You’ve heard all the tips and tricks for better SEO: Write compelling and concise title tags, optimize your images, optimize your page speed and pay close attention to the user-experience of your website—to name a few. But everyone knows the true secret to ideal SEO: A balanced and consistent regime of all these tips and tricks, plus Link Juice.

We know, it sounds absurd when you hear your digital strategist talk about “link building” and “link juice”, but we swear—it’s a real thing. Link building is actually the most important factor for ranking high on search engines like Google and is an essential component of any strategy for getting your brand in front of its ideal audience.

Mixing the perfect Link Juice cocktail

Not all Link Juice is equal. There is a recipe for perfect Link Juice and when followed correctly, you’ll see great results.

5 types of links and how they’ll help or hinder your SEO efforts: 

  1. Editorial Links: Helpful! The key is to generate such good content, other high-quality websites will be dying for a sip of your Link Juice. In other words: Brands will be drawn to link to your content organically. You can always partner with other big brands and ask them to link to your site, but this can be costly and time-consuming.
  2. User-generated Links: Most likely hindering. When search engines like Google check to see if you’re legitimate, they want your Link Juice to come from high-authority, already trusted sites. If you collect a lot of links from user sites that aren’t high-quality, search engines might flag this as being illegitimate and give your website a lower ranking.
  3. No-follow Links: Both! This can be helpful for the user-generated link problem listed above. You can attach a “no follow” relation attribute to your link code that tells search engines you don’t want to pass any PageRank with linking sites. However, this could hinder your efforts if you share a link from a high-authority site that contains this attribute because you won’t benefit from any of their delicious Link Juice.
  4. Risky vs. Non-risky Links: Common sense reigns supreme with this strategy. Risky links—hindering. Non-risky links—helpful. A best practice here is to stay within the webmaster’s guidelines for link building. Do create original and valuable content, build a genuine and engaged community online, and promote to your ideal target audience. Don’t keyword-stuff, buy links, promote to a broad audience, or inject hidden links.
  5. Sustainable Links: Remember, the true key to successful SEO is consistency. Link building is a long-term game. Best practice: Include non-risky links from high-quality sites that’ll most likely stick around for a long time.

If your Link Juice recipe needs perfecting (if you need an SEO strategy that makes sense) explore g[squared]‘s marketing services or reach out to us today. We’re all drinking the Link Juice over here—and it’s delicious.