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 reviewing your options for link building solutions, you have probably found many different outsourcing companies.  But can you really outsource link building successfully?  Recent changes to Google called Penguin and Panda have changed the way that link building works for most websites, including law firm sites.  Over a million websites saw their rankings decline and six million requests for link removal resulted.  How does this impact the viability of your link building solutions?  Keep reading to find out.

How Have Penguin and Panda Changed Google?

What do Penguin and Panda have in common?  It's not just that they're both black and white.  They're also the names of two new Google initiatives that have been launched in just the last year.  The reason that Google began to work on these initiatives was that many companies were using unethical link building solutions.  While some companies would outsource link building to reputable agencies, others used techniques that involved spamming and paid links.

When the Panda and Penguin rollouts took place, websites were no longer just ranked based on the number of inbound links they had.  The quality of the links started mattering, too.  This removed a lot of the incentive to use unethical link building solutions.  Today, companies that want to outsource link building need to keep Panda and Penguin in mind.

What Are the Advantages of Outsourcing Link Building Solutions?

Obviously, the biggest advantage if you outsource link building will be that you just don't have to do it yourself.   In a post-Penguin world, you may want to avoid working on the kinds of difficult and time consuming link building solutions that are still useful in improving search rankings.  When you outsource link building, you'll be able to devote more time to what matters: doing legal work for your law firm.

Another advantage of using outside link building solutions is that if you find a good link building company, they'll stay on top of new developments to search engine optimization strategies.  You have enough on your plate without trying to keep up with SEO technology and new link building tools.  When you outsource link building, you can go hands-off and let the link building company figure out your next strategy.

Are There Disadvantages to Outsourcing Link Building Solutions?

Absolutely.  While it may seem like it's a great idea to outsource link building, you should also consider that not every link building service is ethical.  If you hire someone to provide your link building solutions, there is always a chance that they'll do it in a way that reflects negatively on your law firm.  Make sure that you have seen samples of past link building solutions for law firms in your outsourcing provider's portfolio.

You also lose some of your flexibility when you outsource link building.  If you had created your own link building solutions, you'll be able to change and adapt them as needed.  Not every outsourcing provider keeps abreast of new developments to search engine technology.  If you feel more comfortable keeping up with the state of tech than letting someone else do it, you may want to provide your own link building solutions instead of hiring someone else.

Preparing to Outsource Link Building

If you do choose to outsource your link building, you'll need to take some steps in preparation.  Your website needs to be attractive and designed to be conversion ready if you're outsourcing link building solutions.  Remember, no matter how much your search engine results are improved, that won't help if your traffic all bounces out due to a poorly designed website.

Speed matters too.  Google now bases part of its search engine rankings on how long your website's pages take to load.  For slow websites, this creates a double whammy: searchers are less likely to stay on your website already, and now Google also negatively impacts your rank.  Before you outsource link building, verify that your website is fast and that all pages are downloading correctly.

What Kinds of Link Building Look Good to Google?

Generally speaking, Google wants to reward “difficult” link building to authority sites, not easy link building to spam sites.  For example, let's say that through your public relations efforts, you landed an interview with a national magazine and they included a link to your firm in their online edition.  These link building solutions are some of the best ways that you can get links from authority websites.

Another kind of linking that will look good to Google is when you insert your law firm's profile into a directory, whether a local directory of businesses or a ratings directory specifically for lawyers.  The more of these directory links that you have up to date and with accurate profile information, the more likely it is that your website will appear higher in search and local search results.

You can also build links by asking people on Facebook or LinkedIn to share your content with others.  This is a great way to have your links shared not only by the people you know, but also by the people they know.  If you have some content that “goes viral” by being spread through word of mouth, you'll soon see your reputation and rankings rise up.

What Kinds of Link Building Look Bad to Google?

Usually, if you try to cheat, Google will notice.  If you outsource link building and your link building company primarily works by putting links to your site on spam websites, your reputation will suffer and odds are that Google will drop your search result rankings.

You're also going to have a bad time with most types of link building solutions that involve automated press release companies.  While press releases are certainly a valid link building strategy, these kinds of automated services are not able to really provide you the kind of readership that a real public relations service could.  These websites are not really a substitute for professional press releases or media relations.

As the year begins to draw toward a close, niche marketing strategies have begun to change to reflect recent changes to the online legal marketplace.  With over 80 percent of consumers now researching attorneys online—mostly with search engines—before deciding on who to call for a consultation, you need a great niche marketing strategy more than ever as 2013 gets nearer.  Keep reading to find out how you can take action now to make sure that your niche marketing strategies are still working well into the future.

Niche Marketing Strategy Guide Tip #1: Get Social Today

One of the best niche marketing strategies of right now is to integrate the rest of your search engine optimization with your social marketing campaigns.  If you're not already using social media, you should start as soon as possible.  In addition to improving your niche marketing strategies and SEO results, becoming active on social media websites can steadily improve your online reputation.

Depending on what your niche involves, you may decide to use different social media websites to prop up your social media strategy.  For instance, if you're primarily marketing to other businesses, you may want to start building your network on LinkedIn and discussing your niche using LinkedIn groups.  If you've got a more consumer-oriented practice, Facebook is probably a better place to focus your social media niche marketing strategies.

Niche Marketing Strategy Guide Tip #2: Update Your Website

Niche marketing strategies involve giving some things up in order to focus on your niches.  You can't really implement a niche marketing strategy properly if you're maintaining a website that barely acknowledges your new niches except for on their landing pages.

Decide on your niche marketing strategies for 2013, then get a website update ready starting now for the best possible implementation.  You'll attract a lot more clients for your niches if you look like you're actually dedicated, not just trawling for traffic.

When you update your website, you should also implement any mobile niche marketing strategies and have a mobile friendly version of your entire website.  This niche marketing strategy can help you to get a big chunk of the market that a lot of other attorneys are ignoring.

Niche Marketing Strategy Guide Tip #3: Go Local

Think about your local area when you're developing your law firm's niche marketing strategies.  You'll do much better when you're trying to decide between competing niche marketing strategies if you already know what the local market wants.

Consider the ways in which your area is changing in terms of demographics, and how those demographic changes might change what people want in an attorney.  Trying to provide a solution to these problems is a great way to build your niche marketing strategies in a way that no one else can match.

Niche Marketing Strategy Guide Tip #4: Unique Niches

If you're stuck trying to develop new niche marketing strategies, maybe you just need some better niches to market to.  Consider just tinkering with Google Instant to find out what kinds of attorneys people are looking for in your area.  You may find that when people search for a criminal defense lawyer in your town, there's a niche that isn't being well covered by the existing options.

Niche market finder programs can automate a lot of this tinkering, and if you're serious about developing niche marketing strategies, you might want to download one.  However, not all niche market finders are great for developing a niche marketing strategy for law firms specifically.  You may want to ask the developers of the software whether law firms have had good results, and ask for reviews from law firms that have previously used their software.

Niche Marketing Strategy Guide Tip #5: Types of Niches

The type of niches that can create successful niche marketing strategies are very diverse.  You might want to think about talents you have in areas other than law when trying to develop a new niche marketing strategy, especially if you're developing niche markets as a new attorney or one who has recently hung a shingle.

For example, if you speak a language other than English, you may want to make that other language part of the focus of your practice and cater to other people who speak it.  You can also build a niche based on what you did before you were an attorney.  For instance, a special education teacher who used to teach autistic children could become an impressive attorney in a firm specializing in the legal challenges of autistic education.

Niche Marketing Strategy Guide Tip #6: Look to the Future

When you're planning long term niche marketing strategies, you should be thinking about the already observable demographic trends in your community.  If, for example, your community seems to be filling with retirees, for the next 20 years a practice that works mostly on estates and wills will probably be successful.

If it seems like everyone is leaving the town where you're living in, it may be time to pack up and move with them.  Law is a service industry, and no niche marketing strategies will help you be successful if there aren't enough clients living within reasonable driving distance of your office—or if too many other attorneys are between you and those clients.

Niche Marketing Strategy Guide Tip #7: Beware of Scams

When you're trying to develop niche marketing strategies, make sure that you're not falling prey to any scams to try to enhance your niche SEO results.  “Article spinning” services, for example, may tell you that they'll repost your article in a wide range of places, thus improving your search engine results.

The problem?  Google cracked down on these services last year, by creating a search algorithm that disregards article spinners.  This means that if you're trying these article marketing techniques now as part of your niche marketing strategies, you're probably wasting your money and time.  It's very unlikely that indiscriminate repackaging of your article will actually lead to more clients in the long term, and it could do a lot to hurt your online reputation.

Law firm SEO has been changing as rapidly as the rest of the web in recent years.  Today, with about 85 percent of legal clients doing research online before they decide on an attorney to hire, SEO for lawyers has become more than just a cool tech tool.  Today, lawyer SEO is a necessity for any attorney who wants to stay economically viable.  Keep reading this guide to find out the newest and best techniques for law firm SEO that can help you stay on top of the latest technological developments for attorney websites.

What's Hot: Social Networking SEO For Lawyers

If you think that LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are just something people use to waste time, you need to change the way you think about social networking websites.  Far from just being entertainment, these websites present some of the best opportunities for law firm SEO.

First of all, you should make sure that your law firm has a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook profile, and a Twitter account to make it easier to set up SEO for lawyers on the sites.  Then, you should complete your profiles on these websites including some keywords that might be used to find you.

This isn't the only time that you can use lawyer SEO on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.  You can regularly link back to pages on your website with posts on any social networking site.  These posts are also easy to share, garnering you more inbound links (another critical aspect of law firm SEO).

What's Not: Lawyer SEO That Looks Like Spam

Just because you're using SEO for lawyers doesn't mean that you should spam your Facebook and Twitter followers.  If you use too much law firm SEO copy in your profile, or especially in your posts and status updates, you'll turn potential clients off in a hurry.

Make sure that your lawyer SEO links to genuinely informative articles and interesting content, and doesn't just link to your front page.  If you keep linking repeatedly to your front page as part of your law firm SEO strategy, you'll soon find yourself losing most of the people you've worked so hard to bring to your Facebook or Twitter pages.

If you're ever in doubt as to whether something is lawyer SEO spam or whether it's genuinely good content, ask someone you trust.  Remember that people don't usually like to read advertisements, and that your SEO for lawyers should be a lot more creative than just some basic ads.

What's Hot: Mobile Law Firm SEO

No, not a mobile law firm—mobile SEO, which optimizes your website for people who are accessing it through a browser on their iOS, Android, or other smartphone operating system.  Mobile SEO for lawyers adds new layers of difficulty.  Mobile visitors won't be able to scroll around as easily, or click as easily on small text.  It also means that they won't be able to read small text without zooming.

Getting onboard with the new mobile lawyer SEO trend is a great idea no matter what kind of law firm you have.  Studies show that by the end of 2014, most web traffic in the United States is likely to come from mobile devices, rather than desktop computers.  If you're not using mobile law firm SEO, you'll actually be losing out on most of your potential internet traffic.

What's Not: “Article Marketing” Services

Don't believe anyone who tells you that article marketing is still a good idea for lawyer SEO.  This was a method commonly used for SEO for lawyers in the 2000s, but in 2012, it won't work.  Google's search indexing algorithms have become too sophisticated for these services, which worked by copying the same article onto hundreds of web pages.

Article marketing today won't just make you look bad if someone realizes you're doing it as part of your law firm SEO.  If Google notices that this is the technique you're using for lawyer SEO, it can actually stop listing your websites.

All paid article links, as well as reciprocal link directories, are also likely to end up reducing your rankings.  Avoid these forms of SEO for lawyers at all costs, even if a “behind the times” service tells you that they're still good law firm SEO methods.

What's Hot: Latent Semantic Indexing SEO For Lawyers

One of the newest methods of lawyer SEO is using many different keyword variations in the same page instead of a repeated keyword.  This is called latent semantic indexing, and this is a strategy that should be learned by anyone who uses SEO for lawyers.  While this may sound like a very technical concept, it's actually much easier to learn than you might think, and is at the very forefront of law firm SEO today.

Latent semantic indexing works for lawyer SEO because most search engines have become smart about looking not only for the exact word that you're searching for, but also that word's synonyms and variants.  You can use this SEO for lawyers tactic whenever you want to make your copy sound more natural.  The lack of repeated keywords makes it much easier to read, and you'll have better conversion rates from this type of lawyer SEO.

What's Not: Law Firm SEO With Keyword Stuffing

When you do any kind of lawyer SEO, you need to avoid stuffing the same keywords over and over into your copy.  Google and other search engines will notice if your keyword density looks too high.  While this has been the case for some time, recent changes to Google make it even harder to get the keyword density right when writing copy for SEO for lawyers.

That's because now, Google may even consider relatively low keyword densities spam, if you're not being careful to use different keyword terms for your links.  If you use one keyword term repeatedly, linking it over and over, you'll be punished in search results even if the overall density of the keyword being used would normally be within acceptable parameters.