How Important Is the Location of Links in a Blog Post?

You know a blog post is good when you would still want to read it from beginning to end even if it were printed out in hard copy, such that you could not follow the links. (You know you are a geriatric millennial if, when you were in college, your dad used to print out interesting articles his friends forwarded to him by email and send them to you by postal mail, when he could have just as easily forwarded them to your university email address.) Blog posts are more than just a way to link your website to other sites, and the body text is more than just a prelude to the call-to-action paragraph at the end, where the reader can follow a link to contact you.

Despite this, everyone who has written a blog post for a business website knows that links are important; even a perfunctory search for how to write blog posts will indicate that you should link to other pages on your site as well as to credible sources for the information you are presenting. How important is it where the links are in relation to the rest of the text in the post? There are lots of rumors about this, but no authoritative answers, and the best way to cope with this ambiguity is to entrust the composition of your legal blog content to professional content writers who will deliver posts that perform well no matter where they place the links.

Google: If There Is an Ideal Location for Links, We’re Not Telling Where It Is

Some content marketing guides will tell you that Google’s bots will pay more attention to the links from your site if they are in the first paragraph, while others say that including a link in the last paragraph is more beneficial to your SEO rankings. This debate has as much to do with curiosity about the psychology of search engine bots as it does with the practicalities of optimizing a web page. Asking whether bots read a web page from top to bottom or from bottom to top is somewhat like asking whether dogs dream in black and white or in color.

When asked about this matter during a Twitter discussion, John Mueller of Google was perfectly evasive. He said that the anchor text connected to the link matters more than the location, but he did not disclose which link locations, if any, Google’s bots prefer. Then Gianluca Fiorelli mentioned that Google owned a patent called Reasonable Surfer that pays attention to link locations. Mueller’s noncommittal response was full of the kinds of punctuation-based emojis that geriatric millennials used to use on AOL Instant Messenger while procrastinating studying for their college finals.

You’ve Come to the Right Place for Law Firm Blog Posts

You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to produce custom-written blog content that boosts the SEO rankings of your law firm’s website, so you can have more free time to spend pondering life’s unanswerable questions.

How Useful Are Automated Paraphrasing Tools for Your Law Firm’s Blog?

Every law firm that wishes to stay competitive with its search engine optimization (SEO) rankings needs a blog on its website, and it needs to add new content to the blog at least once per month. Lawyers, paralegals, and other law firm employees are already too busy to take on any additional tasks, such as researching and writing blog posts, especially at small law firms where everyone is already managing a superhuman workload. Relying on artificial intelligence to compose or rewrite blog posts is a popular strategy for adding a blog to your site at minimal cost and minimal expenditure of time. While artificial intelligence is better at writing than it used to be, it is a much better investment of your resources to hire real humans to write legal blog content for your site.

How Paraphrasing Tools Work

Paraphrasing tools are computer programs that take input of existing web context and turn it into output by changing the wording but not changing the meaning. At least, that is what they do in theory. They originated years ago, when Google started penalizing websites that posted plagiarized content, so websites started rewriting existing content instead of simply re-posting what they found on other sites.

Of course, changing something just enough that it is not technically plagiarized does not make for a pleasurable reading experience. You have probably heard of the horrors of “spun content.” If you have ever navigated to a web page that contained it (probably after scrolling through several pages of search results preceding the spun page), you probably clicked away quickly because it was so unreadable that it made your brain hurt. At their worst, plagiarism tools simply swap out synonyms out of context, so that “catch up” becomes “capture up.”

You can guess that this kind of D-minus effort to make your web content not count as plagiarized will not endear you to Google. Looking for synonyms is a profitable enterprise when it comes to keyword research, but you can do that with analytics software. Besides, after a while, it will become intuitive that your blog post should include the phrase “auto accident attorney” in addition to “car accident lawyer.”

Paraphrasing Tools Are No Substitute for a Human Writer

If you don’t have time to write your own blog posts, and having artificial intelligence produce rewrites by making superficial changes is not the solution, then what should you do? Even if you do not have a huge budget to devote to your website or to your marketing efforts, it is worthwhile to hire content writers to deliver professionally written blog posts.

Legal Content Writers Can Do More Than Just Paraphrase

Professional writers with a background in law can strike just the right tone with your audience. You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to compose idiomatic, readable blog posts for your law firm’s website, posts that address the questions and concerns of your target audience.

Bold Text Isn’t Just for Headings Anymore

Back in the 90s, learning HTML and making personal web pages was a popular hobby for people who considered themselves ahead of their time. Young people who considered themselves ahead of their time but didn’t have access to a modem (remember that America Online subscriptions were a pricey status symbol in those days) created zines on offline word processing software, saved them to floppy disks, printed them, made photocopies, and distributed them by postal mail. What the personal websites and the hard copy zines of Generation X had in common was an affinity for outlandish fonts and unorthodox use of italics, bold text, and caps lock. Pressing ctrl+b was an act of liberation.

Of course, by the time Gen Xers entered law school, their college professors had thoroughly disabused them of the notion that using bold text for emphasis was appropriate or professional. Therefore, law firm website content written by lawyers tends to use similar formatting to the other texts that lawyers produce in their professional lives. If the fact that sometimes, using bolded text for emphasis can make your law firm website better makes you feel like your whole life has been a lie, perhaps it is time to enlist the help of professional content marketers to produce legal blog content for your law firm’s website.

Bots Are Getting Better at Making Inferences, but They Still Appreciate It When You State the Obvious

If you have done some research about do-it-yourself SEO, you have probably read that using keywords in bolded subheadings is as important as using them in the main text. What is less commonly known, however, is what John Mueller of Google revealed during a Google Search Central SEO office hours virtual meeting on November 12, 2021. Mueller said that including important words and phrases in bold text within the text of a paragraph can help boost the SEO rankings of the web page.

Google’s bots (Mueller refers to them as crawlers) are pretty good at identifying the most important phrases on a web page full of content, but bolding the most important phrases gives the bots an additional hint. Artificial intelligence is getting better at understanding human language; consider that, earlier in the pandemic, a bot did a bang-up job of writing a pastiche of Kafka’s Metamorphosis; some human readers found it even more unsettling than the original. Despite this, the less you rely on search engine bots to make inferences, the better.

Bold Text Dos and Don’ts

A few bold or italicized phrases in the text of your blog post or content page can be a boon to Google crawlers and to human readers who are quickly skimming your page on their mobile phones to find the answer to a question that arose in the course of an in-person conversation. Keep it professional, though. A little bold text goes a long way. Don’t make your law firm website look like the conversations you had over AOL Instant Messenger in college over which Star Wars film was the best.

Not Too Much Bold Text, but Just Enough

You can count on the legal content writers at Law Blog Writers to be judicious with their use of bold text and all other aspects of your law firm website.