Internet Marketing Is More Work Than Magic

Despite the abundance of information on the topic, too many people still believe that internet marketing is more magic than hard work. Sometimes, I wish it was just magic. Instead, internet marketing is much more about hard work. The truth is that the most effective strategies for getting one's website found are often the most time consuming.

Sure, you can "write great content" but that is really only half the battle. The other half is getting your content to your audience. This is done through the various marketing and publication channels available to the internet marketing.

You can write Shakespeare, but if you can't distribute it, it will remain lost forever. That is why I subscribe to the following mantra, "while content is king, publication is queen". You have to find ways to get your content in front of your target audience and prove that it's link worthy.

Getting Your Website Cited (Or How To Get Links To Get Found)

With the birth of search engine optimization, an industry was born.  Businesses worldwide became focused on "getting found" in the search engines.  As we previously discussed, getting found meant "getting cited" with links from other reputable and relevant websites.

Just like with citations in academia, the best way to get links from other webmasters is to write-well and publicize your writing.  This is the most natural way of obtaining links.

It's important to keep in mind however, that writing for the web has some significant differences from writing offline.  In order to maximize your "link potential" it is important to implement strategies that make your writing "link worthy".  

This is generally known as "link-baiting".  In my view, link-baiting is merely giving other webmasters some form of incentive for linking to your site.  Sure, the desire of other webmasters to share well-written content constitutes a form of link-baiting, it's really the most passive.

Some of the more well-known effective forms of link-baiting include top-ten lists, product or service reviews, interviews of other webmasters, and running a contest.  For more ideas, simply search "link baiting" in Google.

More direct than "writing great content" and "link-baiting" is direct link solicitation.  Using direct link solicitation techniques is a little more tricky and requires some attention and thought to the method used to solicit links.

At the top of the solicitation heap is post-exchanging.  Exchanging blog posts or articles with other websites provides a win-win situation.  First, to the person supplying the post, it exposes their writing to a new audience and generates visits and links back to the author's website.  For the person hosting the post, it provides fresh user generated content for the site's audience.  This can offer a new perspective, point of view, or voice.

From a search engine's perspective, these types of links can appear just as natural as the editorial "citation" links described above.  That makes them very valuable.

The next solicitation-style links are direct requests for links.  Direct requests may be made for one-way links (they link to you) or reciprocal links (they link to you and you link to them).

The effectiveness and efficiency of a direct link solicitation strategy can vary greatly.  If your strategy comes across as too spammy, empty, or irrelevant, it won't be well-received.

Further, if you direct solicit from irrelevant off-topic websites, search engines may discount these links, or penalize you for having a large quantity of such links.

Finally, you can buy links.  Buying links requires even more strategy as purchased links my get your site banned from the search engines altogether.

The Birth Of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Last time, we discussed the early beginnings of how search engines got started. Now, I'd like to discuss how search engine optimization (aka SEO) got started.

Once search engines gained users, it was only a matter of time before people (and businesses) started to recognize that their "position" or "rank" in a search engine for a particular term, made a big difference in the amount of traffic, or visitors, their website received. And with more visitors, can more business opportunities.

Soon, primarily through trial and error, people began trying to "figure out" different ways they could impact their website's "visibility" or rankings for particular terms. This was the birth of SEO.

At first, because the landscape was less competitive (i.e. far-less websites and very few people trying to influence their rankings), simple strategies were very effective in influencing a website's position for a give keyword.

For example, if you wanted you website to rank-well for "shoes", all you had to do was write about shoes on your website.

As more and more websites about "shoes" were created, the search engines had to begin figuring out new ways to differentiate one shoe website from another.

The search engines began looking to other components of web pages to distinguish one web page from another. These included what we call, on-page factors. They include keywords on the page, title tags, meta tags, headers, and where bold or italicized words were used.

In our shoe example, websites that had "shoes" in the title, meta tags, and headers, were considered more relevant to a search for shoes than those that didn't.

Again, the search engines had to evolve. This brings us back to the "unequal democracy".

Because links from other websites are "outside the control" of the website owner, these "backlinks" became the currency of the web.

And so, the main focus of SEO became acquiring both quantity and quality backlinks to one's website. And this largely remains true today.

Which begs the question, how do you get more links?

Where To Begin?

Without going into the "a long, long, time ago" internet/search engine speech, I want to provide an Archimedean point (I'll try to keep the philosophy to a minimum), upon which to build to our lawyer internet marketing knowledge base.

I'm going to start my internet marketing story with a central figure, Larry Page. Lawrence "Larry" Page is a US computer scientist best known as co-founder of Google Inc.

What Larry did, and now what Google does, was to recognize that the entire Web was loosely based on the premise of academic citation – after all, what is a link but a citation?

So, he (with the help of others) devised a method to count and qualify each backlink on the Web (PageRank from which evolved, the Google algorithm).

Still too confusing? Here's another way of looking at it.

Each link on the internet is a vote for the website to which it links.

For example a link on Website A to Website B is a vote from A for B.

However, this democracy is not equal (but then again, show me one that ever is). Some websites carry much more voting "clout" than others. For example, a vote from CNN.com has a lot more weight than say, my blog.

So, what Google does, as well as other search engines, is moderates this "web election". It returns the "winners" in order of votes received for any particular search.

Ok, now we have our Archimedean point, next we'll talk about actually winning these elections.

Another Lawyer Internet Marketing Blog?

Does the internet really need another lawyer internet marketing blog?

Yes, actually. Despite the massive amount of information on the web about internet marketing, we have found most of it to be unclear, a lot of it unethical, and some of it flat-wrong.

Purpose

Our goal is to clear things up, keep it honest and ethical, and provide accurate and effective information on internet marketing, particularly as it relates to lawyers and law firms.

Getting Your Law Firm Found

Welcome!

This blog is dedicated giving lawyers and law firms, information on how to "get found" online.