Link Popularity: A Powerful Tool for Top Legal Search Engine Standing

By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2005 Promotions Unlimited All rights reserved.

Your law firm has a nice website with a memorable web address. Yet after many months you have not obtained one 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 earn top search engine placement was to give your page a memorable 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 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 badly.

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 number of web sites that link to your firms site. The more links pointing to your site, the better your link popularity rating. The idea is that if a large number of web sites are willing to have 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 leading 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. In February '05 alone, there were over 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 showed seven links. To determine what a good incoming link goal should be, you can run this test on a couple of your high ranking, local legal website competitors. Notice how their average number of links compares to yours.

How do you improve legal link popularity?

In the past, you actually 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 {tons|a bunch|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 chat 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-exchange" 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’ 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 self-composed 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 attributes of such software is the ability to rapidly 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 sticking to 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 must 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