If your website is not properly optimized you lessen the chance of being ranked in the top positions of the major search engines. Search engine optimization can be quite overwhelming and time consuming to a business owner.

In a nutshell, there are two types of SEO for lawyers you and your firm can do. Just to maybe get you up to speed, SEO stands for search engine optimization and it's all about getting your website to rank as high as possible with search engines. Back to the two types of SEO:

• On-page, also called on-site search engine optimization.


• Off-page, also called off-site.

This article focuses on off-page SEO. However, just so you know, on-page SEO is primarily about the key search terms placed on the pages of your site. For example, a lawyer's home page key search terms may "Washington criminal lawyer" and "Bellingham DUI lawyers". Most SEO results come from off-page SEO which boils down to acquiring many and high-quality links to your website. These links are called inbound links. The number one factor that improves your rankings with the search engines is the number and quality of links to your website.

How to get those inbound links to your lawyer website?

There are 3 main methods for getting inbound links:

1. attract them;


2. go and get them; and


3. create one-way inbound links yourself.

Attracting inbound links

You need to create a reason in your website for another website or blog to want to link to your website. The best way to do this is create content that people will like. Content can be written, audio, images, and video. Lawyers have a pretty good opportunity attracting links because they have specialized knowledge that people need to know about. Therefore, writing in-depth about your practice area will likely attract links. Be sure the titles of your content are compelling and avoid writing too much in legal language. It may be informative, but it's not compelling.

Go and get inbound links through link exchanges

A popular method for acquiring inbound links is trading links with other lawyers. Type "lawyer link exchange" and you'll get no shortage of law firm websites willing to exchange links. There's a pretty good debate in the SEO community right now about how effective link exchanges are. In my experience inbound links as a result of link exchanges are still valuable and will improve your search engine rankings. Link exchanges are false votes of popularity for a website (the theory behind using links as a ranking criterion); however, it's not always the case. Lawyers listing other lawyers can be a service for people needing a lawyer in another location. At the end of the day, in my experience with my websites, link exchanging works.

Create one-way inbound links yourself

One-way links are those where you don't reciprocate a link. You can create one-way inbound links in 4 ways:

1. Write and publish articles online;


2. Comment on blogs that don't have a no-follow tag;


3. Social bookmark your site; and


4. List your lawyer website with online directories.

Writing and publishing articles online

Well, writing and publishing on EzineArticles is a perfect example. If you look at the bottom of this article you're reading, you'll see a brief bio or resource box.