Link popularity a powerful technique for top legal Search Engine ranking
By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2005 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved.
Your law firm has a good looking website with a catchy web address. Yet after many months you have not secured one new client you can directly attribute to your legal website and your sites traffic is dismial.
Getting your law firms web site ranked high on the top search engines is critical for achieving Internet success. In the recent past, the only thing you had to do to gain 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 top 12 search engines are now factoring in link popularity
when determining a site's position in search results. This means your web
pages may be perfectly optimized for good search engine placement
and still rank low.
Increasing your legal link popularity can dramatically 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 number of web sites that link to your firms site. The more links pointing to your site, the greater your link popularity rating. The idea is if a large number of web sites are willing to create links to your web site, a search engine assumes you have information that is worthwhile to their customers. By using link popularity as a ranking criteria, the search engines are ensuring 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-world 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 over 5,100 unique visitors, all generated 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 steps, you'll be able to run the same link test on your own site. In the search bar on MSN we input the URL preceded by: link: . The input for our first site was:
link:www.sandiegolawyerforyou.com
The results showed that there were 754 links pointing toward this site. For our second legal website, www.legal-advice-library.info, MSN showed seven links. To determine what a good incoming link goal should be, you can run this test on two or three 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 in all, 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 nominal monthly. 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’ tactic 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 manual email request to another Webmaster has been the standard 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 features 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 insure that the linking webmasters are holding 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 solid legal reciprocal linking strategy. The easiest way to do this is with the
They have a free trail so you can try the program without any obligation.
Copyright 2005 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
We have a FREE program for reciprocal legal links where your firm can be linked to 15 high traffic legal sites in just a few easy steps....just CLICK HERE! Also, new for 2005 - Get noticed on the Internet and get powerful links back to your firm's website, totally FREE! We are accepting informative legal articles on helpful information the general public should know about your legal practice area. Your by-line will be hyper-linked to your firm's website from all of our high-placement legal sites. Legal articles must be general in nature and not publicity for you firm or your individual accomplishments. Naturally, we reserve the right to accept or reject any legal article. Please attach your legal articles as a MSWord file and email to: bob@websitetrafficbuilders.com
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