Will a Little Link Juice Boost Your Website Rank?

Link juice is not the latest fad in health drinks but you need it for the health of your blog or website. Without link juice your site is not going to be ranked by the search engines.  Without traffic your site  is dead.

So what is link juice?

Link juice, or link love as it is sometimes called,  is a term that you have probably seen and heard all over the internet but do you know exactly what it means? I had an idea but wanted to find out more. With a bit of research I discovered that the term was first used by SEO consultant Greg Boser.

Put simply, it means the importance of a link from one website to another. Incoming links or backlinks, as they are often known are clickable links from one site to another. Google uses them to decide the importance of a site and calls them “votes” in their explanation of website page rank.

If a site with a high page rank links back to your site it is seen as a good “vote” for your site.  A link from a site with a page rank higher than your site would carry more weight in Google’s eyes than a link from a lower or  unranked site. It would have more link juice.

When you get good link juice your website is more likely to have a better website rank and will appear at the top of the search results.  That means traffic to your site. Traffic is what you want if you want to make money online.

Getting your link juice

Link building has become one of the most important and most effective methods in SEO. It is one of the best ways to increase your search engine ranking and traffic.

Before you go rushing out to get backlinks you have to make sure that you have good original content on your site to link back to. Google also considers the relevance of the page being linked to. If you have good content then you can get sites wanting to link back to yours.

Drop your Anchor

A good strategy for building links is to use anchor text in them. As well as considering the “vote” for your site Google and other search engines consider what is being voted for. The use of your targeted keyword in your link will carry more weight than if you just use your website URL.

Anchor text, if you don’t already know is the clickable part of text that appears on a web page. Here is what the HTML looks like:

<a href=” http://www.domain.com ”> Anchor Text </a>

The text that you use in place of “Anchor Text” is what shows up on the page and can be clicked by the reader. The page that you link to should include the keyword that you are using as anchor text.  You will see this being used a lot in articles on article directories.

Ezine Articles is a PR6 directory so it is a popular site to submit articles to for the anchor text link you can put in your resource box.

Dofollow and  Nofollow

Before you start your link building campaign you should know that there are a couple distinct differences in inbound links. They are dofollow and nofollow links.

Dofollow means that any link juice will be passed on from the site through the link to your site. A nofollow link is the exact opposite. Traffic and visitors can get to your site, but search engine spiders will not follow the link but it will not count as “link juice.”

To find out if a site is do follow you can download a neat Firefox addon called NoDoFollow. Once you install it you can right click on any webpage and select NoDoFollow . All nofollow links will be highlighted red and all dofollow links will be highlighted by blue color.

There is another manual method to check and find out if a blog or site is Nofollow. Just click on “View” at the top of Firefox browser and then page source in the drop down menu. In Internet Explorer it’s “Page” and then page source. Search for the nofollow tag.

Reciprocal Links

Reciprocal linking is when one site links to your site and you link to them in return It was seen as a good way to get your site ranked at one time but there is a lot of debate over it’s value now.

One way it could work is when you find some great content on a site that warrants linking to in your blog post or website article. You can then ask the owner if they would like to link back to your post as it’s relevant to theirs.

Google probably doesn’t put much weight to link pages or long blogroll links.

How do you get free link juice?

Here are a few ideas:

Article Marketing – add your link with keyword anchor text in your resource box as I described above.

Forum Posts – search for high page rank forums related to your niche and add your link with keyword anchor text in your signature

Blog Comments – you can try putting your keyword in the “name” area, and then your URL. It won’t always get approved but it’s worth a try.

eHow – Open an account and put your anchor text in the About Me section of your profile. It has a PR of 7.

Squidoo and Hubpages – Create pages at both of these free sites. Make sure to add a link to your site using keywords as your anchor text.

Website Directories – There are tons of directories you can add your site URL to free of charge. Look for ones with a high page rank and that don’t want a reciprocal link. Here’s one list I found:

http://www.whenweseo.com/web_directories/high_pagerank_directories.jsp

Social Networking sites– You can create free high pr backlinks by posting your site to social network websites such as Digg, Delicious and Sphinn.

Link building can be a slow and tedious job and you might be tempted to get paid links. It can work but it can be expensive. Google can detect when links have been done by some of these companies. You will be surprised at how quickly your link juice will build up and improve your website rank if you spend a little time on it each day.