Legal Website’s Most Overlooked Key
to Search Engine Placement Improvement
By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2007 Promotions Unlimited
All rights reserved.
This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorized use, copying or
mirroring is prohibited.
Achieving top placement in the search engines takes good design, intuitive
navigation, proper key word density, correct Meta tags and informative content.
Law firm sites are lacking one decisive element...Quality incoming links!
The leading search engine, Google, looks more at what other sites are linking to
your site. Google's page ranking system relies heavily on link popularity. Your
site will be assigned a PageRank, the highest rank is 10 and the majority of
quality sites rank at least 4 and above.
It is very logical. Pages that other people think are practical will get linked
by other webmasters and low quality pages will not gain any links. So, only the
sites that are helpful to others will review Top10 ranking. This enables search
engines to rate your website with minimal effort. These days it is very
well-known among webmasters that link exchanging is a very effective method for
creating more traffic.
This change poses a problem for new sites to reach the top and at the same time
favors those large, high traffic sites. For help in getting quality links, there
is software that does it all automatically. Click here to find out more.
More links are not better unless all of them are high-quality links. Numbers
aren't as important as context and relevancy. It is better to have a few links
from sites that are similar in content and topic to yours, a few links from the
portals, and a few links from site reviewers, than to have 1,000 links on Free
For All (FFA) links pages. Actually, in practice, non-themed links can actually
lower a site’s search engine placement. This is especially true when lazy
webmasters join link swapping plans in hopes of having ‘instant’ mega,
in-coming links. These services are designed to immediately boost your link
popularity. The way they work is simple: Each member of a link-share program
places a machine-generated page on his site and links to that page from his
front page. The machine-generated page has links to all other sites
participating in the program. Each member submits his machine-generated page to
all search engines, and the result is that each member has a link to his site
from everyone else.
You may have heard that these type of programs produced some positive effects in
years past, but search engines have picked up on it and now consider them spam
and if participating in these programs your site may be ban from the search
engines. Don't just take my word for it, this is what Google has to say about
it: “Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link
popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines.
These are typically useless exercises that do not affect your ranking in the
results of the major search engines. At least, not in a way you would likely
consider to be positive”. Don't even try them, even if you are really desperate.
The top criteria in selecting a quality linking partner is to simply determine
if their site is ranking within the top three pages of search engine returned
results for a popular legal key word phrase. If your practice is mainly within a
certain geographic area, this should also be considered. For example, lets
assume your main practice area is auto accident, and your firm is located in San
Diego. A good key word phrase to check on Google would be:
San Diego auto
accident lawyer or San Diego accident lawyer. Those would be top on my list.
Also, more generic phrases like San Diego attorneys, San Diego law, etc. are
okay. See who is on page one (exclude the sponsored sites as they usually are
only temporary) and contact them via email to see if they would be interested in
a link exchange. Unless your site is ranking well for a similar key word phrase,
a top ranked site would most likely not be to enthused to accommodate your
request. However, it is certainly worth a try! Alternatively, to start your
linking campaign, I’d say consider any other sites on Google ranking within the
first five pages of results. Also, valuable are any links from other legal
related sites. Naturally, start within your own geographic city area, expand to
the regional area, state and country.
Our dozen top rated legal directories have a reciprocal award linking program
that is free with no obligation and is exclusive to the legal community. If
qualified, your firm will receive a valuable link back due to our top rankings.
For more information about his program, send me an email or click here.
Your site will soon benefit from all that the Internet offers with an
appropriate linking program. Again, quality incoming links are the key to
improved rankings which in turn lead to increased business.
Copyright 2003 Promotions Unlimited. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited http://www.websitetrafficbuilders.com
an Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas ) publisher and search engine
placement technology analyst. You can contact Bob via e-mail at bob@websitetrafficbuilders.com or
visit his
San Diego legal directory at: www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com
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