Attorney Marketing News

Posts Tagged ‘Link Development’

Part One:  Submit an Entry

About About.com

About.com is owned by The New York Times.  The entire site boasts more than 14 million page views per month.  The domain has more than 750 subdomains called “Guide Sites” which are run by an individual “Guides.”

Guides apply for their positions and if their application is accepted they enter into a 3-week intensive training program called “prep.”  During prep Guide candidates compete against other candidates.  Guides who successfully complete prep are then given their own subdomain for their industry or topic and are compensated based on the sites’ performance.

About Guides

Guides often link to other Guides as well as to outside sources (when critical to their articles.)  However, each Guide Site is completely independent and Guides focus on building their own unique sites.  Guides have editors and standards they must adhere to, however, they often have a wide berth when it comes to deciding what to write about and who to interview, and who to accept guest articles from.

About.com Guides are generally open to publishing contributing articles or granting interviews with industry professionals.  Many Guides also use a variety of social media to promote their sites and each Guide produces at least one weekly newsletter (some published multiple times each week.)

Some of the page-view building tools About.com Guides use to generate their own site traffic can also help you building your own.

How to Get Inbound Links From About.com

Getting an in-bound link from About.com is no longer a difficult thing to do if you know how.  Here are tips on how to get high-quality inbound links from About.com:

Visit the main website at www.About.com and use their navigation tools or site search to find a Guide Site related to your industry.  Be creative:  for example, attorneys in business intellectual property may consider contacting the Patent and Inventions Guide Site owner, but should consider all business Guide Sites as potential in-bound link producers because all business owners may be interested in copyright laws, trademark laws, etc.

Be sure to “work” Guide Sites that published articles with keywords or topics that relate to your industry, but again, be creative and think outside the box.  For example, About.com has a site about law school.  Although the site is geared towards the interests of law students, the entire site is rich with legal keywords.  Start commenting on posts to encourage law students, answer their questions, or share your law school experiences.

Submit an Entry – Free Link Gold

Guides often ask users to contribute something.  They may ask for comments on blog posts, in their forums, or through special submission forms.  Read Guide Sites and search for a call-to-action from readers. Since most calls to actions contain the phrase “Submit an Entry” go to the main About.com site (or one if its channels) and search for “Submit an Entry.”

You can also fine tune searches like “Submit an Entry law” or “Submit an Entry business.”

You will get a list of Guides soliciting for contributions from readers – and many will allow you to include a link to your website.  Here are just a few places you can submit an entry and build an instant link to your website:

• Submit an Entry: Entertainment Lawyer List
• Submit an Entry: Tell Us About Your Legal Blog
• Submit an Entry: Share Your Business Video and Start Going Viral!
• Submit an Entry: My Business Card

We are really big on do-it-yourself link building for attorneys. Why?  Because paid link development services are often not worth the money you pay.  We want you to think about content first – great content is worth organically linking to.

Spam Link Development = Wasted Money and Ruined Reputation. Each day on our tiny little blog we receive between 200 and 500 comment posts from link development spammers.  How many do we approved?  Zero, zip, nada.

Junk links from spammers are easy to spot and even the puniest of spam filters catch them – and are deleted. Any company that promises you dozens of inbound links per week – or even per month, is almost certainly a link development spammer.

Using the wrong link development company makes YOU look bad when they finally do get trashy posts like “Great blog my friends and I were sitting around just talking about this now.  I’ll be back!” with your law firms’ name associated with it.

We also want you to think about social networking as a way to build links on your own. Why?  Every thing on the internet from dancing babies to car commercials that has gone viral has done so via viral marketing or because something was so cool people just had to share on their own – not though link building.

Before you spend thousands on attorney link development, take a few minutes to get trusted and valued links on your own.

Here are four websites where you can get inbound links on your own that Google definitely counts (how can we be so sure?  We use these sites routinely):

• AskingLaw.com – Answer legal questions.
• About.com: Entertainment Lawyer List
• About.com: Tell Us About Your Legal Blog
• Post a Comment on LA Wolfe Web Marketing Blog (blog is 100% moderated – if your site and email are legit “no follow” is removed.)

Related Articles:  Attorney Link Development: How to Get High-Quality Inbound Links from About.com

How to Claim Your AboutUs.org Page and Get an Inbound Link

Many “geeks” (like me) spend a lot of time researching domains on whois.sc.  While you probably never head of whois.sc, are not interested in trace routes and domain history tools, you should know that you can use this website to get inbound links and promote your business or law firm on public lists that search engines do pick up.

It is important to note that even if you do not claim your About Us page, they may still create one for you with the wrong information.

• Go to www.whois.sc
• Enter in your domain name (i.e. www.mydomain.com) to pull up information about your website (or any other website you are interested in learning about.)
• Click on “Site Profile”
• Click on “About Us”
• Add your profile.  Instant link.

Want More Link Juice from AboutUs.org?

Fully exploit the features on About Us adding your own tags (once added click on them to go to lists for those tags and enter in your business or law firm.)  You can also add information to the Wiki page that contains links.

Link Outsourcing – A Great Way to Give Your Law Firm a Bad Reputation

If you allow your SEM company to “market” your law firm by outsourcing link development your good name can be ruined. Some companies hire cheap labor pools that create fake email names and simply spam forums and social sites with cheap one-line ads about your law firm to try and get you inbound links. Others do the majority of their “marketing” by publishing (and republishing) poorly written articles [FindLaw Content Writing Complaints] on websites they control and free vanity self-publishing websites.

Does your contract state:

FindLaw will submit Subscriber’s website listing to third-party sites including web directories and social bookmarks which may allow bloggers and others to comment positively or negatively about Subscriber’s firm or attorneys. Subscriber consents to such submissions and understands that FindLaw does not control these sites and will not be able to remove comments or listings once they have been published.

The above allows total control over how and where your website will be marketed.  If you feel you can trust your SEM company, great.  But I would ask for a list of who will be getting the links, how they will be doing it, and a list of sites the links will come from.

Read the fine print on any contract you sign with an attorney marketing company – especially if you are purchasing attorney website marketing services that include link development. If you are not careful, you could be signing away your rights to control how and where your site is marketed and your rights to restitution if your reputation is damaged by spam tactics used to get inferior inbound links.

Were you promised these attorney marketing services in your contract?

• Directory Submissions
• Content Development and Syndication
• Other exposure, at West’s discretion, intended to increase traffic performance.

Before you get excited about all the above marketing possibilities, read the disclaimer in the contract:

Disclaimer: Note that if you are participating on one or more of the following activities, you may not receive optimal results from your FirmSite Visibility Premium package: multiple websites (hosted at FindLaw or outside of FindLaw), Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, black listed website with Google or other Search Engines.

An increasing number of attorneys have more than one domain name (Google “Bisnar Chase” and see how many domains they own.)  Posting on your own blog would count as “participating,” and so could having a linked-in account, or engaging in some sort of online networking (and sometimes even social networks.) “Participating” in any of these things could technically be used as an excuse why the lawyer marketing services you paid for did not produce results.

Oversubmitting to directories is also a bad idea. Your law firms’ website should only be submitted to carefully chosen directories that specifically relate to lawyers and most of these sites charge for inclusion.

Content syndication is also a potential area of wasted money. Be sure to ask where these articles are being submitted and ask to review all articles prior to their publication.  FindLaw recently has been getting a lot of bad PR from attorneys for creating artificial blog sites and submitting content on behalf of attorneys that contained inaccurate information about the law.

Check Your Inbound Links

Check the inbound links you are getting from anyone doing your link development for you.  Checking links can be time consuming and a little difficult for laypeople so ask your SEO company for a list of the links to your website. If links are coming from websites and blogs owned or controlled by your SEO company consider this:  anyone can give you a link to their own site.  And links via vanity submission sites you are not getting what you paid for – you could submit your own articles for free to these same sites (but we do not recommend it because they are low value.)  Finally, if  link developers getting links for you are from a far away land with ISP addresses in Thailand, Indian, and other places Google knows these posters are not really interested in your U.S. law practice and can catch on that you are artificially building links.

Google is smart enough to spot paid link development schemes and specifically cautions you not to do it or risk penalties:

Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results. Examples of link schemes can include:

• Links intended to manipulate PageRank
• Links to web spammers or bad neighborhoods on the web
• Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)
• Buying or selling links that pass PageRank

The bottom line is this: before you sign on for services, understand what you are buying and what bad link development could really cost you — your reputation.

Someone has just emailed you telling you that they have added a link to your website from theirs; now they want you to link back. Should you?

Any link someone else sets up for you on their website and then emails you to tell you they added the link, is a website you do not want to link back to.

An easy way to spot a a link building scheme is that your “gifted” inbound link will be deleted in X days unless you link back. Clearly, the  website owner contacting you is not trying to build quality, related links – they are trying to extort other site owners into linking back to them.

Reciprocal Inbound Link Development Scams shows an example email from a link scammer, Google guidelines for link development, and the two best practices for getting inbound links that remain the gold standard for serious websites owners.