Anchor text references the words which make up a link on your law firm’s website—for example if you have the sentence “If you have been in a car accident, call a personal injury attorney,” the words “personal injury attorney” are your anchor text which links back to your legal website and the name of your firm. Anchor text is used when you want your website to rank for a specific keyword, however it’s easy to go overboard with anchor text when optimizing your law firm’s website; too much and you will end up accomplishing the exact opposite of what you intended, as Google will penalize your site. When you are clear on which keyword you want to target, and are getting links on your website with the desired keyword, that’s all well and good, but you must be careful about having too many links which look exactly the same. If 99% of the links which point to your law firm’s website pages are “personal injury attorney,” a red flag goes up to Google that these may not be “normal” links. Because people have exploited anchor text in the past, everyone must now be more careful about how they use it.
Build Your Legal Website’s Links for Branding and Alternative Keyword Phrases
Your goal is to build links to your business/brand name so the brand becomes much more authoritative in Google’s search results. This goes back to Google Instant results in that if someone only “sort of” remembers the name of your law firm and begins typing in hopeful letters in the search bar, you really want your name to pop up under Richardson Law Firm once the potential client has typed in “Ric.” On the flip side, if your potential client is not really sure of what they are looking for, Google’s suggestions may send them off in a direction that is, unfortunately, not toward your law firm. Make a list of the keywords your legal website uses, then start typing each one of them into Google’s search bar and see what suggestions come up. This little exercise may send you in another direction when you are considering anchor text. Other major search engines–such as Bing–offer keyword alternatives, so take advantage of that when considering alternative keywords and anchor text.
Why Anchor Text is Important
It is actually possible to achieve top ranking for extremely competitive keywords even though you may have not even a hint of on-page legal SEO elements. Consider that Monster.com consistently sits in the number one spot when one types in “jobs” in the search bar but that the word “jobs” does not appear on the page in actual text form. By the same token, if you type in “computers” on the Google search bar, six of the top ten pages don’t even contain the word “computers” in the copy, meaning the search results are due solely to the anchor text of inbound links. Therefore it is impossible to say that anchor text is not important, but your firm needs to learn how to use it wisely when building links.
Using Anchor Text Wisely
Anchor text must be used judiciously when building your firm’s legal SEO as using the wrong words can take you even further away from the links you need. It is advisable to avoid using the anchor text “click here,” as the phrase is not specifically related to the content on your legal website—when the crawler examines the “click here” anchor text it may not see any relevant keyword even if that particular link points to a relevant part of your legal website. When considering legal SEO and your law firm’s web design, you should try to use as many keywords as possible from the list you developed during the planning process. Then determine what anchor text is absolutely essential to your firm’s site, and use only the most critically important.
Tags: law firms website, Legal SEO, legal website
