Increase Link Popularity For Your Law Firm: 8 Tips

A majority of marketers today rank link building as being a difficult or very difficult search engine optimization task. How can your law firm improve link popularity numbers without running into problems with Google? How can you increase link popularity in a way that will make sure that you're getting closer to the front page of search results every day? Here we'll learn 8 ways to improve link popularity that work without “black hat” techniques.

#1: Improve Link Popularity With Quality, Not Quantity

If you learned how to increase link popularity in the early part of the 21st century and haven't brushed up since, you may need to start relearning some things. Today, quality matters much more than just how many links you have. If you want to improve link popularity for your website, you'll need to focus on getting links from websites with high amounts of traffic and high levels of authority.

Google will increase link popularity for a website more when it receives links from pages with a high Google PageRank. This is because these websites are viewed as being more likely to be authoritative. Similarly, because they are perceived as more difficult to get, inbound links coming from .edu top level domains will improve link popularity more than a similar link coming from a .com address with equivalent PageRank.

#2: Increase Link Popularity By Monitoring the Competition

If you're not sure where your strategy to improve link popularity could use improvement, use your competitors to get your next ideas. Use a link popularity checker tool to find out what kind of links your competition is building, and then use those results to find your own link sources. Whenever you find a website that your competitors are using to increase link popularity, you can work to get a link built in that website as well.

Consistent monitoring of your competitors can generate valuable intelligence about their strategies to increase link popularity. Don't be too beholden to their results: remember that you should also strive to improve link popularity in ways that your competition hasn't yet figured out, so that you can more easily defeat them in the search rankings.

#3: Improve Link Popularity Organically and Contextually

Google has recently started paying more attention to whether a website is working to really improve the quality of its results or just the quantity. Because of new, stricter scrutiny that Google is applying to websites' inbound links, you should try to make sure that many of your links are contextually based. When you improve link popularity with contextual links, each of your links will grant you more link juice than if they had come from a website with very little in common with yours.

The best way, bar none, to increase link popularity is to have other people post your content and provide inbound links organically. This means that people are posting links to your website without being asked or prompted to. However, it can be difficult to improve link popularity in this way. If you can't, try to at least make it look like your links have been naturally built rather than artificially.

#4: Increase Link Popularity Slowly For Best Results

A sudden spike in the number of links to your website won't lead to a meteoric rise and thousands of new hits. Instead, it's likely to set you back, because Google will penalize websites that are seen to improve link popularity too quickly. If you're in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines, it may not happen today or tomorrow but you will be found out—and it can be absolutely devastating to search rankings when you are.

Start with three or four links per day at most when you start to improve link popularity. If you increase link popularity more rapidly in a month or two, this won't look nearly as suspicious as if your link building had happened all at once.

#5: Monitor Your Google PageRank To Check Your Progress

You should consistently check your PageRank to see if your efforts to improve link popularity have translated into a direct result for your website. If you're seeing your PageRank number slowly increase, you're probably in very good shape for the future. Keep in mind that because PageRank is a logarithmic scale, even if you are an amazing web marketer, it's very unlikely that your website will ever become a site with PageRank 8 or 9.

#6: Use Analytics to Increase Link Popularity Efficiently

If you're just shotgunning your approaches, you may not know which method for improving link popularity is actually working best. You should instead try a single method to increase link popularity at a time, and see how it works using analytics tools. If you find that a particular method is ineffective, you can improve link popularity using a different method and then use analytics again for a side by side comparison.

#7: Improve Link Popularity With One Way Links

If you're using too many links that are reciprocal (that is to say, two way between sites), Google will assume that you have just been trading links. It's fine to have some casual reciprocity, just don't make it the entire focus of your campaign to increase link popularity. It's easy enough to build one way links today that you shouldn't have any trouble finding sources. Reciprocal linking should only account for a small percentage of your overall links.

If you're not able to get enough one way links using conventional means, you may consider using an automated one way linking service. However, this is usually a bad way to increase link popularity. When you improve link popularity with one of these services, you're automating the link building process in a way that Google disapproves of. If you're caught, you can expect to face stiff penalties in the rankings or even see your website de-listed from Google searches—the search engine optimization equivalent of the death penalty.