Getting the Best SEO Page Ranking for Your Law Firm

If you're at all invested in getting new clients through search, you need to work on your SEO page rank. Studies show that today's internet users will only click through to the second page of search results one time in every ten. This means that you need your SEO page ranking to be on the front page for as many high value and niche keywords as possible. Actually bringing up your SEO page rank has gotten harder and harder, as Google has cracked down on some of the easiest ways of bringing web pages into the front page of search results fast. In this guide, you'll learn how SEO page ranking is determined and how you can bring your search engine rankings up as fast as possible without making anyone at Google suspect you of artificial link building.

What is an SEO Page Rank?

The term “page rank” can refer to many different things. In this guide, we'll use SEO page ranking to refer to the actual ranking that your web pages are able to achieve in search results. In some cases, you may see SEO page rank used to refer to Google's PageRank system. When this is the case, the P and R in Page Rank will usually be capitalized.

The SEO page ranking of your website depends on many different factors. One of those factors, which used to be much more important but has gradually lost much of its relevance as time has gone on, is keyword density. Typically you will want for your web copy to have a keyword density of between .5% and 1.5% in order to maximize your SEO page rank for that keyword.

More important than keyword density to SEO page ranking today is the number and quality of your inbound links. Every inbound link made to your web page will give a small amount of its “link juice” to that page, and the page in turn can pass about 85 percent of that link juice on to other web pages on your site.

How Is My SEO Page Ranking Calculated?

It would be great if this was the spot in the guide where we could give you a handy SEO page rank formula, complete with several variables and coefficients, so that you could maximize your SEO page ranking in a mathematically rigorous way. Unfortunately, that's not possible—the details of the Google algorithms that create SEO page rank are incredibly secret, and the only thing that Google is willing to say on the subject is that over 500 million variables go into ranking results for every search.

That's not the kind of calculation you can do on the back of a napkin! So if we can't figure out exactly how to optimize websites automatically, how do we know what makes SEO page ranking go up? Studies have shown that the most important factor today for building SEO page rank is inbound linking, but we now also know that with too many low-value or low-quality links, your website can actually be penalized and accused of trying to game the rankings.

Many of the 500 million variables in Google's SEO page ranking calculations are actually built in because of scammers, spammers, and just plain unethical webmasters. In their drive to get to the top SEO page rank for a keyword, many of these people will build links artificially, using programs that spam comments with inbound links to their website on hundreds or thousands of blogs at once.

Whenever Google notices that people are artificially manipulating their SEO page ranking numbers, they make attempts to update their algorithm to ensure that these tactics don't work in the long term. In 2011 and 2012, up to 15 percent of web pages were affected negatively by algorithm updates that were designed to reduce the incidence of artificial links and encourage webmasters to work on more natural linking patterns.

Use Caution When Improving Your SEO Page Rank

One of the other things that Google has noticed about websites that are building their SEO page ranking artificially is that their inbound link numbers stay steady for a while, then spike up, then go back to not increasing much or at all. If your links are gained in a pattern like this, it probably won't be long before Google penalizes you and reduces your SEO page rank.

How do you avoid falling prey to this telltale sign? Simple. Make sure that you're having links built every day—not just one or two days a week, or every weekday. Every day, steady link building is a good sign to Google that your SEO page ranking is following a natural pattern. Slowly raise the number of links that you build in a single day, and you'll have a winning pattern within weeks or months.

Using Social Media To Improve SEO Page Rank

Social networks are the single best way to make your SEO page ranking rise in a completely organic way. By posting a link to one of your web pages (perhaps a blog entry or a new video about a legal topic that might be of interest to your social network connections), you give yourself one new inbound link. But what happens to that link after?

In many cases, you'll find that the people you're connected with in social networks will actually share the link for you, adding additional inbound links. In some cases, people may add an inbound link to your site to their blog or other social media page if they're particularly interested in what you have to say, which makes it so that their social networking connections can also see and share your link.

As you get better at social media, you'll start learning what kinds of posts tend to generate the most links and therefore the biggest gains for your SEO page rank. If you don't see your SEO page ranking improving after a concerted social media effort, you may want to bring in professional help to identify what is holding your search engine optimization project back.