The importance of In-bound Links

A common complaint I hear from law firms is that their website does not appear in the first page of search engine results for the most basic but vital phrase such as "Solicitor Guildford".

To a large degree your success in search engine results will depend on your inbound linking strategy.

Before you glaze over let me explain.

You have probably seen links in the pages of a web site. Links can take you to another page in the same web site or to a totally different web site. Links are the "blue bits" on a web page and usually look like this:

www.employer4lawyers.com

If you could click on the link above it would count as an inbound link for employers4lawyers.

Search engines know that it takes human effort to place a link on a website and so they see links as a vote of popularity. Someone actually has to take the time to put a special piece of code on a site so that when you click a link you are whooshed to another site. In very broad terms the more links you have the more popular you're perceived by search engines.

Search engines all have "spiders" (sometimes called "robots") whose job it is to crawl the web going from site to site to read or "index" every page they come across. That way when you ask a search engine a question it knows where to get the answer from.

The way spiders get from one site to another is via links. If you have no links into your site then search engines will find it very hard to know your site exists. How would they get to your site if you had no links? It would be like building a town with no roads to it. That's one good reason for developing inbound links.

Another good reason to develop inbound links is that they can be used to tell the search engines what your site is all about. If the clickable text in our link example above were to read:

law jobs in surrey

.then the search engine would have a good idea what the employers4lawyers site is all about. Now multiply that by tens and hundreds of links with the clickable text all mentioning "legal job Surrey", "legal recruitment Surrey ", "law job in Surrey". The search engine would be in no doubt of which site to bring up in its results if someone were to search for "law job in Surrey".

That is the power of inbound linking explained in the simplest and most general terms.

However there are many pitfalls in link building which could cause your site to perform poorly or not appear in any search engine results at all.

In general we look to add links to our clients' sites quite gradually - usually over the course of 12 months.

We look to develop links from:

• sites relevant to yours
• specialist directory sites
• high page ranking sites
• a broad range of sites

We have powerful software which lets us examine your website and your competitors' websites. It tells us all about the links that come into you and your competitors. In the simplest of terms we look at your competitors linking strategy, use the best parts of it and then make it work for you.