“It’s human nature to stick with traditional beliefs long after they outlast any conceivable utility.” – Jim Pinkerton

If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start?

That’s the naïve question. You should be asking it (even if the answer turns out to be “yes”).

Career Path

There’s no doubt that the job market is dismal, especially for attorneys.  I read a stat several months ago about there being one job for every 100 attorneys that are looking for jobs.

But when did “law practice” come to mean “job?”  Why are so many young attorneys becoming solo practitioners only because they can’t find work?

I admit that this one never made sense to me.  I never wanted to work for anyone else.

During the last few years of my big firm practice, I worked for a fantastic law firm.  I liked the people I worked with and the type of work I was doing.  Clients were coming in and partnership was not far around the corner.

Still, I felt like I was trading the hours of my life away. I knew that if I stayed on this path, when I reached the end of my working years, I would either (a) look back in longing at the important things I missed because I was at work or (b) be so unwilling to face this truth that I deceive myself that I had made the right choice.

Neither of these options appealed to me.

So I quit.

But so many attorneys seem unable to think like this.  They are begging at the feet of big law firms for jobs that don’t exist. They never consider that the “job security” offered by these positions is an illusion at best.  They are so invested in the system that they can’t see anything else.

But what if there was no job-dependent employment model?  What would these attorneys do?

They would recognize that they have a valuable skill and find ways to offer it in exchange for payment.

They would learn basic marketing/networking skills or form partnerships with those who do.

They would hustle and make it work.

Pricing Models

Ask yourself: Does it really make sense to break your life down into incremental 1/10 hour slots and sell those to people who aren’t interested in buying your time as much as buying results?

As both a lawyer and a human being, you are a consumer as well as a service provider.  Put yourself in the client’s shoes.  Do you want to pay for hours of your accountant’s time?  Or would you prefer to pay for a specified result?  Your clients feel the same way.

I implemented value-based pricing models at my firm in areas where they weren’t commonly used.  And I had the infrastructure in place long before the value pricing movement gathered the momentum that it has.  And the response was overwhelmingly positive.  It just makes sense.

So if others weren’t already using hourly billing, is this how you would structure your pricing model? Or are you selling the wrong thing?

Client Communication

My generation has seen the rise of communication models that have already eclipsed all of society’s prior advancements.  The legal profession has been slow to react, both at bar level (a hopelessly outdated attorney advertising paradigm, for example) and the way in which attorney structure client intake and communication.

Pretend there’s a blank slate.  How would you structure client communications?  Does it make sense for clients to set appointments and travel to your office for an item that could be handled efficiently via e-mail or a secure client interface to your website?

Or do we do things this way just because that’s how they’ve always been done?

Others?

So there’s three areas of the top of my head in 15 minutes or less.  Help me expand the list.  In what other ways are attorneys sticking with outdated models that have outlived their usefulness?  Let me know in the comments below.

You have control over on-site ranking factors. You can decide what title and description meta tags, keyword density, and site architecture to use on your site.

These on-site SEO factors are much easier to optimize than off-site factors (such as links and social shares) because they do not require the involvement of anyone else. You just set it up and you’re done.

But how much do these on-site factors help?  A recent study by the Open Algorithm took a look at that question.  For those of you who aren’t familiar:

TheOpenAlgorithm is a project to bring more science to SEO. The initial phase is a correlation study examining the relationship between the ranking of the top #100 results for over 12,000 keywords and over 150 factors that might impact ranking in Google.

So the Open Algorithm study basically looks at what’s working for the top 100 results for a given set of keywords.  It then correlates search ranking with a variety of on-page factors.

Open Algorithm vs. SEOmoz Ranking Factors

I thought this study was interesting in light of SEOmoz’s annual search ranking studies, which basically consist of survey results from what the most popular SEOs think will cause sites to rank better.  It appears that, at least with regard to on-site ranking factors, the best and brightest may be wrong.

Optimized Title Tags

According to the respondents in the SEOmoz survey, the two most-important on-page ranking factors are (a) having your primary keyword in your title tag and (b) having it appear near the beginning of the title.

The Open Algorithm study found week correlation between these two factors.

The correlation of all of the factors related to the title tag recorded above are so close to zero they can be considered random … What this likely means is that, these factors have little or no bearing on the ranking of a web page in Google.

In other words, Google may not care whether or how your keyword appears in your title tag.

Keyword Meta Tag

Back in the early days of SEO, search engines paid attention to keyword title tags. Buy stuffing the title tag with keywords and variants, you could make a page rank for a keyword that didn’t even appear on the page text.

Google eventually started ignoring keyword tags.  The SEO community did as well.  But this study (strangely) found a strong correlation between the site ranking and the use of the keyword tag.

The keyword meta tag was included in the study only to find out if there were penalties for using it and to provide a “handy benchmark for what can be considered a random correlation in this field of factors.”  At this point I don’t see a convincing explanation for why the keyword tag should count other than correlation with other factors that Google does consider.

Other Factors

The study mentions several other factors and is worth a read.  But I am not convinced that the sample used here was sufficient to draw any sound conclusions, especially considering that correlation is not causation.

But I think studies like this are a step in the right direction.  Polling the industry gurus may give us anecdotal evidence, but it’s hard to say how much of this is the blind leading the blind.  The results of studies like these often show that there is more going on than what the SEO echo chamber recognizes.

Given these weak/random correlations, the author suggests that site owners spend no more than 5% of their time on on-page factors.  And the time spent on on-page factors should be directed toward a well-optimized site architecture.

And when you think about it from Google’s perspective, the study’s conclusion makes sense:

A factor is directly and easily manipulated by a webmaster, the weight assigned to that factor is likely to be relatively low.

The takaway: Quit fetishizing over on-page factors. Get an SEO-friendly WordPress theme and start networking and building links. 

Today I want to start explaining how to do local SEO. I find it helpful to think of local SEO through the traditional SEO paradigm. Both have parallel sets of techniques that will help your site rank well, and both are subject to gamesmanship by people who understand the rules.

Comparing Traditional SEO to Local SEO

Organic search engine optimization is usually grouped into two components.

• First, there are the on-site factors.  These are things that the site owner can control, like domain name, keyword use and placement, site architecture, and meta tags.
• The second (and more difficult) component is off-site factors, like link-building, social media shares, and traditional PR.

Search engine optimization is all about optimizing these factors to help your sites rank well in search engines.

The components of traditional search engine optimization have counterparts in local SEO. For example:

• A business title is to local SEO what a domain name is to traditional SEO
• Categories are to local SEO what site architecture is to traditional SEO
• Citations are to local SEO what links are to traditional SEO
• Reviews and ratings are to local SEO what social shares and mentions are to traditional SEO

These analogies aren’t perfect, but they do provide a helpful framework for understanding local SEO. Let’s take a look at the first of these factors.

Business Title is to Local SEO what Domain Name is to Traditional SEO

I have written about how exact-match domain names can help a site rank well in organic search.  In the Local SEO world, you can think of your business title as your domain name.  A business title that includes your primary keyword will help you rank above businesses that do not have the keyword in their title.

This technique can be abused.  Google’s guidelines require you to use your actual business name for your business title.

Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business in the business name field.

If you are just starting a firm and are trying to decide what to call it, you might consider using keywords in your firm title (subject to your ethical rules).  This can help with both organic and local search.  But if you already have an established business name, use it in your local listings.

No matter what you choose for your business title, it is important to use the same business title across all of your local business listings. This helps the search engines identify each listing as belonging to the same firm, which in turn helps you earn trust in the search engines.

The next posts in this series will explore the other factors that can help you rank well in local search.

In the past several years, local businesses (including law firm) have been showing up more frequently in search results. Google, Yahoo, and Bing have all rolled out programs to help you build your local brand awareness.  For queries that indicate a local intent (such as “immigration attorney in Miami, Florida”), search engines now display blended search results that give prominence to local business listings.

The key differentiator between the two types of listings is the local business address.  Search engines recognize that people who use local search queries (those what include an address, city, or zip code along with the product or service query) are looking for local companies.  Because of this, search engines give preference to listings with local addresses.

The increased focus on local listings has been a game changer.  Small businesses with limited resources can now outrank many national companies with higher marketing budgets.  If the national brands don’t have a local address, it doesn’t matter how much money they throw at SEO.  Smaller companies with local addresses will still rank well in the blended search results.

What This Means for Law Firms

I believe that local search optimization is the low-hanging fruit of internet marketing for law firms.  Most law firms are inherently local businesses.  Although there are some statewide and national practices, most attorneys get the majority of their clients from their specific geographic location.  This makes law firms a perfect fit for local search marketing.

In fact, I believe that if you only have the resources to focus on one internet marketing activity, you should focus on local SEO.  Here’s why:

• Your local address already gives you a competitive advantage against attorneys and non-attorneys that are not in your geographic area.  Don’t let it pass.
• Unlike general SEO, local search marketing can help you rank well in a relatively short period of time without a substantial up-front investment.
• People who use local search queries are already in buying mode.  They are more likely to contact your office than an information-seeker.
• The field is relatively new and less crowded than the general search results.  Now is the time to get a leg up on your local competitors that are not focusing on local search.

The next posts in this series will get into the specifics of how to do local SEO.  But I should warn you that local SEO, while effective, is incredibly tedious and boring work.  I know that sounds self-serving coming from someone who provides local SEO services, but I do believe that this is one area that firms should consider outsourcing, especially given that the costs are relatively low.

I don’t like to change plans.  I believe inability to stick to your goals is usually a character flaw.  My plan was two posts per week, so my sense of self-discipline is screaming that, come hell or high water, I need to stick to two posts a week.

But that I can see that blind adherence to that schedule will be counter-productive.  Like anyone, I only have so many hours in a day.   There have been changes in circumstances over the past few months that will limit my time next quarter.

• I am about to start a huge link-building project that will be time-intensive.  I need to clear my schedule to make room for this work.
• Over the past few months, I have been able to acquire a number of niche legal blogs with great link profiles.  I need to do something with them. I am not sure what direction to take these blogs, but I don’t want to waste them.
• I need to finish out my list of free link opportunities for subscribers to my newsletter.
• I am learning to code.  I can build sites in CSS and html. I can get around the WordPress platform and develop within the Genesis framework.  I can even hack together an SEO tool every now and then to suit my needs.  But I have never learned a full programming language.  It’s time to start (I actually started several weeks ago).

I am super-excited about each of these projects.  I’m also (still) excited about this blog, though.  So the plan for the next quarter is to cut my posting here down to once per week.  I’ll reevaluate and the end of the quarter and decide where to go from there.

I’ve also decided to stop with New Year’s resolutions. I’ve made and kept a number of them, but many seemed like Pyrrhic victories.  A year is just too long to forecast in advance.  From now on, I plan to switch to quarterly resolutions, which I hope will be more manageable.

I would also like to be sure that I’m writing to your needs. Is there anything you would like to see covered here over the next quarter?  If so, send me an e-mail or reply below and I’ll try to get to it.

Today we are going to talk about qualification – the process of evaluating your link prospect to determine which are worth your time and effort.

Link qualification should always be viewed in terms of the work or money required to get the link.  If the link can be easily obtained, the quality may not matter as much (although you would still want to steer clear of links that could result in a penalty).  But if you are going to invest time or money to acquire the link, you need to be sure that it’s worth it.   Here’s how.

Categorize and Prioritize Your Prospects

If you’ve followed the prior posts, you can compile an overwhelming list of prospects.  While contacting every prospect is an option, it would probably be a waste of resources due to the time, labor, and diminishing returns involved. The better approach is to categorize your prospects and focus on the ones that are most likely to contribute to your goals.

To prioritize your list of prospects, you will need to define a list of criteria.  It is usually best to prioritize your list based on three simple questions:

• How much value will the link add to my site?
• How likely is this prospect to link to my content?
• Will the link add value apart from the PageRank that it passes to your site?

Let’s take a look at these in more detail.

Value of Incoming Link

This criterion is the most objective and, if your purpose for building links is to place higher in the search engine results, it is also the most important.  But the value of the incoming link can be difficult to quantify precisely.  Link value depends on a variety of factors, including:

• Trust/Authority/Neighborhood –  All links are not created equal.  Search engines view some links as more trustworthy and authoritative than others. And in Google’s eyes, you’re known by the company you keep.  If the link is from a virtual neighborhood of spammy sites, you don’t want your link there.
• Relevancy to Your Niche – A link from a relevant site (such as another law firm or relevant consumer information site) is more valuable than a link from a site that has nothing to do with your topic.
• Page Segmentation – Where will the link appear on the page?  An editorial link (one that appears in the content of the page) is worth more than a link that appears in a sidebar or footer.
• Anchor Text – This can be a two-edged sword.  As a general rule, you want your anchor text to match the keyword you are trying to rank for. But too much unnatural anchor text will raise a flag.  As a general rule, be sure to vary at least 25 to 30 percent of your incoming links.
• IP Diversity –The raw quantity of your inbound links isn’t as important as the number of different IP addresses that link to your site.  Don’t spend all of your time getting links from the same URLs. Get a link or two, then move on.  This will give you a more diverse backlink profile.

Most of these criteria involve at least some degree of subjectively.  But there are a few tools that can help with link qualification.  Let’s take a look at the two most common metrics for link value.

PageRank

The oldest metric for evaluating the value of an incoming link is PageRank, a link analysis algorithm developed by the founders of Google.  PageRank assigns a value between 1 and 10 to each page in Google’s index.  This PageRank serves as a metric for the relative importance of that page in the Google search algorithm.

In my opinion, PageRank is of limited use it determining the value of a link, for two reasons:

• Google is notoriously slow in updating PageRank.   This means that the high PR site that you are considering may have dropped considerably since the last update or, worse, been dinged by Google for a violation of some sort.
• PageRank is too imprecise to differentiate between sites of differing qualities within the broad categories.  Increases in PageRank that Google displays are calculated logarithmically.  This means that the difference between a PR5 page and a PR6 page is much larger than the difference between a PR1 page and a PR2 page.  There can be significant differences in quality between sites with a PageRank of 5 and above.  PageRank is too clumsy of a tool to differentiate between the two sites.
• PageRank takes into account other metrics than links, such as site-wide authority and trust factors.  Because the secret formula isn’t published, it’s hard to isolate which factors contribute to high PageRank.

Although you can still get PageRank information (download the Google toolbar and enable the PageRank button if you use Firefox or Internet Explorer; use this method for Google Chrome), Google suggests that webmasters take PageRank with a grain of salt.  Google has stopped including PageRank information in Webmaster tools.

SEOmoz Metrics

Due to the drawbacks of PageRank as a useful link metric, the link metrics provided by SEOmoz have become the industry standard.  The two primary metrics are Page Authority and Domain Authority.  According to SEOmoz:

Page and Domain Authority are machine learning ranking models that predict the likelihood of a single page or domain to rank in search results, regardless of page content. Their input is the 41 link metrics available in our Linkscape URL Metrics API call and their output is a score on a scale from 1 to 100.

These metrics, along with several others, can be found at SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer.  You will need the Pro membership to access all of the data, but the free tools are good for occasional users.  If you are serious about SEO, though, you should at least check out the free trial to understand what data you’re missing.

Unlike PageRank, the SEOmoz metrics do not take into account link manipulation.  SEOmoz metrics are also keyword agnostic, meaning that they look only at links without paying attention to niche relevance.

Likelihood to Link

This metric is more difficult to quantify. It requires you to make a judgment call about whether the prospect will accept your offer.  To get a feel for this, like at the types of links that are already on the site.  Compare them to the persona that you are writing for.  If the content is a good match for the prospect, you have a better chance that the prospect will link to the content.

Intrinsic Benefits

This is perhaps the most overlooked of the three criteria.  Don’t get so focused on the link juice that you ignore the other benefits that the site may provide.  A page with low link value (in terms of MozRank or PageRank) could still drive traffic to your site.  For example, a site with a large audience that is more likely to share the link could result in many additional links.  The cumulative effect of all of these links could drive much more traffic to your content and, in the long run, be worth much more than a single link on a higher-authority site.

In the next post, we’ll look at the final step in the link-building process: outreach. To get a free SEO tips and sites to place your links, subscribe to my newsletter.

What struck me about this article is how these numbers are spread across age groups.  Older lawyers are having a rougher time than their younger colleagues.  On the older end of the spectrum, 46 percent of lawyers age 50 to 65 report a decrease in business (compared to 42 percent in the general population).  That number increases to 55 percent for lawyers over age 65.

The younger lawyers are faring better, with 22 percent of lawyers under 35 and 15 percent of lawyers between the ages of 36 and 49 reporting above-average increases in business over the past two years (compared to 14 percent of the general population).

In other words, older lawyers are doing worse than average in weathering the recent economic storms.  Meanwhile, younger lawyers are seeing above-average increases in business/profitability in the same economic conditions.

Why is this?  Wouldn’t you expect the opposite to be true?  When I was in the law firm setting, the older attorneys were the rainmakers, feeding the work to the young pups who were still trying to learn the basics of business development.

Could the turn of the tables have anything to do with the internet?  The survey found that 70 percent of respondents used the internet for advertising.  The survey didn’t parse these numbers by age, but I would be willing to bet a meager amount that, as a whole, older lawyers are more heavily represented in that 30 percent of respondents who don’t use the internet for advertising. We all know that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I can’t help but wonder if there is a connection here.

The respondents did recognize that the future of the legal profession will be shaped by the internet and emerging technology.  “Technology/internet issues” ranked second (behind oversaturation of lawyers) among the factors that are expected to have the greatest impact over the profession in the next five years.

The internet also appears to be a more socially-acceptable form of law firm advertising.  Less than one percent of respondents believed that internet advertising negatively affects the public’s view of attorneys.  The respondents were less charitable toward other forms of advertising.  Almost two-thirds believed that television has the most negative impact on public perception of the legal profession, followed by billboard advertising (16 percent) and direct mail (7 percent).

Given that overwhelming majority respondents felt that the internet is a game-changer and that it is socially acceptable to advertise on the internet, why are 30 percent of lawyers ignoring it? Does it have anything to do with age?  What do you think?

But perhaps the biggest to fall was Build My Rank.  Like other blog networks, BMR allowed subscribers to submit articles to its network of blogs, which ranged from PageRank 0 to PageRank 6. (I’m tempted to launch a diatribe about the limited usefulness of PageRank as a metric, but I’ll save that for another day.)  The articles had to be at least 150 words and could contain one link with your chosen anchor text for each 150 words.

But BMR maintained a higher quality than other blog networks. Articles were manually reviewed and often rejected, causing some grumbling among many of the article spinners in the industry. The network owners tried to be sure that the blog posts were unique articles and not just filler words used to create space between keyword-rich anchor text links.

But on March 19, Google took down BMR.  The “overwhelming majority” of the BMR network was deindexed, making all links from these sites worthless.  A day later, BMR announced that it was closing the doors:

It had always been BMR’s philosophy that if we did things a bit different from other networks, we would not only have a better quality service to offer our users, but a longer life in this fickle industry. Sadly, it appears this was not the case.

The fall of blog networks has been heralded as a triumph by the so-called “white hat” SEOs.  In the jubilation, Google’s Matt Cutts confirmed that Google is waging an intentionally-public war on blog networks:

This isn’t a surprise.  Blog networks are an explicit attempt to game the system. No one submits those posts because of the value they add to visitors.  The sole purpose of the 150 plus word article is the anchor-text link from the network. But until now, it was hard to argue with the results.  Blog networks simply worked.

What Does This Mean for Legal Blog Networks?

The legal niche has its own blog networks, some of which are run by powerful publishing companies.  For example, I recently ran across a footprint for a network of blogs being run by LexisNexis.  They have sites (like this one) that are designed primarily to build links for their internet marketing clients.  If you look at these sites, it’s fairly easy to pick out who these clients are.

But there are a few differences between a network like this and open-to-the-public networks like Build My Rank.  The LexisNexis blogs, for example, typically have decently-written, relevant content.  Instead of including one anchor-text link for every 150 words, they sprinkle the articles with anchor-text links among others.  This makes the link-building purpose appear secondary to the content of the blog.

And truly private blog networks don’t leave identifiable footprints.  Even the sharpest SEO would not be able to detect them, much less Google’s algorithm.

Private blog networks like these can be powerful link-building tools.  Whether Google’s assault on blog networks will reach them remains to be seen.

Before we get started, a few caveats:

• I am going to assume that you are either using WordPress as a CMS or have at least some familiarity HTML and CSS.
• I am going to assume that you already have a decent website.  Hopefully you used an SEO-friendly WordPress theme that will give you a solid site architecture and allow you to easily customize your meta tags.
• This post is about the basics.  Just doing these things will put you ahead of much of your competition, but there is much more that could be said.

Let’s get started.

The Easy(ish) Part – On-Site Setup and Optimization

1. Set up Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing Webmaster Tools. Consider using a heatmap tracking system like CrazyEgg for more site intelligence.
2. Be sure your server is configured correctly.  Go to http://responsetester.appspot.com/ and enter in your URL.  Be sure that you get a good grade. If not, talk to your host or IT person.  Get it fixed.
3. Download Screaming Frog SEO Spider and/or Xenu Link Sleuth and analyze your site. Fix every single broken link (404 error) that occurs on your site and convert your 302 redirects into 301 redirects.
4. While you’re at it, take a look at your redirects (301) as well.  They could be coming from improper internal linking. If so, fix those as well. And in the future, be sure to use the proper link structure for internal links (e.g., don’t link to www.yoursite.com if the correct URL is www.yoursite.com/, with a backslash).
5. Be sure that you have a user-friendly 404 error page.  It should give the visitor a next step, like contacting you, searching your site, or browsing to another portion of your site.
6. Install an XML Sitemap Plugin (I use Google XML Sitemaps) or otherwise build an XML sitemap for your site.  If your site includes video, use a video sitemap as well.
7. Use Google PageSpeed or YSlow to check out your site speed.  Fix any major problems.
8. Read my series on Keyword Research for Law Firm Websites, then apply it.  Get an understanding of what keywords your potential clients are using to find your services.
9. Download the Scribe SEO plugin to help you with your on-page SEO.  Using it for even a few months will help you understand how to write in a search-engine-friendly manner.
10. Burn your RSS feed to Feedburner and redirect the RSS feed on your site to your Feedburner feed.

The Hard(er) Part – Off-Site SEO and Social Media

1. Be sure that your local address is on every page of your site (the footer is fine). Then go to GetListed.org and be sure that you are listed in all of the sites mentioned there. Just doing that will put you ahead of 90% of your local competition in most markets.
2. Create an e-mail template that gently offers an opportunity for prior or potential clients to review your services in one of the local review sites listed in step 1, starting with Google.  Use it when you feel it would be appropriate.  Be sure to comply with your local ethics rules.
3. Get a list of your top keywords (see number 8 above), then search for the top sites that are ranking for those terms. Drop those sites into Link Diagnosis or Open Site Explorer to find out which sites are linking to them.  Then visit those sites and, assuming that they are not spammy, get those links.
4. Read my series on Link-Building for Lawyers and go through the steps there to identify more link opportunities.  Sign up for my newsletter to get new link sources delivered monthly.  Make manual link-building an ongoing part of your marketing efforts.
5. Set up a Google Plus profile page for your law firm.  Implement authorship markup so that Google recognizes that page as being associated with your site. Then share content on your Google Plus page (you can do this directly from Google Reader with a click of a button).
6. Identify the top 10 blogs in your niche.  You want those people to know you, even if they are competitors.  Trust me on that one.  Start following those blogs in Google Reader (or whatever reader you use).  Comment when you have something meaningful to contribute.
7. Sign up for a Twitter account.  See if any of those top 10 bloggers are using Twitter. If so, follow them. If not, find 10 more thought leaders that are using Twitter and follow them.  Comment when you have something meaningful to contribute.
8. Find LinkedIn groups that are related to your area of expertise.  Join them and participate.  Try to comment on at least a weekly basis.  Comment when … you know.
9. Dedicate a half hour of your day to content curation.  Set up a social media platform like Hootesuite and share the content of the people that you are connecting with.  This will get you noticed by those people, provide value to people who follow you, and increase the likelihood that people will read and share your own content.
10. Speaking of your own content, share it across as many social media channels as possible and encourage others to do the same.  If you’ve done a good job of building relationships, and if your content is any good, you will begin to pull traffic from these social media channels.

I plan to revise this list from time to time. If I’ve missed anything or been unclear, let me know in the comments below and I’ll address it.

In the last few years, a ton of tools have emerged to help automate link prospecting.  Some of these tools are free; others can be quite expensive.  I plan to follow up with separate posts reviewing prospecting tools and strategies, but for now let me explain a few basic (but effective) techniques using free tools.

Link Prospecting with Queries

Many link-building techniques use queries that can be entered into Google to turn out prospective prospects.  Most of these queries use Boolean operators to focus on search phrases that will be most likely to produce solid prospects.

For example, say that you are a Connecticut attorney that wants to drive traffic to the bankruptcy portion of your website.  You could start by searching for Connecticut bankruptcy in Google to see what turns up (view the results here).  This search should yield a few results that are relevant to Connecticut bankruptcy law, but you will find it to be much too general to identify link prospects.

The better approach is to think strategically about the opportunities that you are looking for.  Say, for example, you decide to promote your site using a guest posting strategy.  Instead of using a generic search, you might want to use structured queries, such as:

• bankruptcy “guest post” [View results here]
• bankruptcy “write for us” [View results here]
• “Chapter 7” inurl:guest post [View results here]

You will see that these queries generate sites that are likely to identify the types of opportunities that you are looking for.  Sometimes a strategic set of queries that couple the root topic (bankruptcy) with the opportunity you are seeking (guest post) can be enough to identify the prospects that you need.

Speeding Things UP With the Ontolo Link Building Query Generator and the SEOmoz Firefox Add-In

While manually entering in structured queries can yield results, it can be a time drain.  Using the free Ontolo Link Building Query Generator can speed up the process of link prospecting.  And if you run your queries in Firefox, you can use the SEOmoz Firefox Add-In to pre-qualify your prospect lists.  Here’s how to do it:

• Be sure that you have Firefox (get it here) installed with the SEOmoz toolbar up and running (get it here).
• Browse to Google.com.  If you are signed in to a Google account, click your name at the top right corner of the browser window, then click Sign Out.

• You will need to tweak your Google settings to turn off instant search and display 100 results per page.  To do this, click on the gear icon in the top right corner of the screen, then select Search Settings.  Then, click the toggle to turn off Google instant predictions and move the slider for the search results to 100.  When you are finished with your changes, click Save at the bottom of the screen.

• Browse to Ontolo’s free Link Building Query Generator (version 2).  Drop your keywords in the Keywords/Topics box, select one on more Asset Type, Opportunity Type, or Campaign Type drop downs, and click Generate Queries. In the above example, I would enter some keywords like bankruptcy, chapter 7, chapter 11, etc., in the Keywords/Topic Box and select Content for Placement in the Asset Type dropdown (to indicate that we are searching for guest posting opportunities.
• The Query Generator will return a nice list of queries to help you identify prospecting opportunities.  Clicking on any of these queries will open a new window showing you the Google results for that query.
• Experiment with various queries until you find a result that produces a list of the type of sites that you are targeting.  Be sure that the SEOmoz toolbar is visible (if not, go to View -> Toolbars -> SEOmoz Toolbar in your browser menu to turn it on).  Also be sure that Display SERP overlay is checked in the Settings options (the gears) in the SEOmoz toolbar. If everything is done correctly, you should see SEOmoz metrics below each search result.

• You should also see a floating SERP control panel somewhere on the screen.  Click Export to CSV.  This will give you a nice and orderly spreadsheet of data regarding each of your link prospects.  We will go into how to use this data to qualify your link prospects in the next step.  (Note:  If you find that you are only pulling a portion of the results into the spreadsheet, try giving the results page more time to load before you try to export.  It takes the SEOmoz SERP overlay a little time to digest all 100 results.)

Applying these simple techniques should allow you to identify a number of link prospects.  We will deal with how to qualify these prospects in future posts.