Links are the currency of the web. The simple explanation is, getting other websites to link to you is like getting votes for your site. The more votes you get, the more trusted you become in the eyes of search engines such as Google. Of course, there are other factors to consider such as the authority and relevance of the sites linking back to you as well.
What Link Building Can Do For You: The 3 Main Benefits Of Linkingbulding
1. Link Building Will Help Your Law Firm's Site Rank Better For Individual Keywords - Links pointing to a specific page on your site, that include keywords you would like to rank for as anchor text, will help improve your rankings in the search engines for that keyword. Take for example a personal injury law firm in New Jersey. Let say they are trying to improve their ranking for the keyword phrase "New Jersey injury lawyer". The firm needs to establish a page on their site that is optimized for "New Jersey injury lawyer" and then the firm needs to get other sites to link back to that page with links that contain "New Jersey injury lawyer" in the text such as the link in this sentence. This will help let Google know what the page on your site is about and will establish authority because other sites are linking to that page with descriptive link text.
2. Building Links Establishes Domain Authority - As you build more links to various pages of your site, your entire domain will gain authority and trust in the eyes of the search engines. As opposed to this helping one of your pages rank for a keyword phrase, your increased domain authority will help all of your pages rank better. This is why when a site like www.cnn.com publishes an article or new page, it ranks quickly and higher than most other sites. This will obviously result in more traffic for the site. The same principle applies to your local law firm site.
3. Your Website Pages Get Visited More Often & More Pages Get Indexed - The only way someone searching Google can find your website is if your site is indexed in Google's search engine. As you site gains more authority and trust, through links, your site becomes "more important" in the eyes of Google. The result is that Google visits your site more frequently to check for updates. In addition, more pages of your site get added to the Google index. This gives you more opportunity to get visitors searching Google for your services.
Thanks for this post about the importance of links. Where would you recommend that someone begin with creating links? Some of the basic link building strategies that I have been using are:
article writing (to exine articles, etc)
blog commenting
Classified ads
Squidoo pages
Forum posting
Is there anything you would add? How do you go about finding link building prospects?
Nina
Nina-
You can find a lot of good link building information at http://www.seomoz.org
We also have a free guide you can download on basic link building principles:
http://bit.ly/bBsdjA
Thats a good way of explaining it, is your book available in the UK anywhere?