to build up overnight.  It's not because you've done anything “black hat,” but because you've actually provided a way for people to find information they're looking for.

You can also improve search results and your search engine link popularity by listing yourself in a large number of directories, both for websites generally and for lawyers specifically.  Attorneys who aren't listed in these directories will have substantially lower SEO link popularity, and most directories are either free to participate in or cost only a nominal fee.

What Changes Will Happen in 2013?

Google tends not to talk about search engine algorithm changes until they come out, so it's difficult to speculate on exactly how SEO link popularity will change.  However, we can make some educated guesses based on how Google has dealt with search engine link popularity issues up until now.

So far in 2012, Google has been making big changes to their search algorithm to prevent people from gaining SEO link popularity through automated or “black hat” techniques that involve spam.  However, spam results are still very noticeable, especially when making searches for very competitive terms.  We can expect for Google to address this and tweak the way they correlate search engine link popularity with rankings next year.  So far, the trend has been toward penalizing automated SEO link popularity building, so you should start phasing out the use of automation programs, even if they're still working for now.

Differentiating Yourself From The Competition

The best way to make sure that your search engine link popularity continues to climb is having an effective brand identity and promoting that brand identity across the web.  If you just seem like another lawyer, without a lot to differentiate yourself from the competition, don't be surprised if your results are tepid.  Don't just do what everyone else is doing—if you want to be on page one, you need to build your search engine link popularity organically and contextually.

Running a free link popularity check tool isn't difficult, but most law firms aren't using a link popularity checker yet.  Why not?  It may be that many lawyers haven't yet really grasped how important link popularity is for their websites—so they don't even know that a link popularity check could be useful.  If you're not sure whether a link popularity check would be beneficial for your firm, this guide can help steer you in the right direction.  Here are seven different ways that a free link popularity check can make your firm's website easier to find for potential clients.

#1: Learn What You're Doing Right

When you run a link popularity check for the first time, you may be surprised by how many links you have.  It's very likely that the link popularity checker will reveal not just links that you've deliberately built for your firm, but also many other links that other people have made with or without telling you.  If you haven't run a free link popularity check in some time, or have never run one before, you're going to find out which of your pages tend to get the most links and which get the fewest.

By finding out what other people are linking to with a link popularity checker, you'll be able to understand which topics are most interesting to your viewers and which don't get as much traffic.  You may not have known that a particular niche was making so many waves for your firm online—this kind of understanding is one of the biggest advantages of running a link popularity check.

#2: Investigating the Competition

Knowing what your firm is doing right is only part of the battle.  The reality is, you've got competitors, and some of them may be doing a link popularity check right now—on both their website and your own.  Once you've already run a link popularity checker on your own website, do a free link popularity check on your competition's site as well.

The results from running a link popularity check on your competitor can be a veritable gold mine of information.  In many cases, you will find through your link popularity checker that they're listed on directory websites or other types of sites that you haven't yet built inbound links from.  You can get your links on the same sites, then re-run a free link popularity check on your own website to make sure they're showing up.

#3: Finding Different Websites For Links

When you use a link popularity check, you can find brand new websites to start posting on.  Maybe you'd never even heard of reddit.com, but now you find out through the link popularity checker that the social bookmarking website already includes three different inbound links for your blog.  Because of your free link popularity check, you can now start using websites where it's clear you or your competitors have had success.

#4: Learning Who's Following You

Having a great network of people is one of the best ways to build inbound links.  By using a link popularity checker, you can find out whether there are a few people or websites that are linking to you repeatedly and seem to be following you.  By identifying these people with your free link popularity check, you can start actually interacting with them and following them as well.

When you use your link popularity check in this way, you're actually building a small web community all of your own.  Make sure that when you reach out to these followers after running your link popularity checker, you don't just seek them out as a source of better links.  Treat them as people deserving of respect and consideration, and you'll have much better results and can possibly make a lifelong career networking connection because of your link popularity checker.

#5: Checking Reciprocal Links

If you've asked somebody for a link exchange, you may have used a link popularity check at the beginning of your arrangement to make sure they put up the link they promised.  But have you checked with a link popularity checker since then?  If not, running a free link popularity check can give you peace of mind and help you see whether anyone has broken their agreement.

If you run a link popularity check and find that someone is no longer running the link that they said they would be, you can talk to the webmaster and ask them to reinsert the link on their website.  If they refuse, you can take down the reciprocal link from your site.

#6: Making Sure Your Links Are Up To Date

When you redesign your website it's imperative to run a free link popularity check as soon as you can.  If you don't run a link popularity check periodically after a site revision, it's possible that your inbound links will direct to pages that you no longer maintain or update.  This means that people trying to follow these links won't get what they're coming for, and they probably won't search all over your site to find it.

When your free link popularity check reveals that some links are going to outdated pages, you have two options.  You can either alert the webmaster of the site where the link is hosted, so that he or she can change the link based on your link popularity checker results, or you can include a new redirect page on your website so that people don't get lost.

#7: Learning Where You Need Expansion

Your link popularity check can show you not only where you've already got links, but also where you haven't got them.  If a free link popularity check reveals, for instance, that you have few or no links from social networking sites, you may want to start pursuing a social networking strategy.  If the link popularity check reveals that you're not yet taking advantage of any type of commonly used link, you should definitely at least consider adding those links to your site.

A majority of marketers today rank link building as being a difficult or very difficult search engine optimization task.  How can your law firm improve link popularity numbers without running into problems with Google?  How can you increase link popularity in a way that will make sure that you're getting closer to the front page of search results every day?  Here we'll learn 8 ways to improve link popularity that work without “black hat” techniques.

#1: Improve Link Popularity With Quality, Not Quantity

If you learned how to increase link popularity in the early part of the 21st century and haven't brushed up since, you may need to start relearning some things.  Today, quality matters much more than just how many links you have.  If you want to improve link popularity for your website, you'll need to focus on getting links from websites with high amounts of traffic and high levels of authority.

Google will increase link popularity for a website more when it receives links from pages with a high Google PageRank.  This is because these websites are viewed as being more likely to be authoritative.  Similarly, because they are perceived as more difficult to get, inbound links coming from .edu top level domains will improve link popularity more than a similar link coming from a .com address with equivalent PageRank.

#2: Increase Link Popularity By Monitoring the Competition

If you're not sure where your strategy to improve link popularity could use improvement, use your competitors to get your next ideas.  Use a link popularity checker tool to find out what kind of links your competition is building, and then use those results to find your own link sources.  Whenever you find a website that your competitors are using to increase link popularity, you can work to get a link built in that website as well.

Consistent monitoring of your competitors can generate valuable intelligence about their strategies to increase link popularity.  Don't be too beholden to their results: remember that you should also strive to improve link popularity in ways that your competition hasn't yet figured out, so that you can more easily defeat them in the search rankings.

#3: Improve Link Popularity Organically and Contextually

Google has recently started paying more attention to whether a website is working to really improve the quality of its results or just the quantity.  Because of new, stricter scrutiny that Google is applying to websites' inbound links, you should try to make sure that many of your links are contextually based.  When you improve link popularity with contextual links, each of your links will grant you more link juice than if they had come from a website with very little in common with yours.

The best way, bar none, to increase link popularity is to have other people post your content and provide inbound links organically.  This means that people are posting links to your website without being asked or prompted to.  However, it can be difficult to improve link popularity in this way.  If you can't, try to at least make it look like your links have been naturally built rather than artificially.

#4: Increase Link Popularity Slowly For Best Results

A sudden spike in the number of links to your website won't lead to a meteoric rise and thousands of new hits.  Instead, it's likely to set you back, because Google will penalize websites that are seen to improve link popularity too quickly.  If you're in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, it may not happen today or tomorrow but you will be found out—and it can be absolutely devastating to search rankings when you are.

Start with three or four links per day at most when you start to improve link popularity.  If you increase link popularity more rapidly in a month or two, this won't look nearly as suspicious as if your link building had happened all at once.

#5: Monitor Your Google PageRank To Check Your Progress

You should consistently check your PageRank to see if your efforts to improve link popularity have translated into a direct result for your website.  If you're seeing your PageRank number slowly increase, you're probably in very good shape for the future.  Keep in mind that because PageRank is a logarithmic scale, even if you are an amazing web marketer, it's very unlikely that your website will ever become a site with PageRank 8 or 9.

#6: Use Analytics to Increase Link Popularity Efficiently

If you're just shotgunning your approaches, you may not know which method for improving link popularity is actually working best.  You should instead try a single method to increase link popularity at a time, and see how it works using analytics tools.  If you find that a particular method is ineffective, you can improve link popularity using a different method and then use analytics again for a side by side comparison.

#7: Improve Link Popularity With One Way Links

If you're using too many links that are reciprocal (that is to say, two way between sites), Google will assume that you have just been trading links.  It's fine to have some casual reciprocity, just don't make it the entire focus of your campaign to increase link popularity.  It's easy enough to build one way links today that you shouldn't have any trouble finding sources.  Reciprocal linking should only account for a small percentage of your overall links.

If you're not able to get enough one way links using conventional means, you may consider using an automated one way linking service.  However, this is usually a bad way to increase link popularity.  When you improve link popularity with one of these services, you're automating the link building process in a way that Google disapproves of.  If you're caught, you can expect to face stiff penalties in the rankings or even see your website de-listed from Google searches—the search engine optimization equivalent of the death penalty.

2012 has made significant changes to how link popularity is tracked and measured by Google.  As link popularity has become important, more firms than ever want to know how to search link popularity.  In this guide, we'll look at some of the reasons that law firms find it in their best interest to perform a link popularity search.  We'll also find out how to search link popularity effectively, and why it isn't always your website that you should be searching for.

Why Should We Perform a Link Popularity Search?

No matter what you've done to build your links, it's a good thing to know how to search link popularity.  Understanding searching techniques will make it much easier for you to monitor and track your reputation online.  By doing a link popularity search, you'll learn what kind of websites are linking to you and where you might be able to create profitable advertisements.  You'll also find out what kind of linking is most effective in bringing clients to your website.

When you thoroughly understand what kind of links you're getting, you can begin to develop a comprehensive plan for expanding your link presence.  Identifying existing strengths and weaknesses can make it easier to develop a more well rounded approach to link building.  This versatile approach is often neglected by online marketers desperate to cut corners instead of providing the very best advice and service.

How to Search Link Popularity: Getting Started

Before you actually start to learn how to search link popularity, it's a good idea to have your goals in mind first.  What kind of results do you want from your link popularity search?  Are you learning how to search link popularity so that you can compete more easily with a rival firm?  Will a link popularity search be used by your firm to figure out where to post your links next?  Understanding what you want will help you make better decisions about what tools to download and how to use them.

How to Search Link Popularity: Free Web Tools

The most common way for people to search link popularity today is by using websites that have free online tools.  These free online tools are a good way to keep people coming to websites, so nearly every search engine optimization guru has his or her own link popularity calculator for people who want to know how to search link popularity.

These tools change locations online constantly, and you may want to check more than one of these tools before you decide that you have a hard and fast number for your law firm's link popularity.  Doing a double or triple check with multiple tools is always a good idea, because disagreement among the results may be an indicator that the websites you're using for your link popularity search aren't working as well as you had hoped.

How to Search Link Popularity: Your Website

The first website that you should do a link popularity search on is, of course, your own.  Start by running a link popularity search that gives you your results for Google popularity.  Different tools will give you different information.  For example, if you learn how to search link popularity using seoprofiler.com, you'll find out how many of the pages of your website are in Google's Top 50 search results, as well as seeing a list of websites in direct competition with yours.

Other tools can just list a large number of backlinks in whatever search engine you prefer.  Don't hesitate to do a link popularity search that involves several different search engines—you may find that you have much better search rankings on one than another, and exploring why can help you create your next strategy for improving your link presence.

How to Search Link Popularity: Competitor Websites

Once you've looked at some link popularity search reports for your website, it's time to turn your attention elsewhere.  Where are your competitors building their links?  Are they getting inbound links by getting directory entries, or by having social media link to their site regularly?  Analyzing where your competitors' links come from can give you fantastic ideas for helping out your own website.

After you learn how to search link popularity, you can do it for any website at all.  If there's a legal website that you're in awe of when it comes to search engine optimization, a link popularity search can take away the mystery and make it easier to imitate that site.

Tracking Your Link Popularity Search Results

It's great to know how to search link popularity and run a search, but just one search is of limited use.  You'll want to use consistent tracking of link popularity in order to make sure that you're seeing whenever a new inbound link appears for your website.

At least once every week or so, you should be looking at a link popularity search.  Tracking changes over time to these results can be helpful in identifying patterns of behavior.

What an Ideal Link Popularity Search Will Show

Google monitors link popularity because some patterns indicate that the popularity has been built artificially.  If your link popularity search reveals that almost all of your links come from the same few IP addresses, you are probably skating on very thin ice with Google and should watch out—your website could be sandboxed at any second.

What you want to do when you learn how to search link popularity is to generate a real variety of links.  You should make sure that you're cultivating links of several different types on many different websites.  Your link popularity search should indicate that you're using varied anchor text and that you don't use the same content over and over for all of your inbound links.

Maintaining link variety is the only way to ensure that Google doesn't identify your website as being too optimized.  What's more, when you have a wide variety of links, you'll be substantially more invulnerable to new spam detection techniques.

When you're looking for information on the specifics of today's online marketing, you'll want to have brand new information that keeps recent changes to social media and web searches in mind.  However, when it comes to strategizing for your online marketing plan and content, you might want to look to a different source: books on advertising and marketing.  Many of these books contain information and ideas that are timeless, and that too many online marketers forget.  In this guide, we'll take a look at seven of the best books about advertising and marketing that can help you develop content strategies for your online campaigns.

#1: Hey Whipple, Squeeze This! By Luke Sullivan

This book, by an advertising copywriter who worked on major campaigns for decades, is subtitled “a guide to creating great ads.”  Sullivan actually starts by talking about Mr. Whipple, the mascot for Charmin brand toilet paper, who was considered by most television audiences to be an annoyance—yet it seemed that having him as the company's mascot kept paying.

Sullivan isn't afraid in his book to talk not only about why some advertisements work better than others, he's also not afraid to talk about the kinds of advertising that he finds to be uninspiring, bland, and boring.  Sullivan's prose is light and entertaining, making this a great first book on copywriting for anyone who is just starting to create their own written content for a website or social media page.  Hand it to anyone who's considering writing copy for your website or advertisements, and you won't regret that you did.

#2: The Hero and the Outlaw, by Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson

Legal marketing professionals today are always looking for a way to differentiate the brand of their law firm.  A great branding effort can make the difference between a firm that prospers, even in difficult times, and one that has to shut down.  In this book, Mark and Pearson look at some of the biggest brands in the country and find a common thread to their incredibly successful branding efforts: archetypes.

Archetypes are the basic personalities and stories that we've heard a million times since childhood.  If someone says “outlaw,” you probably already have a fairly large number of traits assigned in your head to what the outlaw is like and what is likely to happen to him or her.  The same goes for an explorer, or even just a regular guy or girl.  Our archetypes help us anticipate narratives and understand where a brand is coming from.

In The Hero and the Outlaw, Mark and Pearson give aspiring brand strategists tools to develop their own archetypal “personality” for their law firm.  If you're stuck when trying to come up with a good branding initiative, this is the right book for you.

#3: Fascinate, by Sally Hogshead

When you read advice about content on legal websites, you'll probably hear a lot about the need to captivate viewers with original content.  But how do you write content that actually gets people to click and read?  In this book, you'll learn seven different reasons that people become fascinated with content.  It includes ways to look at your fascination strengths and weaknesses, allowing your firm to get the most out of its content and draw in the most viewers.  

#4: Buyology, by Martin Lindstrom

Maybe reading about branding and fascination isn't your thing.  You want quantitative results, statistics that help you understand exactly what will generate conversions and give you lasting business relationships.  If that's the case, you want Lindstrom's Buyology.  Instead of just looking at the psychology of advertising and marketing, Lindstrom's book actually examines the neurobiology at work behind human motivations.

By looking at MRI brain scans of people who are thinking about advertising and marketing content, the book is able to explain why some types of branding and content work better than others.  What's more, the book is written at a level suitable for a lay person, so you don't need to have any special knowledge of science, math, or statistics to get a lot out of it.

#5: Whatever You Think, Think The Opposite, by Paul Arden

Arden, the former creative director from advertising giant Saatchi & Saatchi, brings this book that can help you get out of a creative rut.  If you know that your content strategy is failing but you don't know why and don't know how to get back on track, this book can help you think about your problems in new ways so that you can create real change.

#6: The Book of Gossage, by Howard Luck Gossage

One of the strangest advertising men of the 1960s, Howard Luck Gossage's advertisements are like nothing you've ever seen before.  The Book of Gossage gathers not only many of these advertisements, but also writings by Gossage himself, and assembles them into a book that is as timely today as when it was written.

Gossage's advertisements are particularly relevant for online content creators, because they tend to be very wordy and informative while still being quite fascinating.  Unlike many of the creators of advertising in his time, Gossage favored text—and lots of it.  A master of making even an ad with hundreds of words of copy a breeze to read, Gossage is worth a look if you want to know how to make your website's content uniquely readable.

#7: Winning the Story Wars, by Jonah Sachs

This brand new book came out just last year, and is great at discussing why, exactly, story and narrative matter when it comes to advertising and marketing.  Sachs is talking about up to the minute trends in this book, and understands that in today's marketing world, the biggest advantage that winning the story wars gives you is virality.

If you've ever wanted to know how to make your content go viral, and how to make sure that your stories are outshining the ones being told by your biggest competitors, you should pick up Sachs' book.

Don't believe the hype: reciprocal linking is a long way from dead.  And for as long as reciprocal links are here to stay, reciprocal link checker software can help you to make sure that your linking partners are holding up their end of the bargain and helping your search engine optimization efforts.  In this guide, we'll take a detailed look into why a law firm might want to use reciprocal link checker websites.  You'll also learn about how Google views reciprocal linking, and how to avoid being penalized for having excessive reciprocal links.

What are Reciprocal Links?

Links can be one of two types: one way and reciprocal.  In a one way linking scenario, someone sees your website and likes the way that you state something.  They put a hyperlink with anchor text on their web page, and it leads directly to your website.  For them, this would be considered an outbound one way link, while for you it would be an inbound one way link.

Reciprocal linking is two-way linking.  If you and a friend both have blogs, you might decide to link to each other's content.  This would be considered reciprocal linking, and has formed the basis of many search engine optimization strategies.

Should I Have Reciprocal Links?

It's not as easy as it once was to base your search engine marketing strategy on reciprocal linking.  This type of linking was once the dominant form of search engine optimization link building.  However, it fast became synonymous with spammy “link exchange” websites that did little but compile links and make it tougher to find what you were really looking for.

Today, if you have too much reciprocal linking, Google may actually penalize your website.  This doesn't mean, though, that you should never use these links.  Reciprocal links can still be very valuable, if they're to give higher PageRank websites.  Just make sure that you don't have too many, and you can still use reciprocal linking as a vital part of your link building strategy.

Reciprocal Link Checker Functions: Monitoring Link Relationships

If you're using reciprocal linking in any form, you should periodically do an audit of your links.  It's critical to run a reciprocal link checker every few months—if you don't, you have no way of knowing whether the people you're linking to are providing a link back like they promised.

The most commonly used function of any reciprocal link checker is making sure that this reciprocity is maintained.  If you find that the reciprocal linking you thought you had is down, you can talk to the owner of the website.  By telling them that your reciprocal link checker found that your links are no longer reciprocated, they can find the source of the problem and fix it—or you can simply choose to delete the link from your own website.

You can also use a reciprocal link checker tool to make sure that the links to your website are as prominently displayed as the ones that you are displaying to someone else's website.  If they're in a very difficult to access part of a website, they may no longer be as valuable, because it may be more difficult for them to be indexed by search engines.

Reciprocal Link Checker Functions: Monitoring Anchor Text

Google considers anchor text similarity when deciding whether a website appears to have been over optimized.  If almost all the anchor text you're getting in your reciprocal linking is the same few words, you may need to mix it up a little.  Running a reciprocal link checker is a good way to learn whether you're getting a sufficient variety of keywords to keep Google's Penguin update from penalizing your site.

Once you look at all of your reciprocal links, you should be able to get a good sense of how many of them are using identical or nearly identical text.  You can then send emails to the webmasters at several of the websites where the identical text is being used, asking for variations on the original text so that your reciprocal linking strategy works better.

Other Reciprocal Link Checker Functions

One of the biggest questions that you may have about your reciprocal links is what percentage of your links they constitute.  By running first an inbound link checker and then a reciprocal links checker, you can look at how many of each type of link you're getting.

Any website that has a percentage of reciprocal linking that exceeds 40 percent or so should be very worried about being penalized.  Continuing to monitor your reciprocal links with a reciprocal link checker can help you identify when you need to seek more one way linking opportunities.  You can easily have 20 percent or so of your links be reciprocal without having to worry much about Google Penguin.  This means that you can seek out link exchanges with attorneys or other professionals to raise your total number of inbound links, as long as you don't use this method to the exclusion of all others.

How to Check Your One Way Links

In addition to checking the status of your reciprocal linking efforts, you may need to also monitor the one way inbound backlinks that are coming to your website.  This requires different tools.  Backlink checker websites abound online, and you can even use Google Analytics to keep track of how many people are coming to your website from each of your one way links.

By monitoring your one way links, you can also make sure that changes to your website don't make it less user friendly.  You can build in redirect pages to help people who are coming to your website from other sites, so that their interaction with your site is seamless no matter how much time passes since you received the link.  Without a redirect page, you'll lose potential new business, and the links will appear to be broken to anyone who runs a link checking program.

Doing analysis of outbound links is still uncommon in most business sectors, including the legal field.  However, if you want to make sure that your search engine optimization is successful and that people are using your website the way you want them to, you need to be able to check your outbound links and track how people are using them.  This guide will explore why outbound link tracking is a great idea for law firms that have a large number of outbound links on their websites.  If you're not already doing outbound links tracking, we'll look at which websites need it most and which can probably live without it.

What Are Outbound Links?

A website that isn't connected to other sites is not likely to be indexed frequently by search engines, and isn't likely to be very popular with the rest of the internet.  In order to get links coming in, you'll need to have some links going out.  Those links, that go from your website to the websites of other people, can be for advertisers or other law firms.  Maybe you just have some links to basic legal resources for your area, or resources for people who cannot afford an attorney.

Why Google Cares About Outbound Links

Search engines actually do outbound link tracking, checking how many outbound links your website has in total.  By doing this outbound links tracking, they are trying to assess how much “link juice” a particular link should be worth.  Search engines don't want to put too much weight on links from websites that may be very easy to get links from.

That's why when Google does outbound link tracking, it looks at the overall number of links from the website, and dilutes the value of a single outbound link based on the total number.  If you receive an outbound link, for example, from a website that has 100 links in total and a PageRank of 5, you'll get a much better spike to your search rankings than if you'd gotten a link from a website with over a million total links.  Outbound links tracking can help you understand how Google is looking at both your website and the websites where you're building your inbound links.

Which Law Firms Benefit From Outbound Link Tracking?

Just about any law firm can benefit from looking at outbound links tracking in order to get an idea of where you can post the most beneficial inbound links.  However, some law firms can receive an additional benefit as well.

Let's say that you're an attorney who specializes in estate law in a mid-sized city.  You have some professional colleagues who went to law school with you, and you tend to refer them business sometimes.  By doing outbound link tracking, you can learn exactly how many people have gone from your website to their website.

This kind of referral traffic can actually start to make you money after you do enough outbound link tracking.  If you show through your outbound links tracking programs that you are sending high amounts of traffic through link referrals, you may be able to make a case for other attorneys paying to advertise on your website, making more money for your firm without having to do much different.

How to Do Outbound Link Tracking for Your Website

Outbound links tracking can actually be tougher than you might think when using software like Google Analytics.  It's surprising, but Google's own software doesn't analyze this aspect of your website automatically, and in fact, you'll need to know how to do a little bit of computer programming (or hire someone who does) to do outbound link tracking.

Google Analytics lets you do outbound link tracking with a category it calls “events.”  Essentially, you can program Google Analytics to track any particular events that you believe are interesting and worth tracking—for instance, any time somebody clicks on each individual outbound link.

If you don't know how to program and don't particularly want to learn, there is an alternative to finding a computer programmer.  There are several programs available online that can help you to do outbound links tracking with convenient graphical interfaces.  You can also search for “outbound link tracking code” to find up to date code to insert in your website to help Google Analytics do outbound links tracking.

Doing Outbound Link Tracking For Other Websites

One other use of outbound links tracking is checking the number of outbound links on the websites you're currently building inbound links from.  Why would this be important?  Well, if a website that you've had good results building links on suddenly has a very large number of additional outbound links, the value of your links there just diminished greatly.

You can use a wide variety of web tools to do this kind of outbound links tracking.  If you find that your link value has been diluted by excessive additional links, it's time to find some new sources of inbound links that have not yet become overpopulated with links from other search engine marketing professionals.

Analyzing Other Aspects of Outbound Links

Once you're doing outbound links tracking on your website, you can check a lot of different things.  You can learn, for instance, which link position on your website is the most likely to get clicks.  You can also learn more about the ways that people go through your website, and which information they're leaving your website to get.

If you want to keep visitors on your site longer, after doing outbound links tracking, you should consider including the information available from the biggest sites as part of your own website.  For example, if many visitors are clicking outbound links that go to legal forms, perhaps you should consider hosting the same legal forms on your own website in hopes of converting more clients as site visitors stay longer.  Remember, after someone has clicked away from your website, it's not very likely that they'll hit their browser's “back” button.

Over half of search engine optimization links used to be reciprocal links—that is, links that went two or three ways rather than just one way.  Today, that number is lower, because Google has decided to impose penalties on websites that rely too much on reciprocal link numbers.  In this guide, we'll take a quick paced look at some of the pros and cons of both reciprocal links and one way links, and help you create a linking strategy that incorporates the best of both worlds.

Reciprocal Link Pro: Easy to Start

One of the best things about reciprocal links is that you probably already know some people who can provide them.  With so many attorneys today starting blogs, as soon as you start a blog you can ask your blogging friends and colleagues for a reciprocal link agreement.  Usually, people who are your professional connections will agree to this kind of reciprocal links arrangement, and before you know it, you'll be getting some of their link authority as well as some of their blog traffic.

One Way Link Pro:  Available on Social Bookmarking Websites

One of the easiest ways to build one way links is to use social bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit.  These websites let you build your own one way links.  If you want your link to get onto the front page automatically, you can even pay to have a link displayed as a sponsored link, but you can also try to get it to the front page just by having great, readable content.

Since social bookmarking websites are so big, they're an excellent source of one way link juice for just about any website.  A word of caution, though: if users on these sites think you're spamming, you could be banned.  Quality and variety is key.

Reciprocal Link Con: Google Algorithms for Stopping Overuse

Because it's so easy to exchange links on a one for one basis, Google found itself having to stop websites from getting too much search engine optimization potential just from reciprocal links.  A reciprocal link will only provide you with additional link juice if you don't have a pre-existing high percentage of reciprocal links on your site.

Because of this, no matter what, you can never rely on reciprocal links alone.  You will always have to combine your reciprocal link strategy with strategies for building one way links.

One Way Link Con: Google Algorithms for Stopping Abuse

Of course, one way links can be misused just as much as reciprocal links.  It just took Google a little longer to catch on to the ways one way linking was being abused.  In response to people purchasing large quantities of one way links, Google imposed penalties on websites that had signs of link buying.  For example, your website could incur a penalty if too many of your links displayed the same anchor text, or if too many links came from the same IP address.

While most of the time, Google's detection scheme only detects paid-for links, even links built with white hat techniques can generate false positives.  When you're building one way links, you have to be careful to use a wide variety.

Reciprocal Link Pro: Contextual Linking

Most of the places where an attorney will be able to put reciprocal links will be in places that are contextual—other law firm websites, law blogs, legal directories, and so on.  Because of this, your reciprocal link strategy will be more successful.  Google considers contextual links to be more valuable, and you will be rewarded for reciprocal links that are clearly a sign of esteem between colleagues rather than a paid-for link exchange.

One Way Link Pro: High Page Rank Links

While law firm websites and law blogs may be contextual, they also don't usually have a particularly high PageRank.  Because PageRank matters so much to Google when it tries to decide how much authority a particular link confers on your site, one way linking from these sites can get you a steep increase in search rankings.

For example, links that you receive from Facebook or Twitter aren't likely to be reciprocal links.  These links are very likely to give you a significant rankings boost.

Reciprocal Link Con: Cluttered Websites

If you use too many reciprocal links, odds are that your website will begin to look very cluttered—and the websites with your links will look the same.  Because this can be unattractive to website visitors, you may want to keep your reciprocal link numbers down to a manageable level.

If your website already looks cluttered from reciprocal links, you may want to consider reducing some of them.  Keep in mind that if you have an existing reciprocal link agreement, you should always notify the people linking to you before you remove their link.  Otherwise, you run the risk of violating the agreement.

One Way Link Con: Making It “Look Natural”

While it's easy enough to post to social bookmarking sites or social networks, the vast majority of the time it's quite clear that your one way link building efforts are being done by you, and you alone.  Reciprocal linking is more likely to convey existing relationships within the legal community and in your own city or region.  Trying to make your one way links look natural can be very difficult, and any attempt to “jump start” the appearance of a grassroots, viral marketing campaign is likely to be discovered for what it is.

Conclusions

The best strategies for building links involve using both reciprocal linking and one way linking.  Reciprocal linking makes sense when it comes from sources you know you can trust, and websites with a clear contextual relationship to your website.  One way linking is necessary to avoid the appearance of having too many reciprocal links and incurring penalties.  You should make sure that your one way links are located on websites with high PageRank numbers whenever possible.