If you are new to the field of link building and are hiring a link building agency for law firms, you need to know some key industry terms. Don’t worry; we have solved this problem for you.
This section breaks down common terms to help you communicate effectively with your chosen agency and better understand their strategies.
1) Keyword
A keyword is a word or phrase that people use to search for information on search engines like Google. For law firms, keywords might include "divorce lawyer" or "personal injury attorney." Effective use of keywords helps your website appear in search results when potential clients are looking for legal services you offer.
2) Anchor Text
Anchor text is the clickable text in a hyperlink. SEO best practices suggest that the anchor text should be relevant to the page it's linking to. For example, if a blog post links to your law firm's article on recent changes in copyright law, the anchor text might be "recent copyright law updates."
We recommend our clients use different types of anchor texts to make their link building appear more natural. For instance, you could use exact-match anchors like "personal injury attorney," branded anchors such as "Johnson Law Firm," and generic anchors like "click here" or "learn more." This variety helps enhance the natural flow of your content and improves SEO performance.
3) Backlinks
Backlinks are links from other websites to your site. Good quality backlinks can really help improve how visible your site is and how it ranks in search results. It's not always necessary to get backlinks from sites with very high domain authority. Instead, we recommend getting backlinks from websites that are relevant to your niche and of good quality.
It's also beneficial to seek backlinks from websites whose domain authority or domain rating is higher than yours. This approach can boost your site's credibility and ranking.
4) Referring Domain
A referring domain is a website from which one or more backlinks come to your site. Even if many links come from different pages on the same website, they all count as one referring domain.
Getting backlinks from many reputable referring domains can boost your site's credibility. We recommend focusing on increasing the number of referring domains, not just the number of backlinks, for better results.
5) Domain Authority (DA)
Domain Authority (DA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website might rank on search engines. It ranges from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating a greater potential to rank.
However, it’s important to understand that DA is not solely based on the quality of incoming links. It also considers other factors such as the overall SEO strength of a website, including the number of total links, the quality and relevance of those links, the site’s content quality, and its SEO performance history.
6) Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Rating (DR) is a metric developed by Ahrefs that measures the strength of a website's backlink profile relative to others in Ahrefs' database, on a scale from 0 to 100.
Similar to DA, a higher DR suggests that a website has a strong ability to rank well in search engine results. This rating primarily considers the strength and quality of your backlink profile.
7) Authority Score (AS)
Authority Score is a compound metric used by SEMrush that measures the overall quality and SEO performance of a domain or webpage. It combines data on backlink, website traffic, and other measures to provide a comprehensive view of a domain's influence.
8) Page Authority (PA)
Page Authority (PA) is another score from Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on SERPs. Each page has its own PA. A higher PA means that a page is more likely to rank well.
9) Spam Score
Spam Score represents the percentage of sites with similar features to yours that have been penalized or banned by Google. It is a metric developed by Moz to help identify potentially spammy links pointing to your site.
10) NoFollow Link
A NoFollow link is a link with a nofollow tag, which tells search engines not to pass on link equity through this link. Although these links do not directly influence the search ranking of a page, they can still bring traffic to your site.
It's recommended to maintain a balance between NoFollow and DoFollow links in your link profile. This helps make your link profile appear more natural and less suspicious to search engines.
11) DoFollow Link
A DoFollow link, in contrast to a nofollow link, does pass on link equity and can help improve the page's ranking in SERPs. Most links are dofollow by default unless specifically marked as nofollow.
12) SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages)
SERPs are the pages displayed by search engines in response to a user's search query. They include both organic and paid listings. The goal of SEO is to have your law firm's website rank highly on these pages for relevant keywords.
13) PBNs (Private Blog Networks)
PBNs are networks of websites used to build links to a single website, aiming to manipulate search engine rankings. This is generally considered a black-hat, or unethical, SEO tactic. Google can heavily penalize sites that participate in PBNs, as they are designed to create artificial link profiles.
As experts in the field of link building for almost a decade, we never recommend or use these websites for our clients. We focus on ethical, sustainable strategies to ensure long-term success for your site.
