Make sure your inbound and outbound links measure up

Link building is a crucial aspect of achieving and maintaining a strong online presence and high rankings on the search engines. Here, we will focus on the link building basic of measuring link value.

Ideally, you want your firm’s website to have a varied and natural link pattern, meaning you want the websites that are linking to you to be from a variety of sources. The same goes for the types of sites you link to from your law firm’s site. Building that pattern, unfortunately, is a difficult task to master.

Search engines use actual precise metrics to measure the value of each link, and even the best SEO specialists cannot determine the precise algorithm. However, there are several link building basics that can help you estimate link value:

1. Page Ranking – This is basically a system of algorithms that assigns a numerical value to web pages. The higher the ranking, the better. To figure out the value a search engine gives a certain page, try doing a search of some keywords and phrases that certain pages target.
2. Google PageRank – This is the system of ranking created by Larry Page of Google and is definitely a link building basic “must.” The numerical value determines the page’s importance and relevance. Your firm’s site will want to link to pages with a high PageRank.
3. Google Blog Search – Here is another important tool created by Google that measures accurate backlink information (consider it going behind the scenes). You can learn a lot from seeing which sites and pages have earned respect in the blogosphere.
4. SEOmoz mozRank – Basically, this tool ranks how popular a web page is in relation to others. The more links to a page, the more popular it will become.

Spend a few more minutes here on CaseDetails for an explanation of link building in general and how it fits into your overall online marketing campaign. When it comes to link building, just a few minutes of research followed by 15-30 minutes of application can help bring your law firm’s website higher on the search engines, and bring more clients your way.

Come back often to CaseDetails.com and learn more about link building, local directories and creating a site map.

Understanding how to build quality links to your website can help you get to the top

You have your firm’s site up and running, but now you need to know how to maximize its exposure on the web. Link building can help.

What is link building and how is it related to the success of your firm’s site? You’ve come to the right place.

A link building campaign is crucial to building popularity and gaining trust on the Internet.

Links are basically the connections between the different pages that search engines crawl (consider it a giant referral system). Getting a referral from an important and trusted source goes a long way, right? Likewise, links help determine popularity and respect based on how they are linked. A trustworthy site is usually linked to other trustworthy sites, while a spammy one is not.

Before truly comprehending what linking building is, you need to understand the link signals that search engines use. The following elements are used to measure link value and a site’s link profile:

• Global Popularity – This one is simple: the more popular and valuable your site, the more search engines value links from that site.
• Local & Topic-Specific Popularity – Links from sites related to your topic are more important to the engines than general or off-topic sites.
• Anchor Text – This one is important. Search engines place a heavy emphasis on anchor text quality. If many links point to a page and these links contain target keywords, the page is likely to rank well for the particular phrase(s) in that anchor text.
• TrustRank – Search engines have developed systems for calculating trust. In order for your firm to get a boost in the scoring system, you will want to earn links from highly respected sites.
• Link Neighborhood – It is also important to monitor the sites your firm links to. Choose these as carefully as you choose the ones you earn links from. Creating connections between several respected sites – both inbound and outbound – will increase your chances of scoring well.

Link building is a difficult art to master. Now that you have figured out what link building is, continue to check back for more information on taking it a step further. Learn more about how to fix broken links, link building opportunities on social media sites and how to measure link value. Check out the SEO in 30 Days series to find out other ways of optimizing your website.