Last week, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz wrote a great article on what he calls a “cutting edge SEO” tactic. The phrase “link juice” gets thrown around a lot when talking about SEO. Link juice refers to the overall weight a website or page has when linking to other pages. A page with a lot of link juice can significantly boost the position of another in the search engine results. But how can someone figure out the weight of a linking page without paying out the nose for sophisticated services and software? The answer is surprisingly simple.
Four easy steps
Fishkin has laid out four simple steps that anyone, from the novice SEO to the hard-nosed professional, can regularly use to figure out approximately how much link juice can be squeezed from their website. Here is a brief summary of this process.
- Look for one of your site’s pages that ranks between third and 10th place in Google when searching for several words in the page’s title and body. For example, the Rocket Click’s blog post “Rocket Clicks’ Google Analytics Classroom: Conversion Rate by Day and Hour” is in the third position of Google for the search phrase “Google Analytics day and hour.”
- On another page (such as this exact blog post), place a link with anchor text featuring the exact title of the page discovered in the following step, like so: Rocket Clicks’ Google Analytics Classroom: Conversion Rate by Day and Hour.
- Wait for Google to index the page created in step two, and examine its effect on the original page. If the original moves up by two or more spots in Google, you know that your site has a lot of link juice to pass on.
- Assuming you’ve seen positive results, you can now change the anchor text or the page you are linking to help boost any page you want for your target keywords.
Read more
The original article gets a bit more into the nitty-gritty, technical aspects of this issue, but by following the steps above you should be able to gauge the strength of your site and its individual pages. If you’d like to know more about the specifics of this tactic, head over to SEOmoz and read Determining Whether a Page/Site Passes Link Juice (and How Much). Nick Schurk Organic Search Analyst
