Attorney Website Marketing

What are inbound links and why are they important?

Simply put, an inbound link is any link to your law firm website from another. In the context of search engine marketing, it means a “one way” link. 

Inbound links are important because search engines look at the number of links to a web page to help determine its “popularity”, and consequently, its perceived relevance to a keyword or phrase. Of course, this isn’t the only thing that search engines use to rank web pages, but it is an important piece of the search engine marketing puzzle.

Recently, there has been a great deal of buzz in the legal marketplace about unethical link buying/selling.   Google frowns greatly on links that have been purchased for the purpose of increasing PageRank and they encourage folks to report paid links to them.  The last thing you need is a nasty competitor reporting your website for paid links or unethical link development to your website!

How does a law firm generate ethical links to their website?

Since inbound links are an absolute necessity to ranking your web pages in the search engines, what can you do to generate those links ethically?  In reviewing Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and reviewing what has worked for my clients in the past, I’ve come up with six ethical methods to generate inbound links.

These include:

• Create quality content that is useful and interesting. If the content of a web page is high-quality, other sites will reference it and link to it!
• Submit your law firm website to industry related directories and public directories such as the Open Directory Project and & Yahoo (yes, Google says submit to Yahoo!)  There are thousands of free website directories with legal and practice area specific categories. Most web directories provide a link back to your website.
• Article Writing & Syndication.   By contributing to the blogosphere with interesting and knowledgeable articles, you can generate links into your website as part of a biography or a summary.   Articles can be syndicated or shared on the Internet for others to use in newsletters, blogs, etc.
• Press Release Distribution.   If your law firm has a noteworthy case, addition to the firm, new office or any other announcement, you can distribute a press release through an online press release distribution service.  Most online press release distribution services will include a link to your website in the “About” section or will even allow a link within the context of the press release.
• Online Social Network Profiles. Many lawyers have profiles on social networking websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Myspace.   Link to your website!   This might seem a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many folks don’t do it!
• Blog.   Include links to your website in your blog where relevant.

Note: When conducting link building, remember that it’s not only the number of links that point to your website, but also the quality and relevance of the pages that link to your site. Also terminology or the link text used to link to the page, can drive the relevance of the link.

Caution: While these are all great ways to generate links to your website, I caution against overdoing it!   Too many links, too fast might raise flags with the search engines.

I’d be interested in hearing your ideas for generating inbound links.  Please share your comments below!