Law blogs may be single best way to get links for SEO

Though I don’t believe high search rankings should be the leading reason for publishing a law blog, your publishing a blog may be your single best way of achieving high search engine rankings as a lawyer or law firm.

Incoming links from other relevant sites to your blog or website is probably the single most important factor in achieving high search engine rankings on Google. Getting those incoming links from more important websites or blogs is even better. What’s a more important site per Google? A site with lots of incoming links.

John Jantsch, author of Duct Tape Marketing, had a good post last week on seven of the best ways to acquire those all important links. Blogging ranked number one.

Write a blog. Without question creating a blog and consistently writing keyword rich content is the number one SEO activity for the small business. (For any size business) This is no longer something to debate, blog content will improve your chances to compete in the search engines many times over and draw links from other blogs and sites that syndicate content.

Next in line was guest posting on other blogs, something active law bloggers have a much better opportunity to do.

A variation to writing on your blog is to seek out other blogs and offer to write content that is useful and relevant to their audience. Make certain that you get to place a link back to your site in the body of the post and look for blogs that are well read.

Other ways Jantsch includes in the best way to get links fit nicely with your publishing a blog.

• Submit posts and articles to online directories of articles. With a blog, you’ve got a steady stream of possible articles.
• Leave relevant comments on other blogs. When blogging, commenting on other blogs comes naturally. While the linking benefit may be negligible, commenting prompts the blog author to visit your blog.
• Create profiles on social media websites. Such sites routinely ask you to link to your blog.

Lawyers and law firms spend a ton of money on search engine optimization (SEO). Some of it may be well spent. But in many cases it’s throwing money down a rat hole. Often to companies who have a track record of over charging and under delivering.

Often companies selling SEO services to lawyers are selling the easy way out. There’s no substitute for creating valuable content and acquiring the right types of incoming links. Companies in effect selling you links can lead, as Jantsch says, “…[T]o getting your hand slapped or worse by the search engines.”

I blog and most of the lawyers on the LexBlog Network blog for reputation enhancement and engaging our target audience. But at the same time the search results we obtain are pretty amazing.

If you’re looking for SEO, blogging can be an effective and tasteful means of achieving high rankings on Google.