Link Building 101

I was working with a client this week to explain links and link building. I thought this ended up being a simple but effective link building explanation for a law firm.

Link building builds votes and endorsements for your site. When we build links, we contact other websites to gain links back to your website. Sometimes this is accomplished by making comments to law related content on other websites, sometimes by offering content to other websites in exchange for links back, other times it is creating and posting content among properties we own to build conversations about your services.

An example in the non-internet world would be: When we are looking for a good attorney we look in the phone book, we look at billboard, commercials, and we ask people their opinion. From that research, the attorney that appears most relevant to our needs is the one that goes to the top of our list. These are the attorneys we are going to call.

In the internet world, better relevancy to the searchers search query means higher ranking on the search page.

One of the ways that search engines determine the relevancy of a web page is through link analysis. The search engine examines other sites that link to your site,  the text of the link , the content of both your page and the site linking to your site, and they look at other sites linking to the one linking to yours; all to determine relevancy. So the site with many relevant links that meet the criteria the search engine determines is best for high ranking will show up higher in the search results.The best site or the best attorney is not the one that ends up on the top of the search listing page; it’s the one with the site that is best structured and the one that has the best links. If someone is searching Farmville Attorney, it’s important that your site has links pointing to it from relevant sites that talk about attorneys, law, etc. The reality is that not very many people are going to link to an attorney site so we have to encourage other sites to naturally linked to your site from their sites. That is where a link builder comes in. We ask other sites to link to yours. By creating good articles, blog posts, etc. that can be leveraged to other sites that need content; we can exchange content for a link. Because they are so vital to high rankings, links have become a form of currency on the internet. There are many other tasks a link builder performs including writing and distributing press releases, researching viable sites to ask for links, creating “link bait” which can cause viral linking, placing blog posts with correct and appropriate links, searching for useable and legitimate local and regional directories that will link back. The list is longer than this, but you should ge the picture. If you don’t, email me, or give me a call, to discuss.