Extra Juicy External Links…For Free!

As any respectable Internet marketer knows, it is EXTREMELY important to have a large number of external links pointing to your site.  But all links are not created equal and it is important that these external links are coming from well-respected sites with quality Google PageRanks. 

A recent survey given to some of the top SEO’s in the world proved the importance of external links.  Two of the five biggest factors affecting search results were External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of links point to your site) and Keyword Focused Anchor Text From External Links (having your key phrase in the anchor texts of links that point to your site).  Recently, rumors have spread that Google’s #1 factor when ranking a site is External Link Popularity.  If that doesn’t get your attention then I don’t know what will!

So the question becomes, what’s the best strategy for obtaining a large number of links from quality sites?  Well, there are plenty of strategies ranging from link partnerships to paid links to creating amazingly useful sites that people want to link to because they provide great information (think Wikipedia or CNN).  Personally, I think the best way to obtain “juicy links” is to use the tool we are trying to please…the search engine.

Any site that is willing to provide a link (be it for free or paid) is going to have one of the following phrases on one of its pages: “submit your site”, “enter your url”, “add your web site”.  So for a client who happens to be a used car dealer in Chicago, I will go to Google and search this: “submit your site” used car dealer chicago.  The first result is an online shopping site and when I click it takes me directly to their Automotive section and I am able to click on Submit Link, enter my information and Ta-Da…I’ve just created a quality external link to my site!

Granted, this sounds like something a five year old could do but there are some important factors to keep in mind.  When Google looks at links pointing to your site it looks at the Google PageRank of this page and then assigns a “value” to the link.  Sites with high PageRank’s obviously give more valuable links.  Another factor will be the issue of reciprocal links, many of these sites will ask that you also link back to them.  In my experience this isn’t a big deal as long as the site is respectable.  I would suggest just creating a Resources or Friends page on your site for these reciprocal links.

SEOMOZ.org has taken this strategy to the next level with their Juicy Link Finder tool.  This tool has taken the information from searches like the one explained above and put all of these linking sites into a massive database.  When using Juicy Link Finder all one must do is type in their key phrase and JLF then spits out a massive list of sites sorted by PageRank.  It’s a very nice tool but only for serious search engine optimizers as it’s part of the SEOMOZ Pro Membership.

In conclusion, external link building is important, PageRank is important and the anchor text of the links pointing to your site is important.  Just in the past few years Google has taken this from a small part of their algorithm to arguably the #1 factor for achieving rankings.  Don’t get left behind…build some links!