Hiring an SEO link building service can seem like a good idea for law firms trying to stand out on today's internet, where over 2/3 of U.S. legal clients look up attorneys online.  However, SEO link building services aren't for everybody, and if you're not careful, you could get in trouble with your bar association for unethical advertising techniques.  In this guide, we'll take a closer look at what sets a good SEO link building service apart from a bad one, and how to decide whether you need these services at all.

Reasons to Use an SEO Link Building Service

SEO link building services have exploded onto the scene in recent years to solve a problem.  It doesn't help to have a website if no one knows how to get there.  The vast majority of internet users simply click on one of the first few results for their search, rather than doing extensive research over dozens or hundreds of pages.  If your law firm appears too late in the search results pertaining to your legal field, you'll have to pay for advertising to increase your website's visibility.

However, paid strategies have weaknesses.  Many people don't read contextual sidebar ads, the type that attorneys are most likely to use.  Instead, people prefer to use the “organic” search results—the non-ads.  Today, search engine optimization to get to the top of the search heap involves a great deal of link building.  This means you'll need to get your website linked by other websites.

But what if you don't know a lot of owners of other websites or blogs?  How can you do the link building you need to get the search engine results you're looking for?  SEO link building services are staffed by experts who can help you understand several different link building strategies and make a good decision about which one to pursue.

When you use an SEO link building service, you won't have to learn much about SEO or link building yourself.  SEO link building services can be crucial to the success of some small firms where no one is able to take on additional web work.  Instead of hiring a full time staff member for your link building, hiring an SEO link building service helps you save money.

Reasons to Avoid SEO Link Building Services

Even though it may sound like hiring an SEO link building service is win-win, this is only true for certain services.  Some SEO link building services can actually harm your online reputation by associating your website with spammers or worse.  If you aren't good at vetting online services, you may want to avoid looking for an SEO link building service unless one has been recommended by another lawyer you trust.

You may also want to avoid SEO link building services if you're trying to keep tight control over your content and how it is used.  Some services tend to post your content on many different web pages, which is often of limited use.

There's also the fact that today, no SEO link building service has really figured out exactly what Google's looking for when it comes to website quality.  Google's own answers are vague, and SEO link building services are generally having to simply use their best guesses.  While it's possible that an SEO link building service in 2012 can help you build your business, it's also possible that you'll throw money at the problem without seeing a solution.

Finding the Best SEO Link Building Services

Your best chance of making a profit by using an SEO link building service is if you can find one that has already been recommended by other attorneys.  SEO link building services that haven't yet tried optimizing websites for law firms should be avoided at all costs.

You'll also want to get a handle on some basic new trends and SEO concepts, as well as which concepts are considered outdated (like press release submissions).  Any time an SEO link building service uses out of date strategies, it will come straight out of your bottom line.

While the most expensive SEO link building services aren't necessarily the best, the cheapest are unlikely to be worth using at all.  A cheap SEO link building service may build your links by posting them in irrelevant places or with misleading blurbs.  This is sloppy, and should never be part of the SEO link building strategy for a law firm or any other group of professionals.

Alternatives to SEO Link Building Services

You don't necessarily need to hire a high priced SEO link building service to improve where your website shows up in search results.  Instead, consider doing your own link building by building a quality blog.  There's really no substitute for the creation of your own, high-quality content that really matters to the kinds of clients your law firm brings in.

You can also direct your link building attention toward social media websites.  Social media search engine optimization can be a much better way to have your content “go viral” and increase the visibility of your website than SEO link building services.  Websites like LinkedIn and Facebook make it easier to share links than ever before.

Monitoring the Progress of Your SEO Link Building Service

SEO link building services will generally be of use for your mid to long term marketing strategy.  In the short term, it's unlikely that an SEO link building service will be very helpful—Google's indexers will take time to notice the increasing quality of your website and the number of inbound links you're receiving.

Just because it takes time, however, doesn't mean that your SEO link building services can make you wait forever for results.  No matter what, you should be able to see a difference to your bottom line after six months.  If you don't, your service may not be using the best techniques, or you may be having conversion issues that are preventing you from making the most of your new higher search results.

If you're at all invested in getting new clients through search, you need to work on your SEO page rank.  Studies show that today's internet users will only click through to the second page of search results one time in every ten.  This means that you need your SEO page ranking to be on the front page for as many high value and niche keywords as possible.  Actually bringing up your SEO page rank has gotten harder and harder, as Google has cracked down on some of the easiest ways of bringing web pages into the front page of search results fast.  In this guide, you'll learn how SEO page ranking is determined and how you can bring your search engine rankings up as fast as possible without making anyone at Google suspect you of artificial link building.

What is an SEO Page Rank?

The term “page rank” can refer to many different things.  In this guide, we'll use SEO page ranking to refer to the actual ranking that your web pages are able to achieve in search results.  In some cases, you may see SEO page rank used to refer to Google's PageRank system.  When this is the case, the P and R in Page Rank will usually be capitalized.

The SEO page ranking of your website depends on many different factors.  One of those factors, which used to be much more important but has gradually lost much of its relevance as time has gone on, is keyword density.  Typically you will want for your web copy to have a keyword density of between .5% and 1.5% in order to maximize your SEO page rank for that keyword.

More important than keyword density to SEO page ranking today is the number and quality of your inbound links.  Every inbound link made to your web page will give a small amount of its “link juice” to that page, and the page in turn can pass about 85 percent of that link juice on to other web pages on your site.  

How Is My SEO Page Ranking Calculated?

It would be great if this was the spot in the guide where we could give you a handy SEO page rank formula, complete with several variables and coefficients, so that you could maximize your SEO page ranking in a mathematically rigorous way.  Unfortunately, that's not possible—the details of the Google algorithms that create SEO page rank are incredibly secret, and the only thing that Google is willing to say on the subject is that over 500 million variables go into ranking results for every search.

That's not the kind of calculation you can do on the back of a napkin!  So if we can't figure out exactly how to optimize websites automatically, how do we know what makes SEO page ranking go up?  Studies have shown that the most important factor today for building SEO page rank is inbound linking, but we now also know that with too many low-value or low-quality links, your website can actually be penalized and accused of trying to game the rankings.

Many of the 500 million variables in Google's SEO page ranking calculations are actually built in because of scammers, spammers, and just plain unethical webmasters.  In their drive to get to the top SEO page rank for a keyword, many of these people will build links artificially, using programs that spam comments with inbound links to their website on hundreds or thousands of blogs at once.

Whenever Google notices that people are artificially manipulating their SEO page ranking numbers, they make attempts to update their algorithm to ensure that these tactics don't work in the long term.  In 2011 and 2012, up to 15 percent of web pages were affected negatively by algorithm updates that were designed to reduce the incidence of artificial links and encourage webmasters to work on more natural linking patterns.

Use Caution When Improving Your SEO Page Rank

One of the other things that Google has noticed about websites that are building their SEO page ranking artificially is that their inbound link numbers stay steady for a while, then spike up, then go back to not increasing much or at all.  If your links are gained in a pattern like this, it probably won't be long before Google penalizes you and reduces your SEO page rank.

How do you avoid falling prey to this telltale sign?  Simple.  Make sure that you're having links built every day—not just one or two days a week, or every weekday.  Every day, steady link building is a good sign to Google that your SEO page ranking is following a natural pattern.  Slowly raise the number of links that you build in a single day, and you'll have a winning pattern within weeks or months.

Using Social Media To Improve SEO Page Rank

Social networks are the single best way to make your SEO page ranking rise in a completely organic way.  By posting a link to one of your web pages (perhaps a blog entry or a new video about a legal topic that might be of interest to your social network connections), you give yourself one new inbound link.  But what happens to that link after?

In many cases, you'll find that the people you're connected with in social networks will actually share the link for you, adding additional inbound links.  In some cases, people may add an inbound link to your site to their blog or other social media page if they're particularly interested in what you have to say, which makes it so that their social networking connections can also see and share your link.

As you get better at social media, you'll start learning what kinds of posts tend to generate the most links and therefore the biggest gains for your SEO page rank.  If you don't see your SEO page ranking improving after a concerted social media effort, you may want to bring in professional help to identify what is holding your search engine optimization project back.

Today, many legal professionals already know why to advertise on Facebook.  Advertisements on Facebook reach a billion people worldwide.  Instead, most legal marketing professionals have moved on to asking how to advertise on Facebook.  Keep reading to learn how to get your advertisements on Facebook and in front of the right people.

Facebook Advertising Step 1: Get Your Website Ready

Before you start launching advertisements on Facebook, you need to think about your website.  Why advertise on Facebook, only to lead potential clients to a website that looks like it could have been made years ago with very few updates since?  Even if you learn how to advertise on Facebook very well, you won't get conevrsions without a website that is designed to look clean and modern.

You should also make it so that any blog content you have is shareable.  This blog content can then become Facebook advertisements of sorts.  If they're popular enough to be passed on, you may enjoy viral popularity.  Why advertise on Facebook exclusively with paid ads?  Make the free features of Facebook work in your favor, not against you.

You should also create your landing pages at this time.  Why advertise on Facebook to a broad market when you can niche market and receive more traffic for your website?  Landing pages are an important part of learning how to advertise on Facebook.

Facebook Advertising Step 2: Click to Create Advertisements on Facebook

When you've decided that your website is good enough and you want to know how to advertise on Facebook, you can click on the “advertising” button and create your first ad.  One of the best parts of the intuitive Facebook advertising interface is that even beginners can use it.  You shouldn't have much trouble figuring out how to advertise on Facebook using the tools provided.

Of course, these steps on how to advertise on Facebook assume that you already have a Facebook account.  If you don't, you're going to need to create one in order to post advertisements on Facebook.  Why advertise on Facebook if you don't even have an account?  This part of the process is actually quite easy, and Facebook will all but hold your hand during registration.

Facebook Advertising Step 3: Pick Your Images and Text

Once you've entered the ad creator, you're ready to learn how to advertise on Facebook.  Advertisements on Facebook come in two basic forms, sidebar ads and sponsored stories.  When learning how to advertise on Facebook, you probably want to start with sidebar ads.

Why advertise on Facebook with sidebar ads?  Because they're the easiest advertisements on Facebook to get started.  All you'll need to do to learn how to advertise on Facebook with these ads is just add your text and an image that will capture your audience's attention.  The text should often have questions, or a call to action, that will make audiences more likely to click your advertisements on Facebook.

Facebook Advertising Step 4: Target Niche Audiences in Advertisements on Facebook

Why advertise on Facebook to huge numbers of people who have no reason to use your services?  In this step, we'll learn how to advertise on Facebook only to the types of people who are most likely to need the services that you provide.  For example, let's say that you want to have advertisements on Facebook for your law firm, which primarily handles child support modifications for fathers.  If this is the kind of firm you're running, why advertise on Facebook to women or people without kids?

Narrowing your audience is a vital part of learning how to advertise on Facebook.  As you test several different niche marketing tactics, you'll find out which kinds of advertisements on Facebook tend to get the most clicks and conversions.  This will help you plan out how to advertise on Facebook in the future.

Facebook Advertising Step 5: Scheduling and Pricing Your Advertisements on Facebook

This is the part of Facebook advertising that can involve some tinkering.  In order to put advertisements on Facebook, you'll need to schedule your ads, decide on a budget, and price every click or every 1000 impressions.

In order to decide whether to pay by the click or by the impression, you will have to choose what to optimize your advertisements for.  Choose to optimize them for clicks, not for visibility.  Why advertise on Facebook and pay for a lot of impressions from people who don't actually need legal help right now?  Attorneys in particular are much better off using advertisements on Facebook on a pay per click basis.

Facebook Advertising Step 6: Check Your Work

Before any of your Facebook ads go live, you'll have a chance to review them.  Don't just click through the review process as fast as possible to start making the next ad.  Carefully take a look at your potential ad and proofread it meticulously.  Why advertise on Facebook if you're not willing to put your best foot forward?

You should also verify that your budget and pricing look correct.  As long as everything looks good, you can make your advertisements on Facebook go live quickly.  Within hours or days, you should start seeing data that will let you know whether you've engaged your audience sufficiently.

Facebook Advertising Step 7: Monitor Your Results

Why advertise on Facebook?  To get results, of course.  So why advertise on Facebook if you're not going to keep track of those results and make sure that you're getting what you need from your ad campaigns?

Facebook offers a wide range of testing and analytics tools that let you arrange split tests of ads and compare your results for several different campaigns at once.  If you're not using these tests, you're not getting the most you can out of your advertisements on Facebook.  Try testing not only different content (for example, ad fatigue sets in after a day or two—start changing up your images frequently!) but also different targeting.  You may find that a new niche of people is interested in the kinds of services your law office provides.

Understanding Google page ranking is critical for any search engine optimization work at a law firm.  Knowing how to check Google Page Rank and what a PR value actually means can make your job much easier when it comes time to decide on marketing plans. You'll find out how to check your Google Page Rank, and how to use your knowledge of Google page ranking to your advantage.  One of the best parts of Google page ranking is that these ranks are publicly available—you'll also learn about using a Google Page Rank checker on your competition.

Why Should I Check My Google Page Rank?

Is using a Google Page Rank checker overkill?  Some people certainly think so.  Google itself has gone on record saying that Page Rank is no longer really all that important.  This is something of a misrepresentation.

While Google has maintained for some time that search engine results do not depend on Page Rank, scientific studies involving linear programming for many variables showed that in fact, your Google page ranking is the #1 most correlated factor with where your results are displayed in searches.  This means that it's absolutely critical to check your Google Page Rank, at least periodically.

You should also check the Google page ranking for your competitors in your market.  It's a good thing to know what you're up against and how far you'll need to raise your PR to be truly competitive with their search engine rankings.

Google Page Rank Checker Software: Google Toolbar

The tool that most people start with to check Google Page Rank is the Google Toolbar.  Because this toolbar is created by Google, you can expect a user friendly interface and excellent support and tutorials.  Using the Google toolbar as a Google Page Rank checker is actually incredibly easy.  All you need to do is hover your mouse over the Page Rank part of the toolbar, and you'll find out the Google page ranking of the page that you're currently on.

Of course, this may not be exactly what you're looking for in terms of functionality.  You may want to check Google Page Rank for several different pages, and using this Google Page Rank checker won't do that.  You may also want to compare the Google page ranking of your pages and your competitors' pages.  The toolbar isn't the Google Page Rank checker you need for these more heavy-duty tasks—it's more of an introduction to checking your Google page ranking.

Google Page Rank Checker Software: Other Toolbars

If you need a more robust tool to check Google Page Rank on many different websites, you should consider a toolbar that offers extensive SEO data.  Currently, no other toolbar offers quite as much information in a relatively easy to understand format as SEOQuake.  In addition to letting you know the Google page ranking of every website you search for, SEOQuake can tell you Alexa ratings and many other important details about a website's popularity levels.

Google Page Rank Checker Software: Non-Toolbar Solutions

If you don't want to have a toolbar taking up your screen real estate while you surf the web, there are other ways to check your Google Page Rank.  For example, let's say that you want to find out the Google page ranking of every different page on your website.  If this is the case, you should consider installing a Google Page Rank checker tool on your site.  Many different websites offer tiny variations on this theme, and which variation you prefer is largely a matter of personal taste and aesthetic preferences.

Check the Google Page Rank of Inbound Links

For a long time, the Google page ranking of the inbound links you built didn't actually matter very much.  Today, you should check your Google Page Rank first, but then you should turn your Google Page Rank checker on the pages where your inbound links are coming from.  Why?  There are two reasons.

First of all, Google actually bases your popularity and your search rankings on the overall link authority given to you by your links.  If you check the Google Page Rank of those links, you'll find that your “link juice” from each one depends on the page's Page Rank as well as the number of outbound links on the page.  For example, even a web page with a Page Rank of 8 (extremely high) would give very little link juice if it had 10,000 links on it.

Second, if you have too many inbound links coming from very low Page Rank sites, you could actually find your inbound links becoming valueless.  Google sees this as a sign of trying to game the system, often with automated link building, and your site could crash and burn in the rankings if you don't check the Google Page Rank of the websites you're using to build your inbound links.

Increasing Your Google Page Ranking

After you check your Google Page Rank, you may be disappointed in the results, especially compared to your larger competitors.  Remember, though, everyone had to start from somewhere.  If you want to increase your Google page ranking, you're going to need to start creating original content.  Original content is recognized as such by Google and is ranked higher in quality.  It's also more likely to get you quality backlinks.

Avoid trying to change your Google Page Rank through automated systems and “get PageRank fast” methods.  Often, these are scams or things that will work only in the very short term, but at great potential cost to your website in the long term.  Professionals like lawyers can't take chances with their reputations—it's better to have a more conservative strategy for link building that offers a better chance of lasting results.

It's also important to keep in mind that page rank simply isn't everything.  If you're still building quality inbound links and are able to build referral traffic through social networks, you may be able to do successful internet marketing even without increasing your Page Rank.  As you enhance your other marketing campaigns, your Page Rank will often go up even if you don't try to make it do so.

Using the Yahoo profiles directory as part of your law firm marketing strategy has some distinct advantages.  The main Yahoo profiles and member directory is one of the few online human edited directories that still costs money to submit to.  In fact, the Yahoo profile directory was actually the first part of the Yahoo empire that went live online, and it's still one of the ways you can use Yahoo for your business even though its search is no longer commonly used.  Keep reading to learn some important tips for when you start working on your Yahoo profiles directory entry.

#1: Be Thorough When Working On Your Profile

Especially if you're paying for your Yahoo profile directory listing, you should make sure you're being very thorough about your profile.  The Yahoo profiles and member directory is free to join, but the principle holds true just the same.  No matter which Yahoo profiles directory you're part of, you need to include all relevant information in your entry.

This means that you'll want to have your law firm's phone number and address correct and up to date. You'll also want to make sure your Yahoo profiles and member directory profile includes any niche marketing information about your law firm.

#2: Use Your SEO Knowledge to Write Your Profile

If you've been using search engine optimization on the rest of your website, there's no reason your Yahoo profile directory entry can't also use many of the same techniques.  The Yahoo profiles directory is searchable, so you can use some of your SEO knowledge to create your entries with keywords that will be likely to draw people into your website.

Inbound links that come from the Yahoo profile directory are often worth a substantial amount in search rankings.  Creating good inbound links through the Yahoo profiles directory is one of the main reasons that many businesses will purchase a link in the main directory.  Even if you only have an entry in the free Yahoo profiles and member directory, you will get some link juice from the inbound links coming from your profile.

#3: Maintain Accurate Information on the Yahoo Profile Directory

If your law firm has changes in partners, focus areas, or location, you need to update your entry on the Yahoo profiles directory right away.  People search on the Yahoo profiles and member directory in order to make same day decisions, and if you've got inaccurate information for even days or weeks, you'll risk losing out on business that might have otherwise been easy to secure.

#4: Create a Profile in the Local Yahoo Profile Directory

One of the newer features of the Yahoo profiles and member directory is a local feature, created to compete with Google's local directory features.  If you create a profile in this part of the Yahoo profiles directory, you'll be able to include information about your business that is relevant to local consumers, including having your business plotted on a map.

Local searches have become one of the biggest ways that people search—especially when looking for representation by a qualified attorney.  The Yahoo profiles and member directory is not as frequently looked at as Google+ Local for this type of search.  However, because it takes very little time to set up your Yahoo profile directory entry, it's a very low risk and high reward proposition.

#5: Ask For Reviews on the Yahoo Profile Directory

Since the Yahoo profiles directory may not be the first place that your clients think of when it comes to reviewing you, you may need to actually talk to past and current clients about getting reviews added to the Yahoo profile directory.  Sending an email or putting out a public call on your social networking accounts containing a direct link to your spot in the Yahoo profiles and member directory can make it easier for your clients to click through to the right place (and therefore easier for them to give you a positive review).

#6: Watch What Your Competitors Are Doing

It's important to keep track of your competitors on any website, and the Yahoo profile directory is no exception.  Make sure that you're occasionally searching to see if and when your competition gets a profile on the Yahoo profiles directory, so that you can analyze what they're doing and whether they may actually have a better profile.  If their profile seems more engaging, you should consider changing some of your content in the Yahoo profiles and member directory to better engage your readers.

However, this doesn't mean that you should give up your own individuality.  Remember that your branding efforts should carry over to your Yahoo profile directory entry.  If your Yahoo profiles directory entry appears to be insincere or doesn't seem to really have much of a brand at all, it will just seem generic and unmemorable to viewers.

#7: Never Astroturf on the Yahoo Profile Directory

It can be tempting for some businesses to take matters into their own hands in the Yahoo profiles and member directory.  Some unethical companies—even law firms—have chosen to place false reviews in the Yahoo profiles directory.  In fact, in some ways it can be easier to do this with the Yahoo profiles and member directory than some others, because the traffic level is lower (this makes the subject of the false reviews less likely to find and report them).  No matter what, you should never create this kind of review—either a positive one for yourself or a negative one for someone else.  Doing so makes you look bad, and if you're caught, your state bar may actually sanction you for ethics violations.

#8: Make Sure Your Website Looks Great

Sometimes, webmasters can get so caught up in creating entries on websites like the Yahoo profiles directory that they forget to make sure their website is running at its best first.  You should always make sure before creating new inbound links that your website is ready to handle the traffic and looks exactly the way you want it to look when prospective clients see it.
 

Link building isn't easy to learn—which probably explains why only about 60 percent of American companies are currently making any specific link building efforts.  When you're working a law firm, developing a link building campaign can seem stressful, but in reality there's much less to it than you'd think.  Keep reading this article, and other link building articles on lawfirms.laws.com, to find out how to establish link building campaigns that really work without sacrificing your reputation.

Creating a Link Building Tool Kit

Many of the tools you already use on the internet can be considered allies in your link building campaign.  For instance, let's say that you already have a significant presence in the blog world.  That's great—we'll consider that blog a link building tool that you can come back to and use at any time.

Your contact list is also a link building tool.  Building your contact list and making sure that many people on it are well-connected online can make your link building campaign far more successful.  

In addition to these kinds of tools, you'll need some software.  Use caution before purchasing any kind of link building tool online—make sure that you're getting the best deal for the functionality offered.  Some link building tools simply aren't worth it.  In some cases, there may be a way to obtain a free version of the same link building tool that you just paid for it, without sacrificing quality.  Try using search terms relating to the aspect of your link building campaign that you're working on, then find a tool that works for your purposes.

What to Avoid in Your Link Building Campaign

Not every link building tool works in a way that will actually lead to improved search engine performance.  In fact, if you mismanage your link building campaign by using unethical techniques or having your links show up on thousands of unrelated websites, you could actually see your search rank decrease.

Why?  Because when a link building tool works by putting your link on so many unrelated websites, Google takes notice.  Because of some recent algorithm updates, called Penguin and Panda, if your links appear to be the result of paid linking or article marketing programs, you may find these inbound links now impact your quality score negatively.  Because of this change, Google has seen requests for removal of over ten million links that were now hurting SERPs.

Now, some companies that want to sell a link building tool that uses these methods may claim that Panda and Penguin aren't completely effective.  This is true—websites that use bad linking methods do still appear in some searches.  But what will you do when the Google engineers get better?  Undoubtedly, Panda and Penguin aren't the only updates we'll see to change these types of results.  It's very likely that if Google engineers don't want people using those services, they'll rapidly move to make it harder and harder to use them effectively.

The truth is, paid linking and article spinning were always cheating—and everyone who did it knew.  As a legal professional, you don't want to look like a cheater, so avoiding any link building tool that works in these ways is a good idea.  Do you really want to risk your existing SERPs for the sake of a potentially unethical link building campaign?

What Does a Great Link Building Campaign Look Like?

If bad link building usually involves irrelevant and low-quality websites, you might guess that excellent link building relies on high-quality websites and highly relevant content.  You'd be right.  Instead of using a link building tool that promises instant results, you can use reliable methods to create a great (and more time-consuming) link building campaign.

For small law firms, some of the best ways to kickstart your campaign is to talk to people you know who already run websites.  If you can pitch a guest story for a blog, or an interview for a podcast or blog, you'll grab new inbound links.  Typically, these kinds of guest stories and interviews involve at least one mention of your website, and they can prove very productive for attorneys who know how to use them.

Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter

If you're looking for a resource beyond your Rolodex to help you build your link building campaign, try the folks you're connected to on social media.  Your social media contact list can be the most important link building tool in your entire arsenal.  You can make yourself clearly available and highly visible as someone to interview or to invite as a guest blogger, and you can promote your own blog entries in this way as well.

What makes these strategies work even better is the ease with which people can share a link they found originally on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.  This part of your link building campaign is actually killing several birds with one stone—in addition to making yourself more visible on social media and building link presence, the shares can expand your reach.  This means that on an hour for hour basis, spending time on your social media presence is probably one of the single best SEO strategies you can enact.

Long Term Link Building Campaign Strategies

To find out what the next big link building tool will be, you'll want to stay aware of blogs that are relevant to legal marketers and search engine optimization specialists.  Many blogs will actually discuss the results of a link building campaign, including what went wrong, so that you can learn from professionals.

You'll also want to look at optimizing your site for mobile viewers.  As more traffic goes mobile (it's already a quarter of web traffic today) you'll increase your conversion rate by making sure your website looks great to people accessing it from smartphones and tablet PCs.  These surfers are more likely than anyone else on the web to convert right away, as long as you're optimizing their viewing experience.
 

If you're trying to increase your visibility on Google and other search engines, you probably already know that link building is one of the fastest routes to search engine success.  In recent studies, though, 75 percent of marketers said that link building is either very difficult or somewhat difficult.  If you've been having any difficulty with finding an affordable link building strategy, you're in the right place.  Keep reading this guide for information about affordable link building, including why cheap link building services may sometimes have hidden costs you never thought about before.

Affordable Link Building: You Get What You Give

In the early days of computing, there was a popular acronym, GIGO, which stood for “garbage in, garbage out.”  It meant that if the code you were programming was simply no good, or your data was bad, you wouldn't get the results you were hoping for.  In the same way, affordable link building strategies are garbage in, garbage out: if you're not putting in any effort, odds are that you won't be very successful.

This is probably the biggest of the reasons that affordable link building (and cheap link building services) can be hard to come by.  Remember, if there was one easy solution, everyone would use it—and if everyone used it, it would no longer be useful.  In order to do affordable link building, you can't just do what everyone else is doing.

Instead of looking to cheap link building services as a guide for what to do, find free guides to affordable link building online, like this one.  You'll get more unbiased information that isn't about selling you on a particular service for affordable link building.

How to Do Affordable Link Building in an Hour a Day

Small law firms and solo practitioners often just don't have enough time to do a lot of different marketing activities.  By just focusing on affordable link building for an hour a day, you can avoid having to hire cheap link building services.

Your hour should mostly be devoted to answering questions around the web or pitching some aspect of your or your law firm's expertise to people who may be able to interview you for a blog, a podcast, or even a radio or television show.  While you won't get as many links this way, the links you do get will be from quality sources and will usually be regarded as significantly higher quality than the links you build with cheap link building services.

Of that hour, consider spending about half of it not writing your own blogs or even pitching for new inbound links, but actually looking for new blogs, podcasts, and so on that might create linking opportunities later.  Then, you'll be able to spend the remaining half hour sending a few quick pitch emails to potential linkers all over the web.  Most cheap link building services won't do this kind of quality affordable link building.

Not All Affordable Link Building is Reputable

A great many cheap link building services cut a lot of corners when they're trying to make link building quick and affordable.  Instead of really creating quality links from quality websites, many of these services just use reciprocal links that won't get you the same kind of results from search engines.

Cheap link building services also tend to use older forms of search engine link building, like article spinning services that post your article in many places simultaneously.  While this may seem like a good strategy for affordable link building, search engine indexers know what this kind of marketing looks like.  You can actually drop in the rankings if the cheap link building services you hire do this.  Avoid any article marketing services like the plague, because 2012 and 2013 Google ranking algorithms just aren't fooled.

Not All Affordable Link Building is Ethical

When you hire cheap link building services, you'll also want to avoid any practices that have been characterized as unethical by your state bar association.  For example, if you're using affordable link building strategies that involve making it look like someone is going to a competitor's website or finding out information about a competitor, when in reality they're being directed to your site, this could be a significant ethical issue.

The internet has definitely created some new grey areas in advertising for attorneys, so it's always best to check with your bar association before deciding to use cheap link building services.  Affordable link building could be very costly indeed if it causes your reputation to suffer needlessly.

Can Cheap Link Building Services Be Useful?

In some cases, it's possible to get the kind of affordable link building you want by outsourcing.  While many cheap link building services are using outdated techniques, there are still some that are building reputations affordably.

In order to learn whether a service is useful, you'll need to ask a lot of questions about their methodology.  Cheap link building services that rely on links that will be seen rarely, if ever, aren't really helping you very much.  If, on the other hand, they help you to find new places to guest blog or can place relevant links in directories, that can be quite helpful to your affordable link building efforts.

When in doubt, ask for results: cheap link building services should be happy to provide you with real data and case studies illustrating the effectiveness of their methods.  Make sure these case studies are relatively recent before relying upon them.

Analyzing the Results of Your Affordable Link Building Campaigns

The effectiveness of a particular campaign style is impossible to predict with complete accuracy.  You, or the cheap link building services you've hired, will have to analyze whether or not the campaign you've established is working according to plan or whether it needs alterations.

What defines “success” in your link building venture is completely up to you.  In some cases, your firm may just want to increase brand awareness, while in others you may need new business and will base your metrics completely on key performance indicators relating to new client conversion.

If you've been paying attention to recent Google updates, you'll know that link building strategies have changed for good.  Now that Google bases much of its weighting for inbound links on whether those links are from good quality web pages, you may be considering your options.  Whether it's hiring an effective link building service or doing it yourself, 2012 and 2013 offer a huge range of choices for law firms that want to engage in quality link building.  Keep reading to learn more about those choices and whether your firm is link building aggressively enough for the current market.

Why Links Aren't All the Same

Not so long ago—in fact, as recently as the beginning of 2011—Google didn't take quality into account when looking at your backlinks.  The more backlinks you had, the better your search engine results would be, even if those backlinks were from very low-quality websites.  

The problem with indexing search results in this way is that the system was rewarding people for making the web look and work worse.  Any marketing company could become an effective link building service at that time, because it didn't take much: all you needed was to spam copies of articles and links on as many pages as possible.  It wasn't quality link building, but it did the job.

Why Google Penguin and Panda are Good For Lawyers

If your marketing practices are ethical, there's no reason that you should be afraid of the new Google updates, Penguin and Panda, that changed how links are weighted.  Instead, law firms ought to generally be pleased with how these updates have worked.  They mean that if one of your competitors is spamming instead of using quality link building, they won't appear near the top of search engine results.

While some link building services with low quality links are still hanging around, it's now much easier to find an effective link building service that is focused more on helping you with directory listings, networking with peers, and getting your voice heard by social bookmarking sites.  All of these things are possible to do with quality link building, and none of them require any kind of spam methods to make them work.

Are Paid or Reciprocal Links Quality Link Building?

Google's webmaster guidelines, which govern all websites indexed by Google, explicitly prohibit webmasters from paying for links.  Paid linking is actually a reportable offense, and if someone (like one of your competitors) figures out you're doing it, you could be busted and see your pages de-indexed.  

Excess reciprocal links are also frowned upon by Google's search engine robots.  Why?  Because it's simply too easy to do this kind of quid pro quo with another person online, all without even really knowing (or caring) what the content actually looks like.  

While it's certainly fine to link to some websites that also link you back, this should generally be limited.  You should only engage in reciprocal linking when your firm has a genuine connection with another person or company's website, not just because they said they'd give you a link back in exchange.

Signs That Your Existing Links Are Low Quality

Unfortunately, if you hired what you thought was an effective link building service even just last year, you may have found your SERPs dropping precipitously after Penguin or Panda came out.  If this happened to you, that's one of the best signs that you've done low quality link building.  An effective link building service can help you turn this problem around, even if your pages have plummeted in the search results.

Another indication that you may have low quality link building is if your links were very, very easy to come by.  Quality link building takes time and consideration—you simply can't do it effectively when you're trying to build hundreds or thousands of links in just a few weeks.

Quality Link Building: Easier Than You Think

The fact that no effective link building service can do your link building overnight may seem like a disappointment.  However, even if you're working on getting backlink traffic without any help from a service, it's possible to do quality link building.

Some of the easiest link building you can do that is still considered legitimate involves directory listings.  While some directories (typically those that accept literally any website) are considered low quality link building, many are high-quality websites in their own right.  For example, you should try to be listed on DMOZ, as well as avvo.com and your state bar association's website (if it offers backlinks to firm websites).

If you already spend time on social bookmarking websites and already know the lay of the land on one or more of these sites, you can do quality link building there.  Similarly, even if you don't already have a blog, you may want to ask someone who runs a popular blog whether you can do a Q&A session or a guest blog entry.  If you're lucky (and good), these kinds of posts can even end up shared repeatedly in social media feeds all over the web.

Hiring an Effective Link Building Service

Today, finding the right link building service can be tricky.  Because the recent Google updates are so new, many of these services are scrambling to find new strategies that work.  Usually, the most effective link building service will be one that didn't have to scramble, because it was already dedicated to building quality, reputation-enhancing links rather than creating spam.

An effective link building service can help you to get the best inbound links possible by looking at who you're connected to and how.  What's more, because there are so many different kinds of link building activity to engage in, you can augment these efforts with your blogging or social media updates without overlapping.  An effective link building service will look at what you're already doing well and where you could stand to gain the most with the least additional work.
 

Search engine optimization today requires a lot more than just using good keywords.  With Google Penguin affecting one in six websites, now is the time to learn about best practices for link building SEO today.  Law firms face unique challenges when it comes to SEO link building, because of the nature of their business and because attorneys have historically been very competitive for search engine results pages.  By the end of this guide, you'll have a better handle on how you can use link building SEO to cement your online reputation and leave your competition back in the 20th century.

How Is SEO Link Building Changing?

Today's link building SEO doesn't look like the strategies employed just a few years ago.  The reason?  Panda and Penguin.  What may sound like two lovable zoo critters are actually changes to the way that Google ranks search engine results.  Both of these updates were designed to stop types of SEO link building that Google felt was leading to some users receiving spammy or irrelevant search results.

Many of these irrelevant results were caused by link building SEO services that worked by spamming links and content over and over.  This content decreased the overall quality of Google's search results, and made it tougher for search users to find the kinds of content that they wanted within the first few pages of results.

As a consequence of these new algorithms, SEO link building now works differently.  Instead of just doing link building SEO by accumulating a very large quantity of links, the focus today is on building links that come from quality websites.  These changes are likely not complete.  Even today, some search results still appear that use article marketing spam services to repeat content.  However, as the algorithms at Google keep improving, it's likely that this SEO link building strategy is on its way out.

What Still Matters in SEO Link Building?

Stop thinking about link building SEO as an attempt to maximize the number of locations where your website is linked.  Instead, SEO link building today should be an attempt to maximize the number of quality links you're receiving from quality websites.

What makes a website high quality?  Several things.  First of all, high quality websites are linked to often, by a wide variety of other sources.  Second, high quality sites tend to carry a great deal of original content written by professionals.  The more you can get your links to appear on these types of sites, the more productive your link building SEO efforts will be.

Google bases some part of its link quality rankings on how many other links are on the website.  If there are two links to your website on a high quality webpage that only has 400 other links on the whole website, this counts for more than if you had two links on a webpage with over a million links.

What SEO Link Building Techniques Don't Work Today?

While some link building SEO techniques are quite ethical and can make your reputation improve by leaps and bounds, other techniques will cause clients to go to other attorneys.  For example, some attorneys have tried SEO link building by posting links to their blog on other law blogs which may or may not be related.  While this kind of link building SEO may seem like a good idea initially, it's likely to be deleted by the blog's owner unless your response actually contains real quality content, not just a generic message and a link to your website.

You won't be able to do SEO link building by using article spinner services any more, either, or press release websites.  These services have largely been disregarded by Google's new search algorithms, because too many people were abusing link building SEO by posting this kind of content.  

SEO Link Building With Law Blogs

One way that you can do legitimate link building SEO is by building a blog.  In addition to bringing you new clients directly (as over 50 percent of attorneys with blogs report that they do), blogs can help you get inbound links to your website.  

Not only will other people repost entries from your blog on their blogs, or link them from their social media feeds, but they may also invite you to do a guest blogging stint.  Guest blogging is a terrific way to get inbound links back to your firm's website, especially if you're guest blogging on a very popular blog.

SEO Link Building With Youtube

In addition to blogging, you can also create videos, upload them to Youtube, and make sure that their descriptions include a link back to your website.  This form of link building SEO is totally ethical, as long as the content you're posting has something to do with your legal practice, and firms that are using video as part of their marketing strategy often see their conversion rates double or even triple.

What's more, Youtube videos are more likely to be viewed by mobile customers, who are more likely to convert than their desktop using counterparts.  Youtube SEO link building is a strategy that should be in every law firm's arsenal for 2012 and 2013.

SEO Link Building With Social Bookmarking Sites

When people are looking for something new to read online, they often turn to social bookmarking websites, which crowdsource the newest content and allow users to decide which types of content should appear most prominently.  Sites like reddit.com and digg.com are currently huge players in the social bookmarking world, and using these sites before other attorneys in your area do can help you stay relevant in a fast-changing online universe.

Whenever you post to a social bookmarking site, the quality of your content is absolutely critical.  The users of these sites will almost always reject anything that looks like advertising (unless it's outrageously clever or very, very innovative—think the kind of advertising that wins national awards).  You need to provide some good information to be able to compete with the other links that are already being posted to these websites.