Link Popularity: A Powerful Tool for Quality Legal Search Engine
Standing
By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2005 Promotions Unlimited All rights
reserved.
Your law firm has an attractive website with a catchy web address.
Yet after many months you have not secured a single new client you
can directly attribute to your legal website and your sites traffic
is horrible.
Getting your law firms web site ranked high on the top search
engines is imperative for achieving Internet success. In the not too
distant past, the only thing you had to do to attain top search
engine placement was to give your page a great title, use the right
keywords and add a good meta tag description.
Those were yesterday's rules. Today the rules have changed. 7 of the
popular 12 search engines are now factoring in link popularity when
deciding a site's position in search results. This means that your
web pages may be perfectly optimized for good search engine
placement and still rank low.
Boosting your legal link popularity can significantly improve your
law firms search engine rankings. Improve your search engine
rankings and you can't help but do more business.
Link popularity is the total count of web sites that link to your
firms site. The more links directing to your site, the better your
link popularity rating. The idea is that if a large number of web
sites are willing to host links to your web site, a search engine
assumes you have information that is worthwhile to their customers.
By using link popularity as ranking criteria, the search engines are
making certain their clients will get a more relevant search result.
The greater your link popularity rating the higher your web site
will rank in the search engine directory.
In a real-life example, we will look at two legal websites. We use a
simple technique for estimating the number of links pointing to each
of the sites, from just the MSN search engine. The first site is
www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com. This is a well-established legal
directory site. Just in February '05 there were more than 5,100
unique visitors, all produced from high page one rankings. The
second site is a newer legal information website:
www.legal-advice-library.info. This site had 128 unique visitors in
February '05.
If you follow these guidelines, you'll be able to run the same link
test on your own site. In the search bar on MSN we type in the URL
preceded by: link: The input for our first site was:
link:www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com The results conveyed that there
were 754 links pointing toward this site. For our second legal
website, www.legal-advice-library.info, MSN listed seven links. To
determine what a good incoming link goal should be, you can run this
test on a few of your high ranking, local legal website competitors.
Look at how their average number of links compares to yours.
How do you increase legal link popularity?
In the past, you literally had to visit a number of sites and ask
them to link back to your site.
• or you could pay for legal links.
• or you could submit your site to hundreds of FFA
link directories and hope the search engines indexed the sites
before your postings expired.
• or you could visit a lot of legal discussion boards, post, and
hope your message would be indexed.
All around, a hit-and-miss proposition which might or might not
work. Some legal sites have set up ‘link-farm’ services. Some are
free to join and others charge a monthly fee. When it comes to these
types of services, the best advice is to stay away . . . far away
from them. The search engines are on to this ‘shortcut’ scheme and
will actually lower your site’s ranking or remove it from their
index when they find it on your site (yes, they have techniques for
spotting this).
A self-composed email request to another Webmaster has been the norm
in the past. Recently, specific software has become available that
automates the locating of similar teamed legal sites, individually
emailing them a link request and creating a legal link directory on
your site. One of the best attributes of such software is the
ability to quickly verify that your link is still on your partner’s
site. Such link verification should be done at least once per month
to ensure that the linking webmasters are maintaining up their side
of your reciprocal link agreement.
Legal Link popularity - legal reciprocal links -- the easy way.
After much investigation, I can assure anyone interested in
achieving higher search engine rankings should be sure to develop a
strong legal reciprocal linking strategy. The easiest way to do this
is with the
Zeus Internet Marketing Robot. They have a free trial so you can try
the program without any obligation.
Copyright 2007 Promotions Unlimited. City specific legal
directories. All rights reserved.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bob Schwartz, is the founder of Promotions Unlimited (search engine
optimization) a Internet legal directory (CA, TX & Las Vegas)
publisher and search engine placement technology analyst. You can
contact Bob via e-mail at seo711@gmail.com or visit his San Diego
legal directory at: www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com
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