Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), getting free organic traffic to your website or blog is all about what Internet Marketers call having link juice. Have you had your link juice this morning?

By now, you already know how powerful links can be when it comes to your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Simply put, a link is a shortcut to quickly get you from one website to another. If you can harness the power of the link, you can make your website or blog a force to be reckoned with. That means higher search engine rankings, more traffic to your site, and, eventually, more customers and more money in your pocket.

Ka-Ching!

Link Juice Defined

So you ask, what is link juice? In short, it’s the key to your popularity with the search engines. The more you have, the higher you can rank in the search engines’ results.

To understand link juice, you first need to understand another SEO term: Link Popularity.

Link Popularity Defined

Link Popularity is a metric that most search engines use to gauge the “popularity” of a webpage based on how many other webpages link to it. You could think of it this way: Each link to a webpage that a search engine finds on the Internet counts as a vote for the page it’s linking to. The more links that are pointing to one of your webpages, the more “popular” a search engine will consider that page to be. Sounds simple enough right?

Search engines consider popular pages to be highly relevant. Since they are interested in presenting the most relevant search results to their users, they’ll give popular pages a high ranking. And this will improve your SEO, put your website or blog in front of more search engine users, and ultimately result in more traffic and more potential sales.

But that doesn’t mean you should ask all your friends to link to your site. You don’t want a link from just anybody. You want links from sites with lots of link juice.

Link juice is a way to describe the “weight” a specific link might carry. A link with more weight is going to be more important to the search engines.

Here’s a metaphor of what link juice means.

Let’s say you’re trying to get a job. You’ll agree that your potential employer is going to be more impressed by recommendations from your boss at your previous company than he will by recommendations from your mailman or your dentist. You could have 100 letters of recommendation from your college buddies, but one powerful letter from the CEO of a business you used to work for will do a lot more to convince him to hire you.

It’s the same with the search engines.

Each webpage has a certain amount of clout – or link juice – that it can pass to another page. How much is not really something you can accurately measure, but you can get an idea of how good a link is (how much link juice it has) by looking at a few variables:

How To Assess Link Juice Step #1

How many links are pointing to the page? If a page has hundreds or thousands of links pointing to it, chances are the links on that page have good link juice that can be passed on to outside pages (like your page).

Let’s say www.AustralianBlogs.com.au has a ton of link juice. If you have an Australian blog and get this site to link to you, it could pass on a lot of link juice. (It’s like getting a job recommendation from the top dog in your industry.)

You can in fact do this for $19/year… Click here -> To Get Free Traffic To Your Australian Blog.

How To Assess Link Juice Step #2

How many outgoing links does that page have? Pages with too many outgoing links (20 or more) usually have less link juice than pages with 10 or fewer outgoing links. That’s because sites with too many links to outside sites aren’t as choosy.

Think about it this way: If a food critic rates every restaurant she visits as “5-star,” you might not believe she’s got a very discerning palate. But if she gives her top recommendation only to a few restaurants, you would be more inclined to try them out. After all, they are the only restaurants she likes out of thousands.

If a page has lots of links pointing to it and a small number of links pointing out, it’s probably a good page with plenty of link juice. A link on that site pointing to your site would be beneficial to you.

How To Assess Link Juice Step #3

Is the page that links to you in a similar niche? It’s important to build up links to your site, but you must make sure those links come from sites that complement yours. In other words, don’t request links from sites that are about scrapbooking if your business is about financial services.

Search engines call this relevance- the more relevant the links, the more juice you get!

Of course when you’re starting out, even a few drops of link juice can have HUGE benefits… So link as much as you can and THEN become more choosy as your rankings improve. After all, beggars can’t be choosers!

How To Assess Link Juice Step #4

How much ‘real’ content does the page have? Pages that have very little content and are mostly made up of outgoing links have less link juice to offer. The best links are usually from pages that have lots of “real” content and a small number of incoming links.

Content is valuable when considering BOTH quantity and quality. When both are present, you get the MULTIPLIER EFFECT working for you. Lots of Long Tail Keywords AND high quality traffic.

Once you’ve found a site that has a lot of link juice, request a link from it. Remember, the more link juice you can get, the higher you will rank with the search engines. That will start the process – give it time to ‘percolate’ down to you. It’s not necessarily ‘instant’. It can take up to 2-3 weeks for it to become noticeable.

In some extreme cases of POORLY SEO optimised sites, the effect can be IMMEDIATE and SIGNIFICANT, but that just really means you’re starting from a lower datum or reference point.

Whatever you do, make sure you drink your link juice regularly!