With over 100,000 law firms in the United States, making your firm stand out on the internet can seem like a superhuman feat.  One of the best ways to get your website noticed by Google and other search engines is by creating a comprehensive backlinking effort.  If you're still asking, “what are backlinks?”, don't worry.  This guide will take you step by step through the backlinking process.  You'll learn not only about the basics—like “what are backlinks”—but how to use backlinks effectively to improve your rankings on search engines.

The Basics: What are Backlinks?

Before we can go into specifics, we'll start with some backlinking vocabulary.  What are backlinks?  Any time someone links to your website, the link on their page is called a backlink.  Backlinks can appear on a huge variety of websites.

Getting beyond the simple question of what are backlinks, we can look at a few other terms as well.  “Nofollow” links are links that don't give their “link authority” to the person they're linking (more on that in a minute).  Backlinking also requires understanding the idea of anchor text.  Anchor text is the text on the link—with luck, it'll be a keyword that you want people to find your website with.

Why Are Backlinks Important?

Most of what makes the internet tick is the connections between people using it.  Linking to a website is a good way to show that you believe the website is important, interesting, or authoritative.  Because the most popular websites tend to be the ones that are linked by many other pages, Google takes the number of your backlinks into account when it decides where to rank your website in search results.

Originally, Google and other search engines looked only at the quantity of links that a particular website was receiving.  This made many people start asking “what are backlinks?” and using services that promised huge backlinking numbers.  In late 2011, Google released an update with the code name Panda that started to change all that.  Panda shocked the search engine optimization world by devaluing backlinks that came from websites that gave backlinks freely (and often to spam websites).

After that came Penguin, Google's 2012 code-named update to its ranking algorithm.  Now, instead of asking “what are backlinks?”, search engine optimization professionals are asking about high quality backlinking.  Penguin penalized websites that it believed were over optimized.

The Importance of Diversifying Your Backlinks

What are backlinks that will generate an over optimization penalty?  Typically, Penguin notices when a website has too many backlinks that are all of one variety, especially if it's a variety of backlinking that is easily abused by low-quality websites.  In order to avoid any penalties, you'll want to keep your backlinks extremely diverse.

What are backlinks that will raise red flags?  If Penguin notices that a huge proportion of your backlinking comes from low traffic websites, or that your website is quite low traffic itself, it may see this as a sign of overoptimization.  If the anchor text of your backlinks is always the same, rather than being very diverse, Google will notice this and consider you over optimized as well.

Where Should I Start Backlinking?

Now that you've learned the basics, like what are backlinks, you may want to get started on creating backlinks to your website.  A great place to start is by creating a law firm profile on all the major social networking sites, like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.  If you're already a part of those websites, make sure that your law firm profile includes a link back to the firm's website.

If you read any legal blogs, a great way to start backlinking is to talk to blog owners about guest posting.  If you can think of a topic that would dovetail well with something another lawyer is talking about, you may be able to get a guest posting spot along with some great backlinks to your website.

Don't worry about creating backlinks too fast.  Remember, Google is now more careful about identifying when backlinks come from paid for sources, and can even penalize websites that build backlinks too quickly.

Analyzing Your Backlinks

So what are backlinks actually doing for your law firm?  There's only one way to find out: with analysis.  If you analyze your backlinks thoroughly, you'll be able to see which links are still working, which ones go to invalid URLs, and which are coming from low quality sites.

A number of free backlink checker tools exist to help businesses understand where their backlinks are coming from and how much of an impact they're having.  You may want to check into one of these tools if you've been making a good effort to build backlinks but have met with only modest success in your actual search engine rankings.

How are Backlinks Changing?

One of the biggest questions on the mind of backlinking professionals is this: what are backlinks going to look like in the future?  The current trend, and one that shows no signs of slowing, is a trend toward quality linking.  Quality has become the single biggest buzzword for backlinking in 2012 and 2013, and given Google's mission, it's likely that this emphasis on quality will continue.

This means that it's a good idea to avoid any backlink services that produce anything but the highest quality backlinking.  Even if a particular service seems to follow the letter of the rules, but is still generating a lot of what you know to be low quality links that you didn't have to work for, you may face problems in the future.

However, as long as you keep the quality level of your backlinks up, you can usually assume that they'll continue working for you far into the future.  As other law firms with lower quality backlinking are penalized in rankings, you'll keep working your way up.  This kind of long term strategy can have big payoffs for your firm for years to come.

The Best Twitter Marketing Tips for Success

Twitter for Marketing

Most studies suggest that Twitter is more successful than press releases for a law firm.  Some firms are still hesitant in using Twitter for marketing, but the results often increase awareness and leads for the majority of law firms. 

The Best Twitter Marketing Tips

If you want to start using Twitter for marketing your firm’s services, the following tips have proven successful:

#1 Portray Content in a Personal Tone

If you use twitter for marketing, the last thing you want to do is write content in a professional tone with a bunch of jargon.  Readers may skip by the content and even feel intimidated in some cases.  Make sure the tone matches your services as well.

#2 Provide Helpful Links

If you’re using Twitter for marketing, make sure you’re providing links that can expand on the subjects you’re discussing.  If you can provide links to content on your own legal website, this would prove ideal.

#3 Use Keywords within your Tweets

You can greatly improve your strategy within Twitter for marketing if you adjust your content for search engine optimization.  One of the most important factors to consider is your keywords for both searches within Twitter and over a search engine.  One of the best Twitter marketing tips is to write down a list of the most important keywords for your firm and place these terms within different tweets and your profile.  For more information on keywords and SEO for social media, consider viewing the blog under the blog called SEOmoz.

#4 Tweet with the Right People

It’s one of the most simple and effective strategies in using Twitter for marketing.  It’s all about who you know.  You need to start finding people within your geographic location who are interested in your legal services.  After you start following them, you’ll want to tweet with them and provide useful advice if they’re asking questions within their tweets.  Showoff your knowledge and people may rely on your service in the future. 

#5 Find Trending Topics

If you use Twitter for marketing, you need to find trending topics that you can help answer.  Tools like HootSuite can help you find related conversations, and then you can offer advice for the common questions.  Using Twitter for marketing in this way can guarantee leads in the future. 

#6 Start the Relationship off Right

This is one of the best Twitter marketing tips for your law firm within social media.  If you’ve been following someone and notice they need some information, consider Twitter for marketing just like marketing in person.  Start off by saying something positive about their post and then provide information they may find helpful including posts you’ve written in the past with helpful information. 

#7 Make the Readers Active

One of the best Twitter marketing tips is to write tweets that are both informational AND fun to read.  You’ll want to follow traditional rules while using Twitter for marketing like sharing information and writing information that is useful within your field of law, but you’ll want to ask your readers for advice and input as well. 

#8 Manners in a Desensitized World

If you use Twitter for marketing, some of the best advice this article will address involves being polite.  Many Twitter marketing tips talk about content and updating your material, but what about manners? You can thank a follower over a @message, but you can also thank a follower more personally through a direct message (DM).  If they provided helpful insight or received your services, thank them and they will spread the word about your ethics. 

#9 Showcase your Transparency

While using Twitter for marketing, never try to cover up your lack of experience in a certain subject.  If you use Twitter for marketing your legal services, you need to gain your followers’ trust by showing you credibility in certain subjects and proclaiming your lack of skill in a certain area.  One of the best Twitter marketing tips: ask for suggestions if you need to improve your skills in a certain area. 

#10 Offer Incentives

If you’re using twitter for marketing, one of your main goals is to drive followers to your actual website.  If you offer incentives on your website, you’ll want to use Twitter for marketing the deals on your website.  If followers know your website often contains good deals, they’re more like to keep visiting. 

#11 Use Hashtags

Simple yet effective Twitter marketing tips for bringing more people to your profile include using hashtags.  If you have a follower on your website, use twitter for marketing and retweet about them or display their tweet on your website.  These tips for using Twitter for marketing will encourage more people to come to your profile. 

#12 Integrate other Social Media

This is one of the most important marketing tips as well.  Not only do you want to connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts, but you want to connect your LinkedIn account while using Twitter for marketing.  If you install the LinkedIn tweet application, you can use Twitter for marketing to your professional contacts if they have Twitter accounts as well. 

#13 Use other Tools to Enhance Twitter for Marketing

If you’re using Twitter for marketing, you can use a large list of tools to monitor activity, sort through tweets, and provide other Twitter marketing tips as well.  As mentioned above, HootSuite will track a large amount of activity on Twitter.  Summify will also help you identify news and tweets that relates to your services. 

#14 Rely on the Younger Generation

One of the best Twitter marketing tips is relying on your younger associates for help.  If you’ve just started using Twitter for marketing your law firm, ask your young attorneys in the firm for help.  They are much more likely to be more experienced and literate with the technology.

Twitter for Marketing: Conclusion

If you’re using Twitter for marketing, the service holds a massive amount of potential.  Consider the Twitter marketing tips within this article and do some more research to find out areas you can improve upon. 

Have you been considering hiring backlink services?  When law firms start to think about using a backlinks service, it's often because their search engine optimization efforts just haven't yielded the results they want.  However, a backlink service isn't a one size fits all solution.  Before you decide to hire backlink services, read this guide—you'll learn both why you may want one of these services, and also why you might prefer to keep your backlinking work in-house.

Advantage: Spending Less Time On Your SEO

The single biggest advantage that a backlinks service can give to your law firm is that it frees up a great deal of time.  Backlink building can be extremely time-consuming, especially if the links you're getting are very high quality links.  A backlink service takes these chores out of your hands so that you can focus on your actual legal practice and building your business in the offline world.

Spending less time on backlinking means that you can devote more time to other aspects of your search engine optimization efforts.  For example, if you're keeping a blog (something you should be doing whether or not you hire a backlinks service), this leaves you with substantially more time to actually create new entries and do research for other entries.

Disadvantage: Less Control Over Your Backlinks

When you use backlink services, you're also giving up a substantial amount of control over exactly where and how your backlinks are placed.  This means that in some cases, your backlinks service may create backlinks that are on irrelevant websites or that otherwise don't meet standards that you would have set for yourself.

To avoid this problem when you hire a backlink service, you should make your expectations and guidelines very clear from the outset.  Your backlinks service should be willing to accept your guidelines—after all, it's your business, and backlinks services are changing the way that your business is portrayed to other people.

You should also make sure that you're periodically checking up on the work done by your backlink service.  You need to know enough about backlinking to be able to understand whether their methods appear to be working.  If you don't know enough about backlinking to capably check up on backlink services, read a few more backlinking articles on lawfirms.laws.com.

Advantage: Backlink Professionals Handle Your Account

Odds are, if you're working for a law firm, you've never been part of a backlinks service or done backlinking as your full time, year round job.  The people working at backlink services have done so much backlinking that it has become second nature to them.  That gives your backlink service a much greater efficiency in creating new links and finding new resources for backlinking.

Disadvantage: Some Backlink Services Lack Adaptability

This isn't a disadvantage of every backlink service, but it's a problem with enough of them that you should be aware of it before you make a decision.  The internet is changing every year, and as it does, search engine algorithms are evolving.  Someone who has done backlinking the same way for a long time may not be as adaptable if their favorite tips and tricks no longer work.  You may want to ask your backlink service about their adaptability and how they have changed in the past to meet new search engine guidelines.

Advantage: Get More Backlinks Faster

Some backlink services advertise that they can get you dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of total backlinks within a short period of time.  This type of backlinks service was substantially more common before 2012.  In 2012, new updates to Google made it so that this type of backlink service was now more likely to hurt your website than to help it.  Even with these changes, there are still a few backlink services advertising big total link numbers.

Disadvantage: Less Backlink Diversity

When a backlink service promises high quantities of links to every client, it's usually at the cost of quality and diversity.  Both quality and diversity now matter very much to your search engine rankings, so you should be taking these factors into account even if your backlinks service isn't.  It can be very short-sighted to hire a backlink service that uses a lot of low-quality links: even if you see short term gains, it's very likely that you will lose all of those gains and more when the next search engine algorithm update comes out.

You're better off looking for a backlinks service that offers a smaller amount of relevant, high quality, contextual links.  These links, even when they're created by backlink services, will always help you to climb the search rankings ladder.

Advantage: Easy Profile Creation

One of the most mind numbing tasks associated with link building is creating new profiles.  Because so many of these profiles ask for the same types of information, this is a great job to give to your backlinks service.  Backlink services can make profiles for several social networking sites and directories every day.  This is one of the ways that a backlink service can dramatically shift your web traffic in a fairly short amount of time.

Generally, you'll need to tell backlink services the basic information that you want included, but your backlinks service can also create a great deal of the actual content for these profiles.

Disadvantage: Where Does the Data Go?

Not every backlinks service will keep your data for themselves, but some will.  As a law firm, you probably don't want all of your data being used later on to aid your competition.  You should seek out only backlink services that have a history of keeping their clients' data safe and secure, and which have clearly stated privacy policies.

One of the biggest advantages of keeping your link building efforts in house is the ability to keep this data.  Give data security at least some thought before deciding to hire backlink services to handle your backlinking, or you could end up with a privacy breach on your hands.

Accessing the Power of Twitter Mobile

Twitter Mobile

According to recent statistics released by the The Social Skinny, about 55% of all individuals accessing Twitter do so through their mobile phone.    Mobile Twitter allows users to access updated information on the go, and the mobile features are usually simpler to use than accessing Twitter on a desktop. 

About 40% of users keep from tweeting, and this group uses the social networking platform for one purpose: to stay updated. 

Advantages of Twitter Mobile for Attorneys

Mobile Twitter holds several advantages for attorneys.  For one, an attorney can update information more quickly if they can’t use a computer in the office social networking.  This factor is especially important if you’re trying to post during peak hours.  Secondly, just like the non-tweeting 40%, many attorneys will use Twitter mobile to stay updated if they’re not in the office. 

Lastly, mobile Twitter can help an attorney identify a lead, respond to that lead, and close a deal as fast as possible.  About 34% of all marketers using Twitter will come across leads, and about 20% of those leads result in a deal.  If an attorney is using Twitter mobile, they can respond to a client as fast as possible and have more time to help the client. 

Easy Guide for Adding a Twitter Mobile Account to an Existing Account

If you want to add a mobile platform to an existing account, you need to take the following steps:

1.       Log in to your existing Twitter account and select the icon called “Person”

2.       Click on the drop-down menu and select “Settings”

3.       Choose the “Mobile” tab

4.       Choose your country and then add your mobile number (note: users in countries outside of U.S. will need additional steps)

5.       Start verifying your phone by selecting “Activate Phone”

6.       Mobile Twitter will send you a short code to respond to, and you’ll have to respond with the word “GO”

7.       After the text is received, your account is ready to go

Tips to Using the Mobile Twitter Website

If you to post a reply on Twitter mobile, you’ll want to take 4 basic steps:

1.       Find the tweet you want to respond to

2.       Click on the reply button (which appears as an arrow point toward the left)

3.       Write your reply and Twitter will automatically input the username

4.       Click reply

If you want to send a direct message on mobile Twitter, you can follow several steps.  A direct message will allow you to send a private message instead of a public tweet.  You can only send a direct message to one of your followers:

1.       Click on the “Me” tab

2.       Wait for the next screen to appear, and then click “Direct Message”

3.       Click on appropriate button to compose your message

4.       Start typing the username and Twitter mobile will automatically show appropriate recipients; click on the appropriate person

5.       Write your message and click “Send”

The more you access mobile Twitter, the more follow requests you’ll start to receive.  In order to accept followers, you can take the following steps after logging into your Twitter mobile account:

1.       Click on the “Me” tab and then select “Follower Requests”

2.       Once you arrive to the next page, you’ll see options to accept or deny individuals requests.  You’ll also have the option to accept all follower requests.

Occasionally, you may find that you want to block a follower on mobile Twitter.  The steps are quite easy:

1.       Go to the profile page of your follower

2.       Click on the icon called “Profile”

3.       Once the pop-up menu appears, click on the “Block” option

What is the SMS option for Twitter Mobile?

Mobile Twitter via SMS allows you to respond to tweets and post tweets by test message instead of using an app on your iPhone, Android, or feature phone.  Many attorneys use this option so they don’t have to log into their application.  Of course, users will have to login to their application to view what people are tweeting, but once you’ve responded or receive a new message, you’ll receive updated information through SMS. 

If you want to add your phone for SMS capability, you’ll have to regard the following steps after you’ve setup your mobile settings:

1.       You’ll have to respond to the short code provided for your country.  The short code for Twitter mobile via SMS for the United States is 40404.  

2.       Mobile Twitter will ask you if you already have a username or want to set up a new account. 

3.       Once you have a username, you’ll want to send your username without any other characters in the SMS

4.       Mobile Twitter will then ask you for your password, and you’ll want to respond with the password as well. 

5.       Once Twitter Mobile has verified the information, it will ask you to send the words “OK” to start the SMS feature. 

You can now post tweets by sending a text message to your Twitter code.  If you want to receive other updates through Twitter mobile via SMS, you’ll have to adjust the mobile updates with your phone.  In order to adjust your notifications for Twitter mobile via SMS, use the following options:

1.       A text message stating “OFF” will turn off all notifications.

2.       A text message stating “ON” will turn on all notifications.

3.       If you text message “OFF” [username], “FOLLOW” [username], or “UNFOLLOW” [username], you can receive or adjust these options. 

4.       If you want to deactivate your Twitter mobile via SMS, you can send “STOP”, “Quit”, “END”, “CANCEL” or “UNSUBSCRIBE”

Twitter Mobile: Conclusion

There are multiple other SMS commands you can use on Twitter Mobile.  Mobile Twitter is a great option if you’re on the go and need to stay updated. 

Building backlinks is the foundation of any strong search engine optimization effort in 2012 and 2013.  However, as nearly every search engine marketer knows, it's not easy to build backlinks that get noticed, get indexed, and work to bring your search rankings up.  New changes to Google have made it important to look not only at what backlinks you're bringing in, but where they come from and what they look like.  Keep reading this guide to find out how your law firm can start building backlinks that work—and why you may not need a backlink generator to do it.

Building Backlinks 101

The more websites that link to a site, the more trustworthy Google usually assumes that website is, and the higher its search rank climbs.  This makes a lot of sense: think about the kinds of websites that are typically linked by huge numbers of people.  Facebook, Youtube, CNN and other news websites, Wikipedia, Google, and so on are all websites that people search for quite frequently.  When these appear earlier in search results, people searching don't have to spend as much time looking for what they want and can use the web more efficiently.

While the traditional way of building backlinks is to create exciting or informative or humorous content, then wait for it to spread into the web (perhaps after giving it a little nudge by getting linked by people you know), for some marketers, this wasn't fast enough.  These marketers created backlink generator software that was capable of creating backlinks all over the web much faster than any human beings could.

How a Backlink Generator Works

In order to start building backlinks at breakneck speed, backlink generator software works by having a large database of websites in its programming that are easy to post to.  When you start using one of these pieces of software, it starts writing automatic comments on blogs and making automatic posts to many different websites.  Some generators work by submitting an article you've written to large numbers of websites that allow for unmoderated submissions.

By building backlinks in bulk, the idea behind a backlink generator is that it can bring a website from being relatively new and unlinked to being on the front page of keyword searches within a very short period of time.

The Problems With Using a Backlink Generator

While that's how generators work in theory, building backlinks in practice is actually a bit more difficult.  There are several different reasons that you might want to avoid the use of a backlink generator completely.

One of these problems comes from the nature of the work a law firm does.  People are already reluctant to trust most law firms, and it takes much more time to gain trust than it does to lose it.  If your law firm starts using so-called “black hat” techniques that produce large volumes of low quality content in order to promote your website, people will see it.  When they do, is that the kind of reputation your law firm is hoping to achieve, both in your community and—keeping in mind that the internet is a public space—around the world?  No attorney passes the bar just to become a spammer.

The other problems with using a backlink generator come from just one new search engine algorithm: Google Penguin.  Building backlinks after Penguin was activated in April of 2012 has been much tougher and much more quality focused.

Penguin Kills Most Backlink Generators

Google had no love for backlink generator programs.  They were regarded as something akin to web smog, obscuring the view of the websites people really wanted to see.  To get rid of this method of building backlinks, they released Penguin, a search engine update that stopped many of these generators cold.

How did they do it?  By penalizing websites that met any of several criteria for being over optimized.  For example, because automated backlink generator technology isn't very good at varying keywords and keyword phrases, websites that used the same anchor text over and over with no variation have been hit hard in search rankings.  When you start building backlinks, you need to be careful to make a natural-seeming variety of anchor text keywords.

Another way that Penguin changed building backlinks was by penalizing websites that have backlinks exclusively from low PageRank websites.  If your backlink generator worked by spamming articles on hundreds of low quality domains, you've now got a mess on your hands.  Because Google sees this as evidence of building backlinks artificially, you'll have to ask the webmasters of those domains to take down the mentions of your website.  If they don't, you'll have to show Google the documentation that shows you tried.  It's a long, tedious process, and you're better off building backlinks of high quality from the start.

Do Any Backlink Generators Still Work?

It's true that there are still some programs that do currently help with building backlinks.  Many of these are still using very spammy techniques, but have found loopholes and end runs around the Google engineers' detection of low quality link building.

However, even if you think you've found a good new way to run a link generator without running afoul of Penguin, use caution.  It's very likely that Penguin is just the first in a series of updates designed to improve backlink quality and decrease the prevalence of link spam.  Plan for the future, and get backlinks the way they were intended to be gotten: by giving people content so interesting that they can't help but share it with others.

Building Backlinks Without a Backlink Generator

There are hundreds of resources—many of them right here on lawfirms.laws.com—on how to build backlinks without using any kind of automation.  You can build backlinks using blogs, social networking, videos, even traditional media coverage.

The important thing about these links is that they're developed in accordance with the content of the website they're on.  These aren't links that are about making it harder to get where you want to go—instead, they make it easier.  Those are the types of links you need to think about making, and when you do, you'll never find yourself in trouble with Google again.