SEO for Lawyers- How Link Building Can Improve Search Engine Rankings (SERP)

Link building for attorneys- five important tips to elevate your law firm's web presence.

//Rene Perras/ 05/25/2010

Rene Perras, law firm web marketing expert, discusses how web marketers for lawyers can improve their search engine results by acquiring inbound links to attorney websites.

Most legal web marketers in-the-know are aware that Google and the other search engines place an extremely high value on the quantity, and even more importantly, the quality of inbound links to your law firm website. While no one can quantify exactly how their algorithms use link-based popularity to determine where your legal website will appear in the search results, virtually all SEO experts agree that inbound links are essential to any SEO effort for lawyers.

It would seem that getting links to your legal website would be a fairly easy proposition, but what type of links will be effective in building your search engine results?

1. Trusted- links from well established websites, well known news sites and those that end in.edu or .gov, for example, carry more weight than those from new or "immature" websites
2. Relevant-links from thematically-related legal websites add credibility to your site and to your content
3. Inbound only- there is no advantage to "trading" links with other sites versus having a site link to your website by choice because of the quality of your content
4. Links to both your home page and to interior pages that are consistent with what the visitor to the other site is interested in. In other words, user-friendly links
5. Links achieved naturally because of interest in your law firm website and the content rather than traded or purchased links which are considered to be link spam

So how can your law firm develop a systematic program for acquiring the type of high quality links that can catapult your attorney website to the top of the rankings? There are a multitude of companies that will offer to act on your law firm's behalf in contacting website owners and requesting links back to your website. In many cases they will promise that the links they acquire are relevant and trusted for your keywords, but the fact of the matter is that in many cases they are paying for the links. Google has for several years worked on their quality control and refined its link-weighting algorithm to discount link spamming tactics that include buying links and adding an inordinate amount of links over a short period of time. Links achieved naturally and are earned take time to develop and Google is cognizant of sites trying to game their algorithm.

Through the use of blogs, online newsrooms, and news aggregators like Google and Yahoo News, you can elevate your law firm's web presence to a much higher level. Being proactive in link building means, using every tool in the box to achieve results naturally. Cepac.com offers private label newsrooms using Vision Smart Newsroom Technology that act like a blog on steroids. By releasing optimized content across our network of newswire partners, your law firm can add fresh content to your website while simultaneously creating links through this link baiting process.

Law firms that partner with legal SEO specialists and are patient in their efforts to allow the natural development of links will maintain or improve their current rankings and climb ahead of competitive law firms in lead generation, branding and sustaining their top-of-mind awareness on the web.

For more information on link building, blogs/newsrooms for attorneys, search engine optimization programs for law firms or legal website design, contact Rene Perras.

 

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