There are all sorts of ways you can build links to your legal website or blog, however some of them are ethical and some of them are clearly not. As a legal firm, your highest priority must be to ensure that your link building—along with everything else connected to your website or blog—are absolutely ethical and professional. Anything but ethical behavior regarding your Internet presence can quickly lose your firm the credibility it’s worked so hard to obtain. Have you ever wondered how, once your site, along with every other competing legal website has been optimized online, the search engines determine whose site has the most authority, therefore should receive a higher rank? The answer is really pretty simple: inbound links. It’s just not enough anymore to write content, no matter how great it is. You, as the attorney, must always ask yourself whether any particular instance is a great link opportunity just waiting to happen. There are several different methods for link building which are ethical and not too difficult to boot.
Legal Blog Comments
Hopefully your law firm has jumped wholeheartedly onto the legal blog bandwagon. Legal blogs are an excellent way to increase traffic to your firm’s website, as well as a great way to provide information and education to prospective clients. If your firm has its own legal blog, then you are likely reading other legal blogs from your competitors. While there, making comments can offer an opportunity to build links to your own site, as well as helping you become well-known for your particular niche. Indirectly this can bring more visitors to your own legal website, readers to your legal blog, and more links from all the people who like your site or blog.
Search-Oriented Link Building
Newer websites will most often carry little weight with the search engines when you are talking about link building, so it’s a good idea to prioritize and focus your precious time and energy first on your older sites. Keeping your older sites fully optimized ensures the traffic keeps rolling in, then you can slowly begin to work on newer sites as you have the time. Many SEO experts believe that links from .edu and .gov domains tend to be much more valued by search engines. Think hard about how you can get a link to a school or university. Natural links are always the best—if people are linking to your legal website because your content is stellar, that’s a very good sign, and one that search engines will sit up and take notice of. While paid links have their place, they can also get you penalized for spam, so make sure you are fully cognizant of which paid links are good, and which are not.
Article Marketing and Directory Submissions
A method which has recently become popular is to write a short article regarding the topic you are trying to promote, then publish it on a major article directory site. Those who are actively seeking content for their sites download the articles they like, publish them to their own website, and give you a link in return—simple, yet effective. Before article marketing became popular, the best link-building method was through directories, yet plenty of these directories became nothing more than link farms and took a sharp nosedive. There are still directories on the Internet which are credible and could be worth submitting to, just make sure you differentiate the credible from the not-so-credible.
Press Releases or Guest Posting
If you need to generate lots of high-quality links in a short space of time, try writing a press release, then publishing it through one of the sites which typically handles press release distribution. You will effectively gain a link from every site which publishes your press release. Guest posting is similar to article marketing, in that you create specific content, then offer it up to another website or blog in your legal niche, and ask the owner to publish it—effective and a great way to build your own profile.
As you are well-aware, the legal industry is an extremely competitive one; effective yet ethical link building requires you to understand how to deliver your results online month after month, remaining high in the search engine rankings without compromising your quality or professionalism. With a little practice, link building can be done successfully—yet ethically, allowing your law firm to greatly increase their legal website building.
