Lawyer Internet Marketing | Search Engines | SEO | LawfirmMarketing

How To Get Better SE Rankings for Your Law Firm Website - Linking.

New: Customized Link/Keyword Analysis of your Law Firm Website

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October, 2006
Author: Ingvar Grimsmo

Links are not the same - here's the little known - inside scoop on what works.

Most potential clients searching for a lawyer will do so using search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Google gets about 64% of all the searches so I will simply use Google as an example SE here.

Most will click on the links "above the fold" - the first 5 or so firms listed.

The law firm search engine game is extremely competitive. I have worked with law firm sites for over 6 years now, and I can tell you - it is very difficult to get high rankings for a law related site. The firms you see in the top 10 spend time and money to achieve this result. Yes, you can BUY a listing using Google's AdWord program, but that is tricky - and expensive. And the results are questionable. I have tried.

Aside from a clean, useful - content rich site the top method used to achieve a high ranking is:

Valid inbound links from related sites.

This is absolutely the top tactic. Goggle recognizes that if there is an inbound link from a related site it validates the site. But links are NOT the same. Links from "link farms" are disqualified. A perfect link is this:

• One-way.
  No back-link from your site to their site.
   

• Link text contains your key words.
  If you are a DUI Lawyer in Washington state the link should be like this:

DUI Lawyers in Washington State

• Link page heading contains your keywords.
   

• Link is from a page with the same content.
   

• Link domain name contains your keywords.
   

• Link page is ranked 4/10 or better on Google. Ranking is exponential. A 5 is ten times better than a 4. Most my sites are 4 and I have a few that are 5. 5 is very good. You can check a site's rank by installing the Google toolbar (yes, it's safe and very useful).
   

• The link page has few other outbound links. Google counts this and reduces the value of a link if there are more than 8-10 other links on the page. Some say more than 50 disqualifies ALL links...!
  
  So links on the common "resource" page don't count as much as a single link on a page with related content. One way to achieve this is to set up separate pages for various practice areas on a domain with some of the keywords in it.

For example, I have set up a sample page on this site with the title "Washington DUI Lawyers". There I have one link to my sample DUI site. This link is valuable because it has at least ONE word in the domain (LAWYER), the page heading contains ALL my keywords, there are few links on the page and the page CONTENT is relative. So when this individual page eventually gets ranked  - this link is very, very valuable to another Washington DUI Lawyer site. Just a few of these highly targeted links will most likely result in at least a one point increase in SE rankings.

So a perfect link is from a similar, highly ranked web page with few other links on it. Those links are GOLD.

How do you get links like that?

1. You ask for them.
This is difficult, since for one - it's competitive. And who will give you a valuable link if there is not a link back of similar value? The way around that is to ask someone with several sites to link from one site and to give a link to another. Then both are one-way. By the way - another SE tactic is to have many web sites with similar content on different domains and servers.

2. You pay for them.
If you find a site you would like a link from offer to pay for a one-way link. Here's how to evaluate a link:

http://www.text-link-ads.com/link_calculator.php

For example, a one-way link on this site would cost about $14/month. A link on my main site www.lawyersontheweb.com is ranked at $41/month for a prime spot. And if you are a Medicaid lawyer - a link on my www.medicaidlawfirms.com is worth $36/month and so forth.

3. You create them.
The best way to do this is to write articles and submit them to web-based article databases. Such as http://www.isnare.com or law related sites. Another example of this is http://www.medicaidlawfirms.com/medicaid-alert.htm where the article is supplied by an attorney and the link is now extremely related and effective. You can also be active in blogs and forums related to your practice area. Make sure your link is correctly formatted as per above. Press releases are another great way to create one-way inbound links. www.prweb.com is one of the largest services. Use the free service to start - you are only after the link.

So - bottom line is: if you want search engine rankings - correctly formatted inbound links is pretty well the only way you will achieve this.

Ingvar is a published author on marketing issues and a web designer. He specializes in small to medium law firms.
His main site is: www.lawyersontheweb.com.

Contact Ingvar: ingvarg AT lawyersontheweb.com

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P.S You'll see advertising on the sample sites I have set up. This is Google's AdSense program and is currently providing a reasonable income from my sites. It's a great program.