What is Link Juice in SEO? 5 Ways to Get More of it.

Link juice is a measure of how many clicks your site gets via a search engine and how many clicks it gets internally. The more it gets, the better your SEO.

what is link juice in seo

That’s basically what it is as a whole, but there’s specific areas on your site which you can optimize to improve the most important areas where link juice (more clicks) matters for SEO and that’s what I will help you do.

Contents

Here’s 3 examples of how link juice (LJ) plays a role in SEO:

1) 100 people look up the same keyword on Google, and 10 website results show up on the first page. One of those 10 websites gets more clicks than the other 9 and therefore, that page will receive more LJ and that’ll help the rankings for that site grow.

2) There are 2 competing websites, both in the same field, but one does a few things extra (internally) to improve it’s clicks and as a result and it gets more clicks and visitors touring their site. Because this is measured by Google, they reward that site more vs the other.

3) You own a website and know it ranks for at least 1 keyword on the first page results, but you decide to look up the same search on say a phone, to check it it’s also ranked that high there. You find that it is and click it. That sends LJ to your site too.

The common thing between ALL 3 of these scenarios is that the more clicks the site gets, the better it ranks. But while the last one is pretty clear (doing a manual mobile search and clicking your site), the other 2 aren’t clear…

  • What is that the 1 site out of the other 9 in the first example is doing to get more clicks?
  • What is that the 1 site out of the other competing one is also doing right in the second example to also get more clicks?

I left those details out on purpose because that’s what I will be showing you in the 5 ways to get more LJ to your site and as you read them, you will probably be able to figure out exactly what was going on those 2 examples. 

5 ways to get more LJ to your site and it’s pages.

1) Improve your meta titles. 

A better looking blog or page title has an important role to play in that because it’s better looking, it’s easier for people to be attracted to it and because of that, they are more likely to click it if they see it on a search engine or within your site.

Here are a few examples of optimized titles that before they were changed looked boring, but upon updating, are now more likely to get clicked and remember, more clicks = more LJ:

As you can see, the green titles are far more attractive and there was honestly very little editing involved. Just a few changes and suddenly the appeal and attractiveness of the title is several times greater than before.

Well when you take the green versions of those titles into account, what do you think will happen when say…100 people see those titles vs the red versions of them? I’m certain MORE people will click the green titles and you absolutely WANT that to happen.

For page titles, be sure to optimize it for SEO and here’s how.

2) Improve your first paragraph (the snippet).

I’ve talked about what is known as meta descriptions before and why they are, like titles VERY important for SEO. Your goal with the first paragraph of your post or page is to make it short, make it appealing and in context with the title. 

That first paragraph will become the snippet Google (Bing, and other search engines) shows in it’s results and just like the more improved titles led to more clicks, the snippet is also another thing you want to have optimized because it will lead to more clicks too:

3) Improve your internal linking strategies. 

Remember, LJ isn’t just how many clicks your site gets through a search engine, it’s also how many clicks the links WITHIN your site get, as that is also an important SEO ingredient, so some of these strategies, such as this one will involve making changes and updates within your site’s pages…

Specifically, what we’re going here is we’re adding more internal links within out site to other pages we have. Now besides this being good for SEO on it’s own, there’s also an attractive way to do it right, just like with the other 2 tips above…

In this case, what we’re aiming to do is improve the look of our anchor text (the text which points to the page), so it’s “clickable” for people. The more clickable it is, the more likely a visitor will click it, visit the other page and send that other page more LJ.

When it comes to internal linking, I have 2 examples of how I prefer you do it…

The first example is this: Since one of my above strategies was talking about improving your first paragraph, here is one article that helps you do it.

Notice the anchor text there. Does that look attractive?

If not, then I offer you a second example…

Once again, I’m going to offer you the same context, about improving the first paragraph, but in this case, I’ve got an awesome strategy for making magnetic paragraphs.

Now as you can see, both examples point to the same page, but which anchor text looked more appealing? The second of course and the more you use this sort of strategy within your site when pointing to other pages, the more link juice those other pages will get.

Now I also want to mention that you can absolutely use this strategy for the comments on your site, meaning you can edit them and have certain words be anchor text to point to another page. 

Also do NOT underestimate the POWER of internal linking folks, it’s huge for traffic and other things revolving around SEO. Here’s 7 reasons why it’s so huge.

4) Improve your external linking strategies. 

External linking happens within your site, but it points to external sites. You want to do this because Google loves off page SEO strategies like these and you want to do it the exact same way I showed you how to do it internally, in terms of making great looking anchor text that people want to click on.

5) Improve your images so they get more clicks.

Images themselves can be edited to become a link to something, whether it be for internal or external SEO reasons, but the point here is also that you want to get more of those clicks so you can get more LJ. 

One of the BEST ways I’ve found to make this work is this: 

Let’s go back to the 2 examples for a quick moment…

We’re going to finish this up by going back to the 2 examples I gave you where I left out details on purpose, but now that you saw 5 strategies for getting more LJ, I think you’ll be able to better guess how those 2 examples work. And I’ll help you there:

In the first example of the 1 site beating out the other 9 for clicks on the search engine, it’s because it had a better title and a better snippet. That attracted people to it better and that’s why it got more clicks.

In the second example, the reason 1 site got better SEO results was because it did better internal and external linking (and good, clickable images were also there), while the other didn’t.

Because of that, the first site was much easier to navigate and explore for visitors and search engines. I hope these 5 strategies for improving link juice across your site made sense and if you use them on your website, you’ll also see improved SEO results.

6 thoughts on “What is Link Juice in SEO? 5 Ways to Get More of it.”

  1. Hi Vitaliy, this is so helpful.

    I read recently that meta tags don’t affect our rankings and I felt this wasn’t quite right and having read through this great post, I know now, to keep on creating great meta tags and internal and external links.

    This is so informative and thanks heaps for sharing this information for people like myself to learn from.

    Reply
    • Hi Vicki, meta tags are specifically a place in your post where you enter keywords. They don’t really impact rating for these reasons. Other than that, a good meta title and meta description DO affect SEO.

      Reply
  2. Great information about the importance of meta descriptions and their affect to SEO rankings. I have to check out all my meta descriptions and make them more captivating, That’s for sure one reason why my high ranked blog posts can’t get so much traffic that I’m waiting for.

    Your suggestion for better LJ and better SEO rankings is to keep the first paragraph short, (including your keyword within it of course).

    Can the length of a blog’s headline keyword phrase affect how high a blog post is ranked? I have such a perception, that the shorter the keyword phrase is, the better the SEO ranking is.

    Reply
    • We’re talking about titles (meta titles) here right Kari? In that case, I follow the 60 character or under rule an SEO expert that I listen to once recommended and include the keyword within those 60 characters. I’ve been following that and getting results.

      To ONLY make your title the keyword does make it fit into the 6 characters, but often makes it look bad and produces a very low click through when ranked on Google, so you need to make it look better. I have written about making the title ensure it sticks to the 60 character rule while using the keyword and getting a high click through here.

      Long titles do not produce high rankings because they do no fit into Google’s preview snippet when ranked, and that in my experience reduces their ranking, so stick within the 60 characters and you will be good.

      Reply
  3. I must thank you for revealing us this awesome tips for better SEO. I was thinking that I was doing good but now when I read this article I see that my titles can be much more better and maybe that is the reason why I don’t convert. As for the internal linking, I think that I am good with that but external links are not my good side.

    Reply
    • Well then you will need to go back into your older pages and add external links Daniel. Also for conversions, it may be due to the titles, but you have to investigate how many people visit your posts and then analyze how many of those visits click whatever links or opt ins you have there to determine the conversion rate. 

      Reply

Leave a Comment