Introduction to Lawyer Search Engine Optimization

10/1/09

by Proloy Bhatta

Far too often, Search Engine Optimization gets confused with Search Engine Manipulation. What I mean by that is the fact that many SEO engineers try to take advantage of the latest SEO techniques and manipulate their rankings higher.

Linking Manipulations

Once it was known that Google valued backlinks, many SEO engineers put their focus on generating two way backlinks. Google devalued two way linking once they got a hold of this but then the engineers went into a three way linking scheme.

Website A links to B which links to C which links back to A. This three-way scheme may ensure that all three websites each have a one-way link but Google got a wind of this strategy and has since punished its use.

The search engines can easily find and negate three-way linking. If there are any two websites where one's outgoing links tend to mirror the incoming links of another website, it is not hard to deduce that these two websites are involved in some kind of a manipulative three way linking scheme. Extrapolate this further and it is not hard to find a four way or even a five way linking scheme.

Manipulation may get you the high rankings in the short term but it is devastating to your business in the long term. Three way linking is a perfect example.

Newly Created Websites

When you have a newly created website and want to get incoming links, you have several avenues with which to acquire them.

1. Link Building
2. Article Release
3. Press Release
4. Directory Submission

Link Building

I do not recommend any link building strategy for a new website. New websites come and go faster than cars on a highway. Attaining 100 links in a link building campaign your first two months of existence does not make sense. The moment your website stops generating those 100 links per month, your websites higher rankings would take a hit.

Think about it. How likely is it for a valid website to generate 100 links in their first two months of existence but then generate just 10 in the next twelve months. Not likely. Not unless it was manipulated. Instead of being penalized, you would most likely not be given any credit for those links you worked so hard to generate.

The reason we do not believe that a website would be penalized for other websites linking to you is because if that were the case, then we could all purposely manipulate the engines so that our competitors were penalized.

Article Releases

Releasing articles is a fantastic opportunity for your business to write articles and get it featured on a high traffic article website. Many of the good SEO engineers feel that you would be wasting your time by writing an article for ANOTHER website when you could, instead, write one for your own site.

But depending on the site, article websites can get a lot of traffic. The traffic that they get can easily be filtered back to you by a simple link. The SEO benefit that a website gets from having article links do not carry the same weight as they used to. Nowadays, many companies can easily hire a writer in India or the Philippines to pump out hundreds of articles and point links to their own website. Does it make a website any better than its competition when it has a hundred links pointing back to him from an article website -- likely not. But at least some exposure here puts you above the competition.

Most lawyers will create a fancy website but will do nothing in the way of SEO. Having one link alone would set you apart from your competition.

Press Releases

These PR related sites do not tend to have much in the way of link juice. Google has stated that they do not value the links that come from press release sites. It makes sense. If you have something important to say, say it in a PR but do not expect to get mounds of links because of it.

But here is one caveat. Many websites will reproduce your articles from PR websites.

Many of these websites are article feeder sites that just bump content from all over the Internet to populate an auto generated website. Chances are those links are worthless.

But if you really did have something interesting to say, it may get picked up by some legitimate and popular bloggers. And depending on how great a release you have, it may go viral. I have had PRs that were picked up by some major news outlets.

Directory Submission

How many times have you gone to a website only to see it full of ads and have no content? We tend to get these websites when we incorrectly enter in a URL to our browser but also by doing searches.

Or how many times have you gone to a website full of text, no usability whatsoever?

Google wants to ensure that the results you get do not fall into those messes. So having your website included in a major directory is always a great option. By being included in a directory, you ensure that your website was visited and crawled by a human person. And that alone gives your website an edge over your competition.

PR sites will focus on the PR release itself. Article submission sites are very lax about what you are allowed to link to. And just because you were able to link build with some random people on the Internet does not guarantee that your website was really critiqued. If authoritative, directories are the only way.

Shamelessly joining hundreds of directories would be a waste of time, effort, and money but inclusion in a couple of important directories is always a good thing.

As we said before, all you get with a directory submission is human credibility. Do not for a minute think that you should go out and try to achieve one-hundred directory links. Because if you are accepted into one thousand directories, your website does not prove to the search engines you have any more human credibility than if you had just one link from one authoritative directory.

Of course, additional links from additional directories may give your website better link juice but this should be done in a slow and gradual way.

About Seach Engines and Optimization

The search engines are not people. They are machines. They go out to find signs that you are a credible website and one such way to determine this is by looking at factors that suggest you are credible.

So my first goal with all of my clients has always been to establish credibility with the search engines in as honest a way as possible. I may not get the results as fast as "Manipulators" but I'll achieve long lasting positive results through "Optimization".