If you’re a new website owner then you may know all about backlinks and why they’re important but you may not know how to go about gaining them for your website and how to ensure that your hard work in getting them gives you the best value possible.

Building free backlinks can be very time consuming but don’t underestimate how effective it can be in raising your site up in the search engines. After the investment of having the site built it seems crazy to not put in a bit of effort to make it actually work for you.

So what is link juice? Link juice refers to the benefit passed to your page from the page that contains the backlink. The term link juice was first used by a web marketing consultant Greg Boser. Google’s main measure of link juice is page rank. Page rank can, in effect, “leak” to your pages.

A page assumed to have more link juice if:

• It is indexed by the search engines
• It has a high page rank
• It doesn’t have too many outbound links
• It isn’t part of a link exchange
• It’s relevant to the site it is linking to (i.e. your site)
• The anchor text is on topic
• It has a high number of links pointing to it
• The site that the link is on is recognized as an authority site
• It doesn’t have the nofollow attribute

Links without the above criteria can still be of benefit to your site particularly in terms of traffic but they will not pass as much link juice so funnel most of your efforts in to finding backlinks with plenty of link juice.

To ensure that you get the maximum amount of link juice try to find relevant sites to get links from and try to make sure that they’re one way links. It used to be the case that you could ask a webmaster from another site if they’d provide you with a link and they would as long as you gave them a link back. A win win situation you would think. Well not anymore. Reciprocal linking used to be quite an effective way to build links but Google doesn’t pay a lot of attention to reciprocal links anymore because they know this is an unnatural means of linking, i.e. the links are artificially created by web owners wishing to rank well.

Another important element of your link building is to make certain that you get the right anchor text. Google’s advanced algorithms use the anchor text to help determine relevancy. When building backlinks always try to use your keyword in the anchor text. This will help pass on link juice.

Don’t create a large number of links from the same IP address. If you’ve found a blog where you can post comments or articles that is relevant to your site, don’t spend all your time submitting to them in the hope that you’ll get lots of links. Google wants to see a natural expansion of links to your site and this would occur over various websites not just a small few so make sure you spread out your link building activities.

Keep these points in mind when you’re working on your link building strategy and be gaining link juice and therefore search engine visibility quickly.