Ernest Hemingway once said, “As long as you start, you are all right. The juice will come.” The same is true for link juice and websites: Once you make a start at trying to obtain link juice for your website, the rewards will follow.
What does link juice in SEO mean and if it’s so great, how do you get more of it? In simple terms, link juice refers to what is called link equity, which is the value of a hyperlink to your site. At periscopeUP, we are constantly trying to squeeze every drop out of any link that we can. What are some easy ways to get more link juice for your website? Let’s take a look.
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Use Your Existing Content
SEOs and outreach coordinators are constantly on the hunt to gain authoritative links from high-authority websites, but this can lead to an untapped basket of good content from which to extract good link juice. Creating some good quality anchor text links within your existing website is a simple and effective way to get more link equity. Still, you have to make sure it’s going to give you a good ROI, so you’ll need a process for this.
Try this method for creating good anchor text links within your website:
- Step 1: Pull up your list of target terms for that website. This assumes that you’ve already done keyword research.
- Step 2: Create a list of internal link prospects on that website. To make this process easier, you can run a Google site search with this: [site:www.mysite.com intext:”my target keyword”]. Make a list of pages that you will build internal links for. We like to use SEMRush to find out which pages on a website are ranking for which search terms.
- Step 3: Create keyword links for all of the pages from which I want to squeeze out link equity. This creates a relevance signal with Google and also tells Google that you value this content on your website.
Quick tip: Although internal linking is a great recommendation for your website, you want to avoid using too much strictly keyword rich anchor text or your website could lose authority. Try using the keywords as part of a sentence to make it sound more natural and to help spread the keywords out a bit.
Consider Revising Low Quality Pages
If a page isn’t ranking well or doesn’t rank at all for any terms, it’s not going to give any link equity to your website. Pages that don’t contain any external links from other websites, or maybe just have a video or image, won’t pass on any link equity at all. Given this, it’s time to look at these pages and figure out exactly what they lend to the website. Maybe nothing at this point. Rather than scrapping the page and deleting it altogether, you could do a bit of keyword research and try to expand, enhance and optimize the page to get more from it. Make the content interesting, unique, and keyword-optimized and see if you can obtain any links to this page from other websites. Also, create new expertly-placed internal links to and from this page within your website to help performance.
Redirect Out Of Date URL Paths
On many of our clients’ websites, we see old URLs that contain 404 errors. Examples of this include discontinued services or products whose pages no longer exist and are returning errors. This broken link represents a missed opportunity in the form of distributable link equity. You can lose a website visitor because of this too. Taking the time to implement redirects to these error pages can give your website more link juice. Once you’ve resolved any issues with external links, it’s important to make sure there aren’t any out of date internal URLs, so we also recommend fixing your internal 301 errors. There are a number of great SEO tools that can help you find these old URL paths and fix them. One of our favorites is Deep Crawl.
Get Authoritative Links From Other Websites
You knew this was going appear in this article, didn’t you? The reason SEOs talk about this over and over again is because it’s one of the best ways you can get more link juice for your website. Whether it’s guest blogging or getting listed as a partner on someone else’s website, obtaining high quality backlinks from other websites reigns supreme in terms of getting link juice. Here’s a quick hit list of ways to get authoritative backlinks:
- Writing guest blog posts for another website.
- Submitting high-quality directory listings for high-quality online directories.
- Creating good content like blog posts and infographics and getting other websites or social media influencers to share it.
- Write testimonials to be placed on other high-quality websites (with a link back to your site).
- Submit event listings.
- Find out what backlinks your competitors are getting and try to get the same ones.
- Get interviewed by journalists or bloggers.
In case you can’t tell, we as SEOs definitely think that building up link juice makes the “juice worth the squeeze”. Learn more about how you can get more link equity for your website.
Improve website performance and conversions. Call (443) 475-0787 or Contact Us online.
