Advice for Legal Web Site Owners Looking to Build Out Their Links

Linking with reputable sites can win you points with the search engines, which highly prize viable networking achievements. However, if you’re careless about which sites you link to, you could run into trouble.

The Internet is awash with so-called “link farms” – shady services that offer to artificially inflate a site’s network in the hopes of fooling the search engines into thinking that the site is popular. While using link farms can actually yield some short-term gain, this process puts you at risk for getting de-listed by the search engines and thus ruining your online legal marketing efforts.

A better approach is to develop with great on site resources, including original content, answers to questions about your niche of the law, and biographical info and data/awards about your firm. With this foundation in place, other valid, high-ranking sites will likely want to link to YOU. Your cachet as a “high-value” site makes you appealing as a link to other high-value sites, which also want to climb the ranks. So by refocusing your efforts to improve site quality, you can coincidentally improve your likelihood of making important new online friends.

You can build content and links simultaneously – and in fact most successful owners do “walk and chew gum at the same time” – but remember that these two processes are linked. It all starts with unique, well-branded, well-developed source material.