Law Firm SEO Marketing - A Lesson in Link Building

© 2009, Brandon Cornett.

It's time for another lesson in lawyer marketing, courtesy of the Web Smart Lawyer. Here is today's lesson:

If you want to succeed with search engine optimization / SEO these days (especially in a competitive field like the legal industry), you need to understand the value of links. Attracting links from other websites to yours is the key to long-term search engine success.

In this article, I’ll explain what link building is, how to attract the right kinds of links, and what it all has to do with law firm SEO success. You’ll also learn what to avoid, which is equally important.

Definition of Inbound Links / Backlinks

An inbound links (a.k.a. backlink) is simply a hyperlink from some other website to your website. If I add a hyperlink to this article that links to your site, I’ve given you another inbound link.

In terms of law firm SEO marketing, hyperlinks from one site to another are similar to popularity votes. Search engines use “link popularity” as one of several ranking factors to determine which websites show up at the top of a search results, and which ones are buried on page 5, page 10, or page 5,215. There are several other important components to law firm search engine optimization, but links are high on the list. They are also the hardest SEO component to acquire, as you will soon see.

Linking Your Way to SEO Success

There are other lessons on this blog that discuss lawyer SEO in general. Obviously, this article focuses on the link building side of things. There’s a reason for this. The difference between law firm websites that rank #1 in a competitive market, and those that rank #99 or below, often comes down to the quantity of quality of links in place. In other words, an effective link building program can help you achieve top rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines — regardless of how competitive your geographical niche might be.

How to Get Links to Your Law Firm Website

Now we come to the million-dollar question. How do I get other websites to link to mine, for law firm SEO success? There are many ways to do this, actually. I’ll offer you a list of link-building techniques for further research, but I’ll focus on one technique in particular — a strategy that can give you great results in your SEO marketing program.

Here are some of the things you can do to attract links from other sites:

• List your law firm website in web directories, such as DMOZ.org, BOTW.org, and the Yahoo directory.
• Publish educational articles online through sites like EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com.
• Add your law firm site to legal directories, organization websites and the like.
• Create useful, informative content that others will want to link to as a resource.
• Publish press releases online, through websites like PRWeb.com and PRLeap.com.
• Launch a law firm blog and start publishing authoritative, engaging content (that others will cite).
• Hire an SEO marketing firm to get links for you. But see the word of caution below.

I promised to expand on one of these link-building techniques for you, so let’s talk about the second item on the list. Publishing informative articles on legal topics is a great way to achieve law firm SEO success.

In addition to publishing your work through “article directory” sites like the ones listed above, you can publish them onto an endless variety of legal websites. And if you link back to your own site from the “Author’s note” at the end of the piece, you’ll pick up an inbound link for every article you publish.

Better still, links from legitimate websites that are relevant to your own own (legal oriented) are the best kinds of links for SEO marketing. You’ll get the best results in terms of Google ranking from “scoring” these kinds of inbound links. And publishing quality articles is a great way to do it.

Here’s what I would recommend doing:

1. Do a Google search for “law +submit an article” or “legal +submit an article.”
2. From the above search, make a list of websites that accept legal articles from experts.
3. Start submitting your work to these website, with an author’s note at the end of each article.
4. Use an author’s note like the samples I’ve provided below.

Sample Author’s Note: John Smith is a family lawyer in Austin, Texas. He has been practicing law for more than twelve years, and he recently started a blog on this subject. Learn more or contact the author by visiting http://www.JohnSmithLawBlog.com.

Obviously, that would be a real link if there actually was a John Smith law firm blog, but you get the idea. So each time John places a new article onto another site, he picks up yet another link back to his own website. In terms of law firm SEO marketing, there is no end to what you can accomplish using this technique. Publish a couple of new articles per week, on a wide variety of legal sites, and you’ll achieve top Google rankings in a matter of weeks or months.

An SEO Word of Warning

I recommend handling this process for yourself, as opposed to outsourcing it to a law firm SEO company. Some people (such as inexperienced SEO companies) don’t realize that you can take this technique too far. But you can. There is a such things as “over optimization,” and the more advanced search engines such as Google will actually penalize you for it by demoting your website — the exact opposite of what you’re trying to achieve. Do a Google search for “search engine penalties” and you’ll see what I mean.

Here’s what Google has to say about it: “Some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.” Source

In closing, I would point out that you should strive for quality over quantity when it comes to this strategy. A website with 100 hyperlinks from high-quality legal sites will typically outrank a website with 1,000 or more links from crappy sites. In other words, search engines will consider the source of the hyperlink — not just the link.

Do You Need Advice or Guidance?

If you have questions about this aspect of law firm SEO marketing, feel free to email them to me. I usually answer questions on the blog for the benefit of all readers. If you would like some one-on-one phone time, I can do that too. Check out my consulting website for more on that.