Internet Marketing for Attorneys: How to Give Google What It Loves, Part 1 of 2
Google loves inbound links!
An inbound link is where one website links to another website. You see this all the time on news websites where they link to a video, a blog post, a resource, or a story on another website. Google measures and weighs inbound links as a sign of your website's relevance and credibility. In general, the more inbound links your website has, and the better they are, the more your website will rank above your competitors.
Today and tomorrow, I'm going to explain how link building works and some of the major variables that affect link building strategies and how links directly impact your search engine rankings for specific key terms.
Major adjustments in Google’s algorithm. Several times each year Google comes out with major updates to it's algorithm that can significantly change your ranking for better or worse. If you read a few of the SEO experts they will blog about this each time, but behind the scenes they are often scrambling to figure out precisely how Google changed their algorithm and how they can “rig the system” in their client’s favor. This is an ongoing game of cat and mouse best left to the professionals.
Minor tweaks in Google’s search engine. In addition to the major changes that SEO experts track, Google makes dozens of little tweaks each month. For example, they just made a modification that Matt Cutts, one of Google’s major SEO engineers, recently talked about on his blog that affects less than 2% of websites out there (www.mattcutts.com/blog).
How long it takes for Google to actually find an inbound link. Believe it or not, it is accepted knowledge in the SEO community that Google regularly “lies” to us about the actual number of inbound links it has found to your website. If you go to Google and search for <link:yourwebsite.com> (without the <>, for example <link:therainmakerblog.com>) you will see how many inbound links Google officially tells you it has found for your website. However, they will not tell you the true number. You will never know exactly how many inbound links they have really found because if they told you and your competitors the exact number, it would simply become a ‘race to the top’ to artificially inflate the number, which Google doesn't want.
When you get an inbound link from a smaller website like your law school buddy who runs a solo practice in Boise, Idaho, Google sometimes takes weeks or even months to officially recognize that inbound link even exists. A little over five months ago, five of my clients and I started working with a top-notch link building expert. The practice areas represented in the group are bankruptcy, family law, criminal defense, personal injury and DUI—all of which are highly competitive. Because we selected the right professional (he's also an attorney) who only uses acceptable practices, we are all experiencing some massive positive results! All of our websites are now on the first page of Google for between 3 and 12 of our most coveted key terms!
One of my clients just decided to add his other website which focuses on immigration law because as he told me, “Stephen, I've been paying several hundred dollars per month for over 3 years to a supposed SEO expert who was supposed to be getting my immigration website to the top of Google. In five months this guy has achieved more results faster in a more competitive practice area than my SEO guy has in the last 3 years!” It's not cheap, but well worth it if you want to generate more leads from the Internet.
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Thursday, March 17, 2011
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