Contextual Backlinks: The Best Backlinks on the Web

If you're working on internet marketing for your law firm, you may need contextual homepage backlinks that help to give your website more authority in Google's search rankings. Contextual backlinks are one of the best ways to make sure that your rankings rise steadily, and have many advantages over non-contextual links. In this guide, you'll learn about your options for building contextual homepage backlinks, including organic link building techniques and hiring a contextual backlink service. Keep reading to find out what strategy your law firm should employ for 2013 while building contextual backlinks in 2012.

What Makes a Backlink Contextual?

Simply put, there are two types of backlinks: contextual backlinks and non-contextual. In a non-contextual backlink, a link goes from another website to your website, but the website the backlink is on doesn't need to have much relation—if any—to your practice or even your location. For example, let's say your law firm purchased a large number of non contextual homepage backlinks. These backlinks might appear on websites advertising products ranging from prescription drugs to work from home opportunities.

Contextual backlinks, on the other hand, rely on the context of a website. When you build contextual homepage backlinks, they'll come from websites that discuss some of the same topics as your site and use some of the same keywords. A contextual backlink service is a service that exclusively works on getting these types of backlinks for law firms or other companies.

Why Are Contextual Backlinks Best?

In the internet search world, contextual homepage backlinks are king. Whether they're built by a contextual backlink service or organically grown, contextual backlinks make the web make more sense than a non-contextual link would. When websites about similar topics are linked together via contextual homepage backlinks, it makes information more available to consumers. Non-contextual backlinks, on the other hand, are much like email spam: website visitors didn't ask for them, and odds are, they never wanted them.

Contextual backlinks also help you to build more than your SERPs. While your search engine rankings are important, it's also much more likely that someone will actually use contextual homepage backlinks to visit your website. This is one of the biggest advantages of these links, whether you're getting them from a contextual backlink service or doing it yourself. If you're using exclusively non contextual backlinks, you'll probably never (or at least, very rarely) see actual web traffic coming in from all of those backlinks you purchased.

Should I Use a Contextual Backlink Service?

There are advantages and disadvantages to getting your contextual homepage backlinks through a contextual backlink service. On one hand, you'll get your contextual backlinks more quickly, helping you to build your rankings faster. You'll also have the freedom to do other marketing tasks instead of painstakingly building individual contextual homepage backlinks.

However, giving up that control can make it so that your contextual backlinks aren't as high quality as you would like. You'll want to make sure that your contextual backlink service makes only high quality links before using them. It's also more expensive to use even the cheapest contextual backlink service than it is to just build backlinks organically, because most organically built contextual homepage backlinks are completely free.

Do Contextual Backlinks Work Right Away?

Whether you make them yourself or have a contextual backlink service make them for you, you can't expect for your contextual homepage backlinks to work immediately. This is because before they can have any impact at all on your Google SERPs, they will need to be indexed by the search engine. Sometimes, the process of indexing can take days, weeks, or even months depending on how deeply embedded in a website your contextual homepage backlinks are.

In some cases, your contextual backlink service will “tier” your backlinks, linking to your already existing contextual backlinks. This can help them to be indexed more quickly. If you're not using a contextual backlink service, some pieces of software also claim to do this kind of tiering automatically. However, use caution: not all users of these pieces of software have reported positive results, and your mileage may vary.

Does Google Penguin Punish Contextual Backlinks?

One of the biggest questions many internet marketers have about any method of building links is whether it's Google Penguin safe. In most situations, a contextual backlink service will guarantee that their links are Penguin proof (and if they won't, you should find a different service to provide your contextual homepage backlinks).

As long as you're building quality links, it's very unlikely that Google will punish you for any contextual backlinks. After all, these are the kinds of links that tend to make the web better, by making it easier to move from one piece of information to other relevant websites. Any contextual backlink service should be able to help you understand how your links are relevant and why they won't trip any red flags for over optimization when Google indexes them.

How Many Contextual Backlinks Should I Build?

When you start to work on building contextual homepage backlinks, don't go too crazy all at once. If you build too many links in very short succession, it's very likely that Google will believe your website is over optimized and may take action against it in the search rankings accordingly. Ideally, your backlink presence should be just a step or two beyond your real web presence—one of the main metrics that Google looks at is how many backlinks you have compared to your overall website traffic.

Consider starting by just making one or two new contextual backlinks per day at first, then working your way up to three to five per day. This is an easy pace that you can easily continue on for the indefinite future. What's more, if you're only making a few backlinks a day, you can make sure that they are the highest quality backlinks possible. This ensures that your strategies will continue to be effective long into the future, not just until the next search update changes how Google looks at your links.