In last week’s “Smart SEO for Lawyers” webinar, I emphasized the importance of link building for SEO.  Naturally, someone then asked for practical ways to build links, with an emphasis on “practical.”  I can certainly understand the sentiment, because common advice like “have great content that people want to link to” isn’t very practical at all.  So here are five practical ways that a lawyer could build links to his or her law firm website.

1) Create a blog on your domain

Let’s be honest, the average Joe doesn’t care about law until he’s sued or arrested, which is why link building for lawyers is so hard.  One way around this is to have a blog where your main audience is other lawyers.  However, with enough dedication and writing talent, you could expand your audience to anyone (just be aware that the 5,325th article on “what to do in a car accident” isn’t going to get anyone excited).  The more you participate in the blogosphere the higher the odds of your blog posts attracting links.

That said, a blog is no magic pill.  It’s just a platform, and unless you write stuff people actually want to read, a blog won’t help you.  Whether blogging is practical really depends on how much writing talent and free time you have.  If blogging isn’t a good fit, then move on to the other options below.

2) Do guest blog posts in other people’s blogs

Want to benefit from blogging without fully committing to blogging? You can.  Offer to write guest posts for other people’s blogs (where you’ll get links back to your website embedded in the guest blog posts).  You could do guest blog posts for legal blogs or even non legal blogs.  For example, if you’re a wills, trusts & estates lawyer, there are hundreds of gay and lesbian blogs that would be interested in having an expert lawyer write free guest posts talking about GLBT legal issues.

Here’s how it works, and you don’t even have to waste time writing before you secure a guest blog post:

• Think up a catchy title for a blog post like “7 Laws GLBT Families Need to Know About.”
• Grab a list of GLBT blogs.  Alltop.com is great for this, as it compiles lists of blogs by topic.
• Have an assistant email a form letter to every single blog on the list asking if they’re interested in your guest post. In the letter, give a very short summary of your experience and offer them exclusive rights to the content.
• If you get any takers, then write the blog post and send it to them.  At the bottom of your blog post include a short “About the Author” section with links back to your website.
• Rinse and repeat.

3) Sponsor local nonprofits

Buying links is a big “no no” in Google’s book, but luckily there are ways to buy links without “buying links.”  As far as I know, no one has ever gotten in trouble for sponsoring a nonprofit and getting a link as a thank you.  So do a little research into worthy non profits in your community, and then contact them about sponsorship.  In addition to any SEO benefit you get, you’ll also build good will in the community and help worthy causes.  This is a nice example of traditional marketing blending with SEO.  You might also get a tax break for whatever you donate.

4) Submit to quality directories

There are thousands of junk web directories that are best avoided, but there are still some good ones that are worth submitting to.  Some of these good directories charge a fee, while others are completely free.  Here is a nice list of quality directories.  And, of course, you should look into niche directories that won’t appear on generic directory lists.  For example, Avvo (for claimed lawyers) and Justia will give links to lawyers in their directories.  If you’re a part of any association or school that maintains directories, be sure to submit your site to them as well.

5) Check out the competition

Find competitors who outrank you in Google and enter them into backlinkwatch.com to see where they’re getting their links.  Often times if they can get a link from a particular website, so can you.  The downside to this is that it puts you one step behind the competition, whereas with the other options you can lead, often in a way that’s hard for competitors to copy.

We’re thrilled to have Larry Port, the Founding Partner and Chief Software Architect for Rocket Matter, join us next Thursday as a guest for a free legal marketing webinar.

Rocket Matter is the leading web-based legal practice management and time and billing software for small to mid-sized law firms.

Larry will be covering a topic not yet discussed here at Avvo, but one that is very much moving into the legal industry: Cloud Computing. The ABA Journal wrote a lengthy piece about the technology in its April issue and lawyer Nicole Black is writing the book Cloud Computing for Lawyers to be published by the ABA in early 2011.

But many lawyers are probably still asking,  just what is this cloud that everyone is talking about? From the perspective of the law firm, computing in the cloud eliminates typical IT expenses, management, and headaches. Cloud options are often cost-effective since they forego high up-front costs in favor of predictable monthly fees. Yet many lawyers are concerned about security risks.

In next week’s webinar, Larry will cover it all, including how to carefully select a cloud computing solution and understand the risks.

We hope you can join us!

Date: Thursday, July 15, 2010, 1:00PM ET / 10:00AM PT
Sign up: Cloud Computing for Legal Professionals with Larry Port

Matt Cutts of Google recently came out with a video explaining the wrong and right ways to “sculpt” PageRank.  At the end of the video he confirms that keeping important web pages close to your homepage is a good way to help your rankings.  Read on to learn about the details.

A quick refresher on PageRank

Google operates as a big democracy, where links count as votes.  But all votes are not counted equally, and some votes aren’t counted at all.  Google has an algorithm called PageRank (named after Larry Page) for calculating how many votes a web page has and how important those votes are.  A link from a high PageRank page counts more than a link from a low PageRank page.

One way to think of how PageRank operates is as “juice” flowing through a network of pipes. Every time a website links to your website, it’s sending “link juice” into your website, which then flows throughout your website.  The higher the PageRank of the page containing the link, the more juice the link will pass.

Links are the “pipes” through which the link juice passes.  Web pages that have accumulated large pools of PageRank may rank better in Google.

Sculpting PageRank

Once it became known that PageRank flows around your website, and pages that accumulate the most “juice” may have a ranking advantage, it wasn’t long before people started trying to manipulate the flow of PageRank so that it would flow to pages they most wanted to rank well for.

A common tactic for doing this was to use the “no follow” attribute on internal links to unimportant pages.  Adding the “no follow” attribute to a link tells Google not to pass “juice” to a link (it closes off the pipe, so to speak).  People figured that if they no followed unimportant pages they’d never want to rank well for, like a privacy policy page or a contact page, then more juice would be left over to go to important pages. This was called “link sculpting.”

Why link sculpting with “no follow” stopped working

At some point Google changed the way “no follow” worked such that it no longer made sense to do it on internal links for link sculpting.

Here’s how no follow used to work:

You have a page with 10 internal links (links that go to other pages on  your website) and 100 points of link juice to spread around.  In that case each of the 10 links would get 10 points worth of link juice.  If you “no followed” 5 links, then the remaining links would get 20 points worth of link juice each. The link juice is simply concentrated into fewer links, making them better off.

Here’s how no follow works now:

You have a page with 10 internal links and 100 points of link juice to spread around.  If you “no followed” 5 links, then the remaining links would still get 10  points worth of link juice each, and the 50 points of link juice going to the 5 “no followed” links would simply evaporate.  You haven’t gained anything by using “no follow” to control the flow of PageRank.

This change was a bit of a scandal in the SEO industry because it turned out a lot of firms had been recommending that clients sculpt PageRank with “no follow” after Google revealed it had stopped working, proving that the practice was boondoggle.

Okay so what can you do now?

Most websites tend to attract most of their links to the homepage.  It’s just the way it is.  What this means is that most websites have a big pools of link juice bottlenecked at their homepages.

When you consider that the more times links juice passes through links, the more it “thins,” you realize that by putting an important page 3 links away from your homepage, the juice that finally arrives at that page is less than if you had put the important page 1 link away from the homepage.

So, for example, if you’ve got 10 practice areas listed on your website, but DUI is really important to your business, link directly to it from your homepage.  The optimal way to do it, at least from a PageRank perspective, would be homepage > DUI, rather than homepage > practice areas > criminal defense > DUI.

That said, you can’t be myopic about sculpting PageRank, since it only tries to redirect the juice you already have.  In practical terms, what you probably need to rank better is to attract more link juice, not to play with the juice you already have.  But we do have confirmation straight from Google that putting pages close the homepage can give them a PageRank boost.

After my wedding, someone said to me, “no one remembers the food at a wedding, I hope they don’t remember yours.” The food was horrible, the service appalling, and the caterer showed up so late that my wedding party had to set up the tables for the reception.

Being a Web 2.0 kind of guy, I left a review on Yelp to inform others about my experience.

Yesterday, I received an email through Yelp:

Hi Conrad, I accidentally stumbled onto your review that you wrote about your experience with XXXX XXXXX, my company, last summer and I wanted to find out if anything was ever done to satisfy your complaints and disappoinments. I don’t recall talking with you directly after the event and if I did I truly apologize for not remembering.  If you would be so kind as to call me when you have a minute. I would love to resolve this and somehow earn your respect again.  What name was the order placed under and what was the date?
Thank you very much,
John”

I’m a true believer you can build raving fans by proactively responding to negative feedback.  Granted it’s a little harder for a wedding caterer – I can’t really make up for the fact that they were understaffed, took over 30 minutes just to serve the main course and forgot the chocolate in the chocolate strawberry dessert.  So I appreciated John’s approach, but he’s falling a little short.

Best Practices when Dealing with Negative Client Reviews

1. Proactively Monitor Your Online Profiles – don’t “accidentally stumble” onto feedback about your company.  Use Google Alerts to proactively monitor your online reputation.  Avvo makes this really easy with email notifications when something is added to a lawyer’s profile.
2. Reach Out – responding to unhappy clients is a hallmark of good business.  While you can’t please everyone all of the time, you shouldn’t dismiss all disgruntled former clients as nutjobs.  Most online review forums that protect the identity of the reviewer (like Avvo), also offer facilitate confidential conversations – for example, John sent the email through Yelp and he never saw my email address.  Avvo has a similar process where our Customer Care team will reach out directly to the reviewer.
3. Offer to Make It Right – John offers to work with me to resolve this issue.  This is the foundation of great customer service.
4. Make it Easy to Contact You.  You’ll notice in John’s email that while he asks me to call, he fails to provide a phone number or email address. Because the review came through Yelp, I can’t even find his email address.
5. Follow up Quickly – My wedding was in 2003.  I left the review on Yelp more than a year ago.  At this point, the likelihood that I’m going to invest time with John is close to zero.   The likelihood that during the past 7 years I’ve warned numerous engaged couples about my experience with the caterer is exactly 100%.
6. Manage Your Overall Review Profile – one negative review isn’t the end of the world.  People reading reviews know that you can’t please all of the people all of the time.  However, if the balance of your reviews are negative, you may want to look very critically at your business.  John’s business has two negative and one positive review.  With innumerable options available, would they make your wedding caterer shortlist?

Many people are uncomfortable providing negative feedback in person.  Online reviews may be the only indication that you have a grumpy ex-client.  How (and when) you respond can make all the difference.