As my colleague Laura so excellently pointed out in her post on the effects of Google’s Panda update, Google’s algorithm change has negatively affected the rankings of a great number of sites. No sites have been more affected by this than article submission sites.

In fact, many attorneys I know have been very gun-shy to submit any content to article submission sites recently. Leaving them with a glut of great content, and seemingly nowhere to put it.

Well I am here today to offer up a solution to this problem- Guest Blogging.

Blogs always need new quality content (believe me), and many of them accept content from guest bloggers or authors. The key is to find guest blogging opportunities on high-ranking, trusted sites on topics that align with your content.

But first thing first, how does one find guest blogging opportunities?

Fortunately, blogs are a great source for how to find guest blogging opportunities (go figure), and this is a topic that is touched on quite frequently. Basically,  you find guest blogging opportunities by searching for them. Or should I say, knowing HOW to search for them.

Here is a comprehensive list of ever search query you will ever need to find guest blogging opportunities:

• “KEYWORD” “guest bloggers”
• “KEYWORD” “guest bloggers wanted”
• “KEYWORD” “submit an article”
• “KEYWORD” “submit blog post”
• “KEYWORD” “submit guest post”
• “KEYWORD” “submit a guest post”
• “KEYWORD” “write for us”
• “KEYWORD” “become a guest writer”
• “KEYWORD” “become guest writer”
• “KEYWORD” “become a contributor”
• “KEYWORD” “add blog post”
• “KEYWORD” “send a guest post”
• “KEYWORD” “write for us”
• “KEYWORD” “become an author”
• “KEYWORD” “contribute to our site”
• “KEYWORD” “suggest a guest post”
• “KEYWORD” “(Write for our) guest column”

Your success in finding these opportunities will come from trying out the right combination of KEYWORD and search string. Start with the basics like LAWYER, ATTORNEY, or LEGAL PROFESSIONAL.

From there you can branch out into practice areas, or better yet, general topics that relate in your legal practice areas. As long as you are submitting quality content, many non-legal sites would love to accept your submissions, in fact, many lawyers are paid handsomely for this.

The goal is to have your content accepted by these sites, not to promote your legal services. If accepted, you will be able to provide a link to your attorney website in the author area. I promise you, with these queries, you will find no shortage of guest blogging opportunities.

Which brings me to my second (and perhaps more important) point.

You must, I repeat, you must vet the sites you are going to submit to before submitting any content.

Google (especially post-Panda Google) really looks down on duplicate content (perhaps a bit too much as Laura pointed out here), and will penalize any site with excessive content duplication. This can hurt you in two different ways.

Firstly, any site that accepts duplicate content will not be ranked highly by Google. So check out what content is listed, look for duplicates, and perform searches with the posted content to see if it appears elsewhere. If it does, do not submit content to that site.

Secondly, if you submit your quality content to a low value you site, you will not be able to submit that content to a more trusted, authorities site later on. See, a quality site will discover that your submitted content is already posted elsewhere, and reject your submission; this is called opportunity cost in the business world.

The next red flag to look for is the quality of content. The blogs you are looking to guest on should cover topics you know a lot about. So read through their other blog posts, and make sure the content is worth reading. If the content is crap, stay away!!

Also, make sure that all the content is related. Good blogs focus on very specific topics, or at the very least have a unifying theme.

While I spent a good portion of this post speaking to how to get approved for guest blogging, make sure that there IS an approval process. Avoid any blogs that appear to not carefully vet who posts on them.

With these queries, you should be able to find guest blogging opportunities in any field you wish.

It’s a post-Panda world and we’re all just living in it, or so the saying would go. But there is another saying, and this one is a little better known: “Life goes on.” So let your content run free.

So who do you hire to do so?

Here are a few options and our opinions on each:

1) Have a Paralegal or Junior Attorney in your office do it

You’re already paying them so why not give them another task?

This is the most popular decision when it comes to finding someone to perform routine link building tasks like directory submissions and article distribution, but what about training and research time? It takes a good amount of time and effort to get paralegals and assistants with no experience to know enough about the art of SEO and SEM, and even then are they qualified as experts who can do an effective enough job to increase your search engine rankings?

We’ve also noticed that this route leads to a high turnover rate, as most of the time assistants and paralegals either move on from their link building duties because they’d rather be more involved in the legal aspects of the firm (which is what they went to school for) or because the firm finally realizes that they aren’t Internet Marketing professionals after a few months.

2) Can your Traditional Marketing consultant(s) do this?

Most firms and small law offices have traditional marketing consultants that they go to for their “traditional” marketing needs, whether it be in-house or not. These people surely know enough about SEO and SEM to either do most of it themselves, right?

Well, that depends. From our experience, the marketing consultants are great for certain aspects of web marketing, like serving as contact people for online press releases, helping out with necessary social media tasks, and basically serving as the go-to person for the attorney(s) since they don’t really have the time, but from our experience the traditional marketers don’t know enough about SEO and SEM to create and maintain an effective link building campaign. There are some exceptions, of course, but from our experience the traditional marketers make better project managers who can measure the level of effectiveness of an SEO/SEM campaign than actual “do’ers”.

3) Hire A Freelance SEO/SEM consultant

This is another very popular decision when it comes to finding someone to build links to your website. You can find hundreds of people on Craigslist and freelance websites like Elance, but be very careful of this. Be sure to ask for other websites that they have performed SEO/SEM duties on, and see what types of rankings and back links these sites have.

Also try to make sure that they are actually competitive keywords that the freelancers are using, and aren’t showing you keywords that pretty much anybody could obtain with a few pages of content.

Hiring a freelancer is a good option if they can prove that they know what they’re doing and are effective, but turnaround usually plays a part (the freelancer takes on too many projects or takes a full-time job and suddenly doesn’t have time to dedicate to your project) as does measuring success.

It usually takes some time to obtain number on rankings on search engines because of indexing (usually up to six months), and it’s not easy for you to pay someone every month without seeing some type of return on investment. Be sure to monitor your Google analytics for increases in traffic and keyword visits, and also ask for a detailed breakdown of what links were obtained by the freelancer. If you really want to be sure, check the PageRanks of the sites that the freelancer is obtaining links from and also make sure that they are legal-related or relevant to your location.

4) Hiring an Offshore Web Marketing Company

You likely get contacted by companies from India and other countries overseas that promise you page one rankings for a low monthly fee all the time. This is because the labor in these countries is very cheap and, just like with any other business, outsourcing your project to an overseas vendor can be tempting, especially if they can show results for past clients and are hundreds or thousands cheaper than a company here in the States.

There are a few problems with this. One is the language barrier, not only between you and the company but also the grammar errors that come up while the offshore company provides their link building services on article and press release sites, blogs, forums, etc. You may say to yourself at first “well, I’ll just proofread everything” but that turns into more time than completing the actual work.

Another issue is that most offshore companies use black hat techniques, like obtaining crappy back links that have nothing to do with law or your location. You may not care about this at first when you’re on page one of Google, but if the search engines find out about these sites linking back to yours it’s very likely that your site will be penalized and you’ll be stuck after paying for services that ended up hurting you more than they helped.

Have you ever tried to convince Google to re-index a website with hundreds or thousands of bad inbound links? We have after we tried to help out a few clients who made bad choices when hiring link building “companies”, and it’s near impossible. Long story short: you get what you pay for.

5) Hiring a Web Marketing Company

While it’s true that this is probably the most expensive option, it is usually also the most effective. Hiring trained and proven professionals to handle your SEM and link building campaigns provides a return on investment that most of the previous options do not.

You understand how important your search engine rankings are, and building quality and relevant links is absolutely key to obtaining and keeping these rankings. Are you really thinking about pinching pennies when you know this?

Be sure to check out some of the web marketing’s companies and their search engine rankings before hiring them. Also be sure to follow similar rules that pertain to “hiring a freelancer”, like asking for a detailed work completed report and monitoring the quality of the back links that the company obtains.

Having a web marketing company on your side also pays off when you need web marketing advice, like whether or not certain paid advertising opportunities that are available online are worth the investment, what kind of strategies they can implement to increase traffic conversion, networking and referral opportunities, and more.

There is power in numbers and most web marketing companies already have the necessary resources in place to make your link building and search engine marketing campaign a success, and help you generate more leads, cases, and most of all, money.

We’ve heard all of the hype surrounding Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Some sites are announcing that the new search engine is already competing with Yahoo! for second place in the SE battle, and the reviews of Bing (“But it’s not Google”) seem to be pretty good so far. So, the question is: what can you do to optimize your site for Bing and strike while the iron is hot?

(And yes, you will start seeing Bing show up in your Google Analytics reports soon.)

I came across a pretty good blog post this morning which cites a number of other resources who have done case studies on what Bing looks at as opposed to Google and Yahoo! when ranking websites. One of those resources has a detailed chart showing a comparison of on-page factors of the number one websites on Google and Bing for the keyword term “seo services”.

In summary, the resource came to the conclusion that the number one ranking website on Bing was able to keep a leg up on the competition by

1. Having an older domain age, and
2. Having inbound links from websites that included the primary keyword in the referring site’s title tags- in other words, building inbound links from other SEO sites and directories as opposed to being from just anywhere.

Obviously you don’t have much control on domain age, but here is another search engine that is ranking with inbound links as, what seems to be, one of their primary ranking factors.

I don’t know how many times we tell clients and other webmasters this when they ask why they’re not ranking well for their keyword and keyword phrases, but we can take this chance as an opportunity to say it again: If you’re not maintaining some sort of (professional) link building campaign, you’re already ten steps behind the competition.

Quality content is key, obviously, but taking the “if we build it they will come (and link to us)” approach isn’t enough to rank number one for more competitive keywords and beat out competing websites who are taking the time every day (or hiring SEM professionals to do it for them) to acquire links from relevant and authoritative sites in order to increase their rankings and keep you buried in the search engines.

We’ve put together some pretty good do-it-yourself link building techniques which you could take a look at if you have the time to build links to your website on a daily basis. But, if you’re like most of our clients, you simply don’t have the time (or professional knowledge) to do this and, if that’s the case, feel free to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to tell you how we can help.

Whether or not Bing lives up to the hype remains to be seen, but one thing is for certain: now is the time for you to get ahead of the competition and improve your search engine rankings (on Bing, Yahoo!, and Google) with an effective link-building campaign.

I can’t stress the importance of using keywords that you’d like to rank for in the anchor text of your links enough. It is probably THE most important factor when it comes to Google and other search engines deciding what keywords and/or phrases you’d like to rank for, and making sure that you’re aware of what anchor text other sites are using when linking back to you is very important.

Check out this backlink anchor text analyzer tool to be sure that you’re aware of what anchor text other sites are using when they rank to you, and of course you can shoot them a quick e-mail asking them to change it if you’d like.

We can show you a number of Foster Web Marketing clients whose traffic and leads have dramatically increased over the past few months because of these standard practices: proper web development (adding content on a DAILY basis) and basic search engine optimization techniques.

But when it comes to the point where your site and every site competing with yours have been optimized online, when they all have thousands of pages of content and features such as blogs and library articles included on their site, how do search engines decide whose site has the more authority and should rank better?

That’s easy, the amount of inbound links it has. The blog post I made a few weeks ago about a FWM client trying to figure out why he or she was being outranked for a specific keyword search is a pretty good case study to prove that building links is VERY IMPORTANT.

So, back to basics. It’s not enough to just write content. You, as an attorney or webmaster, always have to keep that thought in the back of your head: is this a link opportunity?

Google ranks sites and pages with more inbound links to them based on the fact that, if this is useful and informative content, than more people will be linking to it and sharing it.

But does this always come into play as attorneys? You have to remember that the area where you practice is geographically limited (or it SHOULD be! I can’t stress the importance of marketing yourself to one niche market as opposed to trying to conquer the world and rank for the entire east coast with only one website) so the chances of sites and blogs linking to you are as small as the size of your target audience.

You could always take the “link baiting” approach and come up with a story that will bring in readers from around the country or world. But, even though we always stress the importance of increasing your exposure online and that everyone, no matter where or who they are, is a potential client because of referrals and social networking, this usually results in a high bounce rate and a very low ROI.

Sometimes you have to take a more pro-active approach to link building. Some of these were mentioned in our ways to build links as attorneys and should be used regularly, but when it really comes down to it: link building is like everything else, the more personal and grassroots ways you use, the better.

Here are 10 basic and usually overlooked linkbuilding techniques you can use:

1. Posting on Craigslist. Sometimes it’s good for leads, but it also counts as a link. Don’t stress over the fact that the link is “nofollow”, look at your Google Analytics traffic report and see how many visits Craigslist resulted in next time you post. TIP: sometimes the services section postings get flagged or get lost in spam postings, so be creative with it.
2. Register with your local Better Business Bureau and Chamber of Commerce if you’re not already. This almost always leads to a link or two.
3. We’ve mentioned this before, but take a few minutes out of your day to answer questions on Yahoo! Answers , Fluther,  and any law-related message boards you can think of like Injuryboard. Dropping a link back to your site on these kinds of sites, as long as you ADD VALUE TO THE CONVERSATION and answer the question can result in pretty good traffic.
4. Build relationships with local bloggers.
5. You SHOULD, by now, realize that you need to be active on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But do you have a link to your website or blog on there? No? (smack forehead)
6. You have a blog… is it linking to your website? Is your website linking to your blog? TIP: utilize site-wide footers as well.
7. Sometimes you have to look in the mirror. Is your own site or blog linking internally to other pages? Are you taking the time, when writing a blog post, to link to other blog posts and web pages? These count as links as well. ALWAYS think about how you can link internally, it’s very important.
8. Google local searches. Know those maps and local business results you see for certain searches in your area? You should be concerned about not being ranked number one. Obtaining a number one rank for these isn’t something I’m going to share quite yet.
9. Look for linking opportunities from local government and law-related websites.
10. Create a Squidoo page.
11. Okay I lied, there are 11. ALWAYS DEEP-LINK AND USE DIFFERENT ANCHOR TEXT. You don’t want everything going back to the homepages and you don’t want search engine spiders seeing the same anchor text when crawling for inbound links. Switch it up, you’re constantly adding content to your site for a reason, use those other pages!

How about this…. SEOMoz published an article last year, but it still holds weight today (with the exception that keyword in domain name should now be higher and so should SEO-friendly URLs): Search Engine Ranking Factors, where a number of experts in the industry ranked different on and off-page search engine optimization factors on a scale of 1-5. Some of those related to link building:

Anchor Text of Inbound Link- 4.4 According to most, this is the second most important factor when it comes to Google and other search engine spiders figuring out what your site should rank for. For Foster Web Marketing clients who Tom and George have been preaching to about changing your titles in DSS and making them shorter: your practice area and home pages are linked to and from on other FWM clients. The anchor text for these links pull directly from…. you guessed it… the TITLES! Get them under 70 characters and make them page-specific… meaning don’t focus on the home page for every keyword, that’s why you have practice area and other pages!

Global Link Popularity of Site- 4.4 And the third most important factor. Your inbound links shouldn’t only point to your home page. That’s why FWM clients have blogs, library pages, and other resources. Now you have to build links to these pages. It’s called deep-linking, and is VERY important.

Link Popularity Within the Site’s Internal Link Structure- 4 And number five overall. Each link on your site to another page on your site counts as a link. When writing blog posts and other content, include links to your other pages that are relevant, and use the proper anchor text. And remember that footer feature that we mentioned we’re launching for FWM clients this month? This is why.

So, as Dave Frees mentioned in his comment the other day, what are some ways of building links as an attorney or law firm? Here are a few great techniques to use:

1. Blog Commenting

Dave couldn’t have done it any better. In his comment, he included a link back to his blog, which, while blog comment links don’t carry as much “link juice” as other methods, they kill two birds with one stone.

Blog comments can be good for building link juice and traffic, but it also helps you expand your social network. If you’re a motorcycle attorney in New England (he wouldn’t be the Million Dollar Man without a link back to his site, would he?) and you come across a blog post or article that you think is relevant or interesting by a motorcycle attorney in California somewhere, comment on it! Not only will you be getting a link back to your site, but you’ll also be expanding your online social network.

Tip: Exercise good taste when using this link building method. Don’t put your practice area as your name and don’t shamelessly self-promote. READ THE BLOG POST and then comment, and add something that is relevant to the discussion and topic. Nobody likes a spammer. Use some of the resources I mentioned in my Ways to Market your Attorney Blog post like Google Blogsearch and Google Alerts to find posts relevant to your practice area(s). And don’t focus too much on NOFOLLOW vs DOFOLLOW, it’s not a huge issue if you’re commenting on blogs that are relevant to what you do.

2. Forum and Answer Services Participation

You, as an attorney, offer valuable information that can be relevant to everyone. And this information is trusted. You didn’t spend all of those years in law school and making a name for yourself over the years for nothing, people know that the knowledge you possess is trusted and accurate. So share it!

You might be saying to yourself, why offer advice and information for free? I’m here to get leads and clients, not trade industry secrets.

The Web 2.0 mentality is all about transparency. People (and search engine spiders) notice you taking time out of your busy day to contribute to legal forums and other informative websites. Including a link back to your site in the signature of these sites can’t hurt either. I’ll make a post later about some legal forums you can use to answer law-related questions (and get a link or two in the process), but in the meantime, registering and using answer sites like Yahoo! Answers, Fluther, and others cant hurt.

TIP: Again, be tasteful. Don’t use wording like “for a free consultation, visit http://www.spammylawyer.com”. And again, the forum and answer service links don’t carry a LOT of linkjuice, so don’t focus too much time on these thinking it will help you reach #1 next week. The main goal of this is that search engines see you contributing to relevant conversation. Also, deep-linking (linking back to a blog post or library page) is much better than linking back to your home page when using this method.

3.. Article Submission

Creating articles and submitting them to article submission sites is a common link building technique. However, two things to keep in mind:

1) Duplicate Content

You can either a) write an article specifically to submit to these sites, and don’t publish the article on your blog or website. or b) revise the way the article is worded if you decide to include it.

2) Trusted Article Sites

Google has made it known that there are articles sites out there that are not trusted. Stick to sites like  EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare.

TIP: If you have a website as well as a blog, you can link back to each through this method. And if you don’t…

4. Get a BLOG!

Many debate whether it is better to have a blog on or off-site. On-site is good because it’s another way to add content. But off-site is better for link building and networking purposes.

Bloggers don’t mind linking to other blogs; in fact, they are way more likely to link to another blog than they are to your website. You can also use an off-site blog to drop links to your site pages from time to time. Take the time to build the authority of the off-site blog by

1. Linking to useful pages and resources
2. Submitting your blog to the resources I mentioned in Ways to Market your Attorney Blog3. You can even install a footer on your off-site blog that links every page to your web site. This is good, because most blogs are multiple pages, resulting in more links to your website. But, content is key, and building the blog’s authority not only improves the link juice coming to your site, but it also gives you another site that has a chance to rank well.
4. Promoting your blog as actively as you promote your website, and take the time to come up with useful and informative content.
5. Get a domain name that is relevant to your practice area. Google seems to be putting more and more emphasis on ranking sites with good domain names higher, so see what is available other than your or your law firm’s name.

5. Niche Directory Sites

Google has made it no secret that regular directory sites like DMOZ are not as valued as they once were. However, relevant niche (law-related) directory sites are still good, if they are trusted and have a decent authority built. Look for directory sites that include content and a few articles, and not one that just links in and out.

TIP: Set up a “links page” for niche directory sites that require reciprocal linking.

These are five (and by the way, top 10 or top 5 lists as link bait and article topics are great because they are easier to read through) link building methods that are good for attorneys and law firms. I will share some more next week some time.

A client of ours, Atlanta Car Accident Attorney James Murphy are wondering why they’re not ranking as well for their blog posts as they are for their practice area pages. From her e-mail:
 
Type “school bus accident dublin ga” in the Google search bar.  We should be the 5th result or so.  When clicking on the link, however, our car accident practice area page appears….

(then) type “parking deck Sandy Springs” in Google.  We should be the first result, and Google sends visitors to the correct blog (post).

At Foster Web Marketing, clients in similar practice areas who are not in the same area (and don’t compete) link to and from each other. But the pages that they link to are the practice area pages and home page, resulting in more inbound links and higher “link juice” of the practice area pages than of the other pages.

That being said, the practice area pages ranking higher than the blog post pages are not uncommon, and goes to show the power of building links to individual pages (ESPECIALLY blog posts).

So then you ask, why does a blog post rank for the second keyword phrase, but not the first? The answer: competitiveness.

Who are people going to blog/talk about or report more, a school bus accident in Georgia that sends 29 kids to the hospital, or a parking deck collapsing (which, from what I can find, resulted in no injuries). While there’s no clear-cut answer, it would appear that the school bus crashing resulting in injuries is the more competitive topic/keyword phrase, because there is simply more more authoritative sources out there covering the story.

Proof: type in “school bus accident dublin” and you’ll see that there are triple the amount of search results, and more news stories out there than the second keyword phrase about the parking deck.

So, how do you overcome this?

Build links to the actual blog post. The search results above you are ranking because they have built more authority, meaning that particular page has built more links (both off-site as well as internal linking on-site…. if a news website has 100,000 pages, with a link on every page to this particular blog post, while the quality of those inbound links might not be that great… guess what… that’s a lot of links) than your blog post.

Taking the time to create the content of your blog post is only the first step… promoting and building links to it is a whole new level.

Check out the first post of this blog, ways to promote your attorney blog, and coming tomorrow: ways to promote and build links to individual blog posts.