The All Powerful Linkerati?
Back in 2006, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz fame, cleverly invented a term for one of the most crucial components to search engine optimization. His term, “Linkerati“, describes the concept of identifying potential linkbait targets.
With all the “to-do” about content being king, the concept of identifying linkerati is often overlooked. You see, not all visitors and users of your website are likely, or even capable of linking back to your content.
For example, let’s say you maintain a legal blog. You know that content is important so you try to post something every day. In fact, let’s assume that you’re a rather talented legal blogger and your content has a relatively strong following. Comment discussions on your blog are robust, and your articles are frequently the subject of tweets and re-tweets. However, you can’t understand why you receive so-few links back to your blog. The answer, you’re not reaching the legal Linkerati.
Legal Bloggers – Legal bloggers have a lot of incentive to link to your content. They are usually very interested in the subject matter, they are active in the legal blog community, and most importantly, they want links to their own content. Legal bloggers are one of the best sources of relevant links.
Law Firm SEOs – While this may come as a huge surprise to some legal blog professionals, there are a large number of lawyers who don’t have the time, or frankly the desire, to moderate and administer links on their law firm websites and legal blogs. Talking to the law firm seos that handle these tasks on behalf of their lawyer clients, is a great resource for new links.
Legal Web News Writers – Tough to get, but exceptionally valuable, these folks control the legal news outlets on the web, including places like Law.com and other online legal news portals, etc.
Legal Journalists – Online or offline creators of “legal news” are probably the most valuable of all the legal linkerati. A reporter for any major news publisher can generate extremely valuable links back to your law firm website.
So who are your legal linkerati?