Contextual Link Building: A Link Building Solution For Law Firms

As linking strategies have changed and become more complex, contextual link building has become one of the biggest trends of 2012.  Law firms, because their business is so context-dependent, are ideal users of contextual link building strategies.  Whether you want advice on finding a great contextual link building service or doing it yourself, keep reading this guide to find out exactly how to make your contextual linking dreams become a reality.

What is Contextual Link Building?

Traditional link building just refers to the process of getting other websites to link to yours.  Search engines, when trying to determine what website is the best source for a particular search string, consider these “backlinks” to be one of the biggest indicators of quality.  This means that if no one (or almost no one) is linking your website, you probably won't appear in the first few pages of search results—no matter how carefully you've search engine optimized your website's actual content.

Contextual link building is a particular form of link building that involves only building links to websites that share many similarities with your own site.  Why does this kind of link building work?  There are several reasons.  First of all, in order to combat the rise of backlink spam, many search engines now take context into consideration when deciding which links are “worth” more to the ranking algorithms.

Second, contextual link building is more likely to be seen as relevant by users.  This means that you're more likely to have your links shared by other people online.  Typically, a contextual link building service will advise having two or three links in a 250 to 500 word post, all of which link to keywords you're attempting to optimize.

Can My Firm Do Contextual Link Building On Its Own?

It's very possible to do this type of link building without hiring a contextual link building service.  You can build contextual links on many different types of websites.  Let's take reddit.com, which has been soaring in popularity throughout 2012 and looks to do the same in 2013, as an example.  Reddit allows anyone to post links to content, and users of the website can vote a link up if they decide it is high-quality, and down if it is low quality.  A contextual link building service may or may not post on websites like Reddit, but you can.

When you post to a website like Reddit or any other “Web 2.0” site as part of a contextual link building effort, you'll want to decide what your goals are ahead of time.  Try making the kind of post advised by a typical contextual link building service: 250-500 words (trying to keep on the shorter end—people prefer shorter, more concise content!), with two or three links to your website.

Is a Contextual Link Building Service Worth It?

If you're having trouble finding places to do your contextual link building, you may want to hire a service to handle it for you.  A contextual link building service will find the best websites to put your content on—websites that already have a similar context to your own site and will give you the best quality backlinks possible.

There are a few reasons that you may want to avoid doing contextual link building on your own.  If you don't have much SEO experience to begin with, it's probably true that even a mediocre contextual link building service will do a better job than you will—there's simply too much to learn for an amateur to become good at link building within days or weeks.

Contextual link building can also be tough because it involves knowing exactly the right kinds of websites and keeping up with the most up to date SEO trends.  Hiring a contextual link building service means that you'll never need to worry about reading search engine marketing blogs to keep up—they'll do it for you.

While every contextual link building service is different, in terms of both experience and price, ideally you shouldn't choose a service based on price points alone.  A cheap service may give you great results, or it might be using outdated contextual link building methods.  Ask to see not only case studies, but recent case studies from your contextual link building service so that you can be sure that your service is doing the kinds of link building you want.

What is Tiered Contextual Link Building?

While traditional contextual link building works fairly well to improve search results, there are ways to improve upon it.  For example, tiered link building is substantially more complex, but offers benefits for law firms.  Tiered contextual link building requires not just building a back link to your own website, but also building additional backlinks that link to the backlink.

Why does this work?  Because Google and other search engines are much more likely to believe that a contextual link occurred naturally when other websites are linking to it.  When not only your content, but your links and tiered backlinks are high quality, you'll shoot to the top of search engine rankings.

Having a two-tiered contextual link building effort is great, but if you hire an experienced enough contextual link building service they may actually advise you to do three or even four tiered link building.  This may seem like overkill, but some services have had great luck with this type of multi-tiered system.

Why Not Other Link Building Methods?

Because contextual link building can seem like such a challenge, you may be asking if there's a better way.  The answer—perhaps unfortunately for some law firms—is no.  Contextual link building offers unparalleled ability to control the message and keywords that your backlinks are using.  If it's done right, it will look completely natural, and like part of traditional web marketing efforts rather than straight-up search engine optimization. 

Other link building methods are often very obvious and are much easier for search engines not only to track, but also to shut down if too many websites begin using them.  Contextual link building, on the other hand, is here to stay—it's simply too hard to detect when it's done well.

How to Build Backlinks That Search Engines Will Notice

Three fifths of marketers believe that building backlinks is “somewhat difficult” or “very difficult.”  Have you had trouble learning how to build backlinks?  This guide can help.  In this guide, you'll learn the biggest principle for building backlinks—a principle that's used by the best search engine marketers and the search engines themselves.  You'll also find out how to build backlinks on a wide variety of different websites, so that you can diversify your web presence and prepare for whatever comes next in internet search trends.

The #1 How to Build Backlinks Principle: No Shortcuts

When people first learn about building backlinks, they start asking, well, how hard can it be?  After all, there are many guides online that show you how to build backlinks, and many of these guides suggest using article marketing services or press release websites that can give you dozens of backlinks within an hour or two.  Why not just use those?

It's true, those methods are easy.  What you may not know is that search engines have started to defend against websites using them.  Because so many websites trying to use these services were essentially spam sites, Google and other search engines have cracked down on websites that are building backlinks exclusively through low-quality websites like press release and article spinning sites.

Why the crackdown?  Because fundamentally, Google doesn't want you to know how to build backlinks easily.  In fact, Google would prefer that websites didn't focus on building backlinks at all as a search engine optimization strategy, and confined themselves only to organic backlinks generated because someone enjoys your content. 

As search engines have become more sophisticated, they've gotten better at identifying people who are using those old “how to build backlinks” guides.  Use their advice on building backlinks and you could find your website's ranking dropping rapidly.  There are no good shortcuts for how to build backlinks—nothing that will let you build hundreds or thousands of links in a day.  There are, however, ways to start building backlinks slowly and steadily that can make your website the top result in searches.

How to Build Backlinks: What Search Engines Like

Search engines are just computer programming, and search engine optimization marketers around the world work diligently to find out exactly what kind of backlink efforts work best with that programming.  They have found several common features of the types of backlink building that search engines seem to prefer.

Search engines tend to give better rankings to people who work on building backlinks that are contextual, rather than random.  If your link pattern is very random, search engines are likely to perceive this as spam.  Building backlinks to websites that are closely related to your site and are considered popular, high-quality websites will be much better.

You should make sure not to use the same keyword phrase every time for your links.  Search engines love variety—because variety is more common when building backlinks organically.  Try to vary your keywords, link text, and even just the types of websites that you're using.  Don't just use Facebook posts or blog comments, in other words—try something new!

How to Build Backlinks: What Search Engines Hate

In the process of building backlinks that work, many search engine marketers have also discovered strategies that do not work.  In some cases, these strategies rarely or never worked, while in others, they worked for a time until new algorithm updates accounted for people trying to game the system.

In brief, Google—and other search engines—don't like when people bring the quality of web results down by trying to improve their own search rankings.  This means that if you're spamming blogs, you're not building backlinks that are likely to be considered high quality by Google, Bing, or anyone else.  If you're using the same keywords over and over, or your copy is barely readable because the keywords are inserted so awkwardly, you've taken the wrong advice about how to build backlinks.

Just about any method that search engine marketers have developed to generate huge numbers of backlinks quickly will fail today.  Why?  Even if you find a new method for building backlinks fast, the sheer speed of it is likely to raise red flags about your content.  Google's algorithms know that websites don't engage in building backlinks of any reasonable quality at a rate of thousands a day.  You should ramp up your backlinking slowly, so that it's much harder to detect the artificial nature of your link building efforts.

This means that some of the most popular tools of search engine marketers in years past no longer work in 2012 and 2013.  Instead of using article spinning services that put the same content (or very similar versions of content, often edited by a computer program) into many different websites, today's search engine marketers are having to work harder for a smaller number of quality backlinks.

Building Backlinks Using High Quality Websites

If you want to get the most bang for your buck when building backlinks, you'll need to have your links on high quality websites.  One of the best things that you can do for yourself when starting to learn how to build backlinks is to learn what kinds of websites are considered the most trusted and highest quality—not only in general, but in your specific field of law.  Learning the big players in your specific field will help you target guest blogging opportunities and other chances for contextual link building.

When you build backlinks using these high quality websites, it may take a little more time to get each link in place.  However, each of them will be considered a high quality backlink that is worth much more than if you had inserted dozens of non-contextual backlinks on a wide variety of low-quality sites.  In other words, it only seems to take more time—you'll still get a better return on investment from link building on high quality sites.

7 Ways a Backlink Building Service Can Help Lawyers

New changes to Google's search ranking algorithms called Penguin have impacted about 65 percent of marketers worldwide.  In the post-Penguin era, quality backlink building services are among the best ways to improve where your law firm appears in search engine results.  A professional backlink building service can help your website become more visible in search rankings in several different ways—keep reading this guide to find out some of those ways, and how each one can change the way search engines see your law firm's website.

Finding New Places to Build Backlinks

Many of the online tools that used to be very effective in improving search rankings are no longer effective after Google's recent algorithm changes.  That's because those changes affect the listing status of some websites that were commonly used by backlink building services.  Instead of considering these websites' backlinks equal to those from other websites, Google now considers them to be worth very little or nothing.  In some cases, if a backlink building service has clearly abused these websites to improve search rankings, Google will de-list the website completely.

If your favorite backlink websites have been de-listed, it's time to talk to backlink building services.  Today, just about any backlink building service that is still in business has had to adapt to these changes.  Backlink building services will be able to identify places where your links will be quality content, rather than spam.

Building Backlinks with Directory Entries

It surprises some people that directory entries are still considered a valid way to build backlinks, but maybe it shouldn't.  After all, as long as a directory is high quality, directories serve to organize information in a very user-friendly way. 

Creating directory entries can be repetitive work that isn't very creative.  Backlink building services can take this boring chore off your hands, freeing you up to create new marketing content or otherwise attend to your law firm's other business needs.

Some of the directories that your backlink building service uses may be big, worldwide directories like DMOZ or Yahoo.  Smart backlink building services will also seek out local directories and specialized directories full of attorneys and law firms just like yours.  Local search results are getting bigger and bigger, and your backlink building service can take advantage of local by making sure that you're listed in all the right places.

Building Backlinks with Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking websites, like reddit.com and digg.com, have become increasingly popular over the last several years.  Even Barack Obama has become a user of Reddit, which is a website where any user can post a link and other users “upvote” or “downvote” it to decide on its level of popularity compared to other links on the site. 

Backlink building services can use Reddit and other similar websites to your advantage.  Because the content on these websites is user-generated, your backlink building service can start by posting a link to some of your most interesting content with a relevant headline.  If you're looking into backlink building services that offer this kind of linking, make sure that you take a look at the kinds of links they're offering.  Your backlink building service should be able to make links that fit in with the quality guidelines of the website and generate comments and discussion.

Creating Multi-Tiered Backlinks

Your backlink building service can increase the perceived quality of their backlinks even further by tiering them.  Tiering essentially means having not just backlinks, but backlinks that link to your backlinks.  That would be considered a two-tiered backlink—some backlink building services create three or even four tier backlinks for their clients.

This is one of the newest techniques for generating high backlink quality ratings, so you may have to do some searching to find a backlink building service that offers it.  Some backlink building services still work exclusively with single-tier backlinks and get good results, but the time is coming when that may just not be enough to compete with other law firms.

Guest Posting on Relevant Blogs

Backlink building services can also post your content on blogs by asking for guest blogging opportunities.  If this is a method that you want to use extensively, you should search for a backlink building service with a track record of getting great guest post leads.

If the backlink building services you're using don't have extensive knowledge of the legal field you specialize in, it may be a good idea for you to write the guest post content yourself.  However, your link building service may offer copywriting services as well, either as part of your package or for an extra fee.  Ask to see samples of copywriting from any link building services you are considering—you don't want to pick a service where the copywriters have poor grammar or stilted sentence structure.

Creating Press Releases

Not all press release websites are still considered legitimate by Google.  In fact, many websites which used to run press releases are now considered to be primarily vehicles for spam.  That's why when your backlink building service creates press releases today, they'll need to be careful about where exactly your press releases go.

Ideally, your link building service should avoid any press release websites that accept literally any type of content.  Take a look around the press release websites your service is considering using.  Do they look like they're full of legitimate press releases from companies you've heard of, or does it look like a website full of companies you'd rather not be affiliated with?

Generating Blog Comments

Not all approaches to link building are based in creating your own posts.  By using blog comments, your backlink building service can join in on the conversation for your law firm.  This means that you'll be able to put a link to your website in comments on legal blogs with high traffic.

Please note that creating legitimate blog comments is a very different method than what some backlink building services offer—blog comment spam.  Your law firm should never be involved in spamming any website for any reason, and should stop using any service that is clearly spamming blogs.

There are over one trillion links on the web today—and that number will have doubled by 2014.  In such a large sea of links, your law firm needs to stand out.  An outbound link tool can help you understand what's going on with links leaving your website or the websites of others.  While an outbound links tool is something of a specialty item, it can be a great way to give your search engine optimization campaign the final nudge it needs to be very successful.  In this guide, we'll take a look at several types of outbound link tool, and explore which ones you may need to successfully run a law firm website in 2012.

What Are Outbound Links—And Why Do They Matter?

Outbound links are just the links that go from one website to another.  Often, law firm websites will build outbound links to legal resources including forms, state laws, and so on.  When someone else has an outbound link to your website, it becomes an inbound link for you.

Outbound links basically matter because inbound links matter.  The more inbound links that a website has, and the higher the value of those links (based on the authority level, or PageRank, of the website they come from), the higher a website will be in the rankings when someone does a search.  Because of this, outbound links from websites with good reputations can be extremely valuable, while other outbound links have little or no value to the websites they're linking to.

Why You Should Use an Outbound Link Tool on Your Site

There are many different reasons that you might want to use an outbound link tool on your own website.  One of the most obvious reasons is to check and make sure that each of these outbound links is going where you want it to.  An outbound links tool automates the process of checking each link so that you don't have to do it painstakingly by hand.

Another reason that you might want to use an outbound link tool is to determine whether your outbound links might actually be worth something.  Some website owners can make a substantial amount of additional money by selling outbound links.  While this practice is widely discouraged, and Google may delist you if you are found to be selling links, this is another use of an outbound link tool that you should be made aware of.

An outbound links tool can also help you understand why people are leaving your website.  Obviously, the longer someone stays on your website, the more likely they are to convert.  By finding out which people leave and where they go, you can use your outbound links tool to reshape your website.  If no one is visiting a particular outbound link, why keep it up?  Replace it with something more likely to be useful to your website visitors.

Why You Should Use an Outbound Link Tool on Other Sites

You may also want to check outbound links that are coming from someone else's website.  Even before you build a link on a site, using an outbound links tool on a website can help you understand the value of placing your links there.  If you see that the outbound link tool indicates there are large numbers of links on the page, and your website would gain only a tiny fraction of a very small amount of link juice, you may decide to focus your efforts elsewhere.  On the other hand, if you have the opportunity to create a link on a website that an outbound links tool shows has very few links, you may want to take it.

Google Analytics as an Outbound Links Tool

Google Analytics can be used as an outbound link tool, but it's not the easiest one to use.  You can use Google Analytics to track where your site visitors are going using the event tracking features.  By inserting code into your website, you'll be able to monitor the flow of these visitors much more easily.

However, Google Analytics has some serious weaknesses and downsides as an outbound links tool.  Unlike other outbound link tool websites, Google Analytics won't help you to verify that your outbound links are still working, and won't do a count of outbound links on another website.  Also, while you can use most outbound links tool software without much computer knowledge, Google Analytics requires an understanding of programming before you can use it to track your outbound links.

How an Outbound Link Tool Fits Into Your Strategy

While an outbound links tool isn't necessarily the most vital tool in your search engine marketing arsenal, it's a good checkup to run once in a while.  Consider outbound link checking to be the flip side of your inbound link building efforts.

If your law firm is just starting to do search engine optimization, you may want to initially use programs like Google Analytics not as an outbound links tool, but to monitor your traffic and how people are getting to your website initially.

Other Third Party Outbound Link Tool Software

While usually Google Analytics is the outbound links tool used to understand traffic flow patterns, if you're looking for an outbound link tool for another reason you might be happier with a different piece of software.  By just running a Google search for “outbound link checker” or “outbound links tool,” you can usually find a tool that will do exactly what you're looking for, for free, on the first page.  For example, Scrapebox.com gives you a great outbound link tool to count your outbound links and verify that the links you have are still working.

Analyzing the Results from Your Outbound Link Tool

Once you have all of the results from using an outbound links tool, it can be hard to decide exactly what to do with them.  If it seems like too much to analyze, you might consider having an analytics agency check it out for you.  Analytics companies specialize in interpreting a narrative picture of how your website is working from all of the data that you've collected over time.
 

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.

Outbound links are everywhere online.  Until relatively recently, Google limited the number of outbound links that could pass on their link juice to new websites.  Today, that's no longer the case, but outbound linking has become so complicated that you may want to use an outbound link checker.  These tools can help you to check outbound links both on your own website and on the websites where you're considering starting link building campaigns.

How Do Outbound Links Affect Websites?

Whenever a website that is considered to have authority (given to it in Google's 0-10 numerical “PageRank” value) gives an outbound link to another website, some of its authority is conferred upon the website being linked.

Why does that matter?  Because when those outbound links are referring to your website, you'll receive a boost to your search engine rankings whenever Google indexes one of these links.  The higher the PageRank of a website is, the more authority you can get from being linked there.

Why Do Outbound Links Need to Be Checked?

If you're not already checking your links with an outbound link checker, you might want to give it a try.  Most software to check outbound links is available for free on the web—often you can use the tools right on a website rather than downloading a piece of outbound link checker software.

By checking on your own outbound links periodically, you can identify exactly which of your outbound links is getting the most traffic and which don't seem like they have been very useful for people using your website.  If you have an outbound link that the outbound link checker indicates is almost never used, you might want to remove it so that the remaining links on your page get more value from the links they are receiving.

You can also run basic outbound link checker programs on other websites.  While you won't be able to track hits to outbound links the same way that you can for your own site, you can verify that links are working.  You may want to use your outbound link checker to monitor the number of links that are on a given website, for reasons that we'll go into in just a minute.

Is There an Outbound Links Limit?

If you've heard vague rumors that after a certain number of links, they don't count, or that you'll get penalized by Google for having more than some amount of links, that's no longer quite true.  It is true that Google used to have, as part of its Webmaster Guidelines, a rule about having no more than 100 outbound links per page.  Some people first used outbound link checker tools to make sure they weren't exceeding this limit.

However, as many websites began to grow that thrived on having large quantities of new links (think social networking and social bookmarking websites), this limit quickly became very impractical—and more importantly, it became unrepresentative of the web.  If a website's link is spreading virally through social bookmarking websites, it should gain authority so that it's easier to search for.

However, that doesn't mean you get the same amount of link juice from your outbound links on these websites.  Now, the total amount of authority a website has to give must be divided among all the links it has.  This means that you won't get nearly as much link juice from a very link-heavy website as you would from a website with similar PageRank and only a few links.  Because of this, outbound link checker tools are still relevant even though there's no longer a hard limit.

Avoiding Link Dilution With an Outbound Link Checker

By running an outbound link checker periodically on the websites where you're working to build inbound links, you can verify that your links are still worth something.  If the links that you're building are very diluted, they may not be worth the time and effort that you're spending to make them (unless they're from a website with a very high PageRank score).

You can also use an outbound link checker to find out which new websites might be fertile ground to start building new links on.  By understanding how much link juice you're likely to get from each new link, you can start anticipating how much you'll rise in search rankings and how many additional links you need in order to reach your search engine optimization goals.

Monitoring Inbound and Outbound Link Traffic

If you want to keep a very close eye on your outbound links, you need something more than a basic outbound link checker.  If you want to be able to closely monitor where your traffic is coming from and where it's going, you'll need to start checking events using Google Analytics.  Event tracking can actually involve anything on your website, from clicking a link that goes to another page on your site to tracking visitors who stay longer than five minutes on a particular page.

However, this isn't for the faint hearted or the bad with computers.  You'll need some basic coding skills to get started on event tracking, in contrast to the very easy to use basic outbound link checker programs.  For some smaller firms, it's probably not worth it to pay someone to do this work—you may want to focus your search engine marketing efforts on other aspects of search engine optimization.

Analyzing Your Outbound Links

Once you start tracking where your links are heading and keeping track of how many you have with an outbound link checker, you'll be able to do some hardcore analysis.  Outbound link analysis can help you understand what your site visitors want and where they're going to get it.  

By looking at the traffic leaving your website through your links, you can develop a much more data driven understanding of what to include on your website and what to direct people offsite for.  While this kind of analysis can be somewhat difficult, many analytics agencies can help you interpret the results for a reasonable fee.

In surveys, small firm and solo practitioner attorneys frequently list marketing and advertising as their least favorite aspect of their job.  Unfortunately, in an increasingly competitive, linked in world, popularity matters more than ever, and link popularity (the number of websites linking to yours) matters more than just about any other kind.  If you have no idea how to build links yourself, you may be considering link popularity building services.  While a link popularity service may initially seem like a win-win division of labor, there are some drawbacks.  Keep reading this guide to find out both the advantages and the disadvantages of hiring link popularity services to do the dirty work of marketing for you.

Pro: Spend Less Time Working On Your Links

You didn't go to law school to build links.  Most attorneys would rather be doing just about anything else—even document review—than working on establishing links from a website.  A link popularity service can step in and take over all of those responsibilities for you.  Link popularity building services leave you with more time to talk to clients, research cases, and do all the other things that keep your firm running from day to day.

Link popularity services are generally so automated that you won't even need to think about your link popularity service on a daily basis.  Most link popularity building services will send you updates as frequently or as infrequently as you request, so that you can put your linking out of sight and out of mind.

Con: Lose Your Control Over Some Links

At the same time, having your links automated by link popularity building services takes away some of your control.  When you're building links yourself, you can personally choose which websites will host them.  When a link popularity service is doing the link building for you, you won't have that ability any more.

This aspect of using link popularity building services can be an especially big problem for established firms with a reputation to uphold.  You should always check link popularity services before you use them, and ask them what kinds of websites they post to.  If your link would be posted all over online pharmacy and pornography sites because you decided to use cheap link popularity building services, your firm is very likely to regret it.

Pro: Get Links on More Websites

Odds are, you only have a short list of websites that you know you could get a link on.  For most link popularity building services, the list is in the thousands and growing by the day.  A link popularity service can ensure that your links are displayed even on websites that you hadn't heard of before, and that are extremely valuable for contributing “link juice” to your own website.

Con: Google's Over Optimization Detectors

If your link popularity services link to too many websites all at once, it is quite probable that they will set off a chain of events you won't like very much.  First, Google will notice that you've posted links in an artificial pattern and will assume that you are using an automated link popularity service to artificially inflate your search rankings.  Next, they'll “sandbox” your site—this means that your links won't count, or will even penalize you, until you have them removed.  Not all link popularity building services are good at helping clients take links down, so you should find out about the policies of any link popularity service you use before this happens to you.

Pro: Professionals Know Which Links Work

One of the reasons that lawyers commonly give when they decide to use a link popularity service is that they want to leave link building up to the professionals.  Search engine optimization and link building is a rapidly changing world.  The most popular link popularity services are likely to have professionals researching the newest techniques, even if you as an attorney can only barely keep up with SEO blogs.

Having professional expertise at your fingertips is a great reason to hire a link popularity service, especially if you're not quite sure why your link building efforts haven't been working.  Link popularity services can analyze your current link traffic and help you understand what went wrong and how to fix it in the future.  Many link popularity building services will even give a free initial consultation so that you can get this information before making your decision.

Con: Professionals Have a Reason To Lie

On the flip side, remember that your link popularity service is a business, and because of that, it has a motivation to tell you that its methods work—even if they don't.  Let's say, for instance, that a new Google update renders the methods used by your link popularity building services completely irrelevant to search results.  If this happens, do you think the link popularity services company will tell you about it?  Instead, your link popularity service is likely to tell you to keep paying while it tries to work out a solution that may or may not work.

For this reason, if you decide to use link popularity services, you should check up on their work periodically.  Make sure that the links from your link popularity building services are still working, and that your link popularity service is actually leading to overall increases in your web traffic.  If you're not seeing changes to your rankings or your traffic, chances are that you've chosen link popularity services that just aren't working the way they're supposed to and you may need a new service provider.

Conclusions

In some ways, hiring link popularity services can actually be fairly risky for law firms.  However, for some firms, the unique benefits of having your firm rise in rank without having to dedicate hours of valuable time to it every day can be worthwhile.

You can improve the chances that you'll be satisfied with your link popularity services by seeking out services with good reviews and that don't fully automate link submissions.  Some link popularity building services will actually use exclusively hand-created links, which can be a much more effective way to do natural looking link building than full automation.

If you're using a lot of reciprocal links, you may need to know whether they'll start having a negative impact on your SERPs.  After Google's Penguin and Panda updates, 15 percent of websites were penalized for having excessive optimization—and one of the biggest red flags for over optimization is having too many reciprocal links.  In this guide, you'll learn how to avoid these penalties and how to overcome them if you've already been penalized.

What is a Reciprocal Link URL?

Any time you type a web address into your browser bar (like www.google.com), this is called a URL.  A reciprocal links URL is a URL that goes to a website that also links back to your own website.  Usually, reciprocal links are set up deliberately by people from two different websites in order to help improve visibility, publicity, and search engine rankings.

Sources for Reciprocal Links

In order to get reciprocal links, you don't have to look very far.  You probably already know friends, family members, colleagues, and relatives who have websites.  You can start getting your first reciprocal links URL by just asking one of them if they would be willing to do an even exchange of links.  After you get the reciprocal link URL from them and have verified that the link to your website is up, you can link to their site.

You can also find a reciprocal link URL and code to include on your website using some reciprocal link exchange programs.  These reciprocal link URL codes will actually work to automate the process of creating reciprocal links.  When someone includes the reciprocal link URL and code on their website and then follows the reciprocal linking instructions, your website will automatically create a reciprocal links URL that directs to their site.

How Google Penguin Checks Your Reciprocal Link URL

Google monitors your website's inbound links constantly to see whether your reciprocal links appear to be too high a percentage of your overall inbound links.  There's no exact percentage number (if your PageRank is higher, for instance, you can get away with having more reciprocal links URL content, while lower PageRank sites will get flagged with much less), but you should always keep these penalties in mind when making a new reciprocal links URL.

If you're not already working on building one way links in addition to your reciprocal links, you need to start right away.  If your website is already heavily imbalanced in favor of reciprocal links, you should focus on one way link building before including a single additional reciprocal link URL on your website.

Why Your Reciprocal Link URL Anchor Text Matters

In addition to monitoring your reciprocal links URL statistics, Google is also looking at your anchor text.  The reason that your reciprocal link URL anchor text matters is that Google wants to be able to identify trends and patterns.  If you're using the exact same reciprocal links URL anchor text in every single link that you create on a reciprocal basis, Google will see this as a very solid indicator that your links have been built artificially, possibly with black hat methods.

To keep your reciprocal links generating link juice for your website, you'll need to vary your reciprocal link URL anchor text.  By varying the reciprocal links URL anchor text even slightly, you'll show that your links haven't been made using a totally automated system.  Try to make the level of variation fairly high: for instance, some of your reciprocal link URL anchor text should be a brand related term like your firm name, while others should be the kinds of exact keyword matches that you might use for search engine optimization.

Checking a Reciprocal Link URL from Your Linking Partners

If you've already worked hard to build a great reciprocal links URL on a website, you don't want to let it just disappear.  It's critical to make sure that any reciprocal link URL you've agreed upon still exists as long as you're still running a reciprocal link for that website.

In order to check on your reciprocal links URL and make sure that your partners are doing exactly what they said they'd do, you can run a reciprocal link checker program.  This program examines every reciprocal link URL you've set up and verifies that the link to your website still exists on every website you're linking to from your reciprocal links page.

If you find that one of your linking partners is no longer listing your reciprocal links URL where they should be, don't just delete their link right away.  Sometimes links can disappear during site redesigns or during problems with a website.  Instead, talk to the webmaster about the problem.  Many webmasters will be more than willing to re-list your reciprocal link URL as long as they can see that your link is still intact.

What if You Have Too Many Reciprocal Links?

It's every web marketer's worst nightmare in 2012: waking up to a message from Google that says your website has been overoptimized, or has suspicious links.  If you have used too many reciprocal links, especially from non-contextual sources or sources that are blacklisted as being potential sources of link buying, you'll face these penalties.  When you get an email from Google about your reciprocal links URL content being bad, you'll need to act fast in order to recover the lost search rankings.

First of all, find out which reciprocal link URL they believe to be from a bad source.  Then contact the webmaster who is running that website and ask for them to take your reciprocal links URL down.  If they do, you can notify Google that the offending link has been removed.  If not, you should keep all the documentation relating to your attempt to have it removed.  Google will take this documentation into account and may decide to lift the penalty even if the link isn't removed, as long as you made a good faith effort.